Digital Commons Network^™

Our Stories, Our Voices: The Lived Experiences Of Black Families With Young Children During Covid-19, Devalin Jackson

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of Black families raising young children during shelter in place orders and distance learning due to Covid-19. The study was conducted virtually through Zoom and Google form due to county shelter in place orders. Participants were recruited from the school in which the researcher worked. Through the use of virtual interviews, the five participants highlighted themes of reconnections, isolations, empowerment, family values and conversations. The families shared experiences of resilience and hope and brought thoughts of how these experiences could be highlighted in instructional and curriculum designs; especially during …

Human Trafficking And The Media, Samantha N. Blum

Master's Theses

This paper focuses on how the media can affect the publics knowledge about human trafficking. Specific attention is paid to what human trafficking is and what the different types of criteria that need to be met are. Of the criteria that is met, the paper looks at the overlapping of requirements between human trafficking and other offenses. More importantly throughout the paper is analyzations on police officers’ beliefs about knowing what human trafficking is, what still needs to be done, and their stance on the current definition. The research presented demonstrates the need for more positive psychological approaches when talking …

Operational Decision-Making In Healthcare Using Control Charts, Rohan More

Master's Theses

The primary objective of this thesis was to design a framework supplemented with guidelines for the healthcare managers to select an appropriate type of control chart for operational decision-making. A systematic literature review was conducted to gauge the extent to which control charts were being used in a healthcare setting for clinical decision making and operational decision-making purposes. The findings showed that the application of control charts was almost equal for the clinical decision-making sector and the operational decision-making sector. On further analysis, the ability of control charts to function as a standalone tool was affirmed by the vast majority …

Study Of Plants Used Against Infections By California Native American Tribes, Maria J. Rojas

Master's Theses

The objectives of this research were to evaluate the antibacterial activity and to determine the chemical composition of a list of medicinal plants used by Native Americans in California. Artemisia californica, Mimulus aurantiacus, Equisetum telmateia, Equisetum hyemale, and Marah fabacea were selected from a list of plants reported as having been used for ailments related to infections by tribes located in California. The extracts obtained through steam distillation from E. telmateia, E. hyemale and M. fabacea were assayed for in vitro antibacterial activity against 16 Gram-negative and 6 Gram-positive bacteria using disk diffusion assays and measuring the diameters of inhibition …

English Language Learners In The Dance Classroom: Building Bridges To Rigorous Language Acquisition, Breegan Kearney

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate several aspects of instructing English Learners (ELs) in the dance classroom. The researcher created three essential questions to guide her research: Q1 What specific strategies are currently being utilized by dance teachers to support English Learners in accessing dance-specific language? Q2 What are the opportunities for and barriers to incorporating these strategies? Q3 Does this teaching process have any effect on student engagement in dance class? Thirty dance educators discussed their experiences instructing English Learners in dance content in the form of a digital survey, and rated common strategies for ELs based …

From Concrete To The Classroom: A Street Dance Toolkit, Tarayjah Hoey-Gordon

Master's Theses

Minimal research exists in the way of successfully and appropriately incorporating the study of Hip-Hop culture into public education dance curriculum. Many of the available resources about this topic are not academic, standards based, or developed through research studies. The purpose of creating a Street Dance Toolkit was to analyze the ways in which access to an extended curriculum based on Hip-Hop culture can be used to expand a dance educator’s knowledge of Street Dance as a formal technique in a public school setting. The process of designing and analyzing the toolkit to establish a formalized street dance curriculum was …

The Impact Of Alexander Technique On Efficiency And Ease Of Movement In Kindergarten Through 5th-Grade Students, Mary Catherine Polesnak

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to determine if the Alexander Technique could improve Kindergarten through fifth-grade students’ efficiency and ease of movement. The Alexander Technique has many anecdotal accounts of personal benefit, but research is lacking that shows its benefit. The goal was to answer the following guiding research questions: Q1 Can the Alexander Technique improve efficiency of movement in K-5th-grade students? Q2 Can the Alexander Technique improve the ease of movement in K-5th-grade students? There were forty-nine student participants in grades Kindergarten through fifth-grade at a small, rural, private school in the midwest. Permission for this research was …

Dignity And Respect In The Salsa Dance Classroom: Fostering Healthy Self-Esteem To Promote Compassion, Diana Sanchez

Master's Theses

Many students that have attempted to take salsa dance classes often express their disillusionment in the way in which they are treated by salsa dance instructors. Salsa dance classes have the possibility to function to awaken in the student greater integration with the society in which people live, while stimulating actions, improving self-esteem, and self-confidence, improving vocabulary, awakening sensitivity, attenuating shyness, as well as increasing communicative and social skills. If the content of a course is well designed and delivered with an intentional student-centered approach, it can positively contribute to greater and more sincere learning. In this sense, the objective …

Desire And The Power Of Practice: Queer Sexual Perspectives, Philip W. Kemp

Master's Theses

This research provides a theoretical analysis of the lived experiences of 17 queer individuals, ages 19 to 66, regarding their sexual desires and practices. Queer Theory is incorporated to inform on sex, gender performance and sexuality as social constructs, to inform grounded theoretical concepts, and to identify expressed social behavior by each participant. Social Exchange Theory is used to analyze participant responses. Modified grounded theory is incorporated to posit a particular social exchange that I refer to as the queer exchange; in which particular costs/benefits are considered before queer individuals engage in social exchanges due to their potentially (un)perceived queerness. …

Korngold's Dream States: An Analysis Of Transitional Passages In Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Opera "Die Tote Stadt", Tyler Brandon

Master's Theses

This thesis aims to compare Korngold’s treatment of altered states of reality in his 1920 opera Die tote Stadt to that of other composers and apply a theoretical approach to explain the transitions between the diegetic realms, or multiple narrative levels, that the work is contained within. These are outlined by William Cheng in his article entitled “Opera ‘en abyme’: The prodigious ritual of Korngold’s ‘Die tote Stadt.’” An overview of Cheng’s article is provided, recounting the claims that he posits and the analyses that he uses to explain the transitions between these diegetic realms. Next, other instances of altered …

Analysis Of Electroanatomic Mapping System Accuracy Using X-Ray Reconstruction Of Electrode Locations In A Porcine Animal Model, Hana Boudlali

Master's Theses

Fluoroscopy is considered the gold standard for locating catheters during cardiac electrophysiology (EP) procedures. However, fluoroscopy emits ionizing radiation which can lead to adverse health effects when exposed to in high doses (World Health Organization, 2016). Electroanatomic mapping (EAM) systems display the three-dimensional location of EP catheters and measure the local electrical activity of the heart. They can minimize a physician’s reliance on fluoroscopy and can help reduce radiation exposure during a case (Casella, 2011).

EAM systems are diagnostic medical devices that inform the placement of ablation therapy and must accurately locate catheters to be deemed safe. Test methods to …

Impact Of Soil Properties On Removal Of Emerging Contaminants From Wastewater Effluent During Soil Aquifer Treatment, Lauren N. Riley

Master's Theses

This study evaluates soil properties that impact the effectiveness of soil aquifer treatment (SAT) as a polishing step to the remove two classes of ECs from wastewater effluent: pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), and engineering nanomaterials (ENMs). In recent years, it has been determined that elevated levels of emerging contaminants (ECs) are being released into the environment with wastewater effluent. ECs are proven to cause adverse environmental and health effects as a result of long-term exposure. It is important to evaluate sustainable solutions to improve the current methods of wastewater treatment to address these ECs.

Soil aquifer treatment (SAT) …

An Exploratory Study Of Pulse Width And Delta Sigma Modulators, Logan B. Penrod

Master's Theses

This paper explores the noise shaping and noise producing qualities of Delta-Sigma Modulators (DSM) and Pulse-Width Modulators (PWM). DSM has long been dominant in the Delta Sigma Analog-to-Digital Converter (DSADC) as a noise-shaped quantizer and time discretizer, while PWM, with a similar self oscillating structure, has seen use in Class D Power Amplifiers, performing a similar function. It has been shown that the PWM in Class D Amplifiers outperforms the DSM [1], but could this advantage be used in DSADC use-cases? LTSpice simulation and printed circuit board implementation and test are used to present data on four variations of these …

Improvement Of Labyrinth Seal Leakage Rates Using Additive Manufacturing, Austin L. Gasbarra

Master's Theses

The growing popularity of additive manufacturing in commercial applications has al- lowed for new ideas and new ways of thinking when designing components. Further optimization at the component level is possible, though powder metallurgy is in its infancy. This study explores the possibility of using additive manufacturing to develop better labyrinth seals in turbomachinery. Labyrinth seals have a torturous fluid path with high losses, thus limiting the amount of fluid leakage. These types of seals can be non-rotating, allowing them to better take advantage of the additive manufacturing process due to the absence of rotating stresses. Labyrinth seal performance is …

Iot Camera System For Monitoring Strawberry Fields, Simon Schoennauer

Master's Theses

A wireless imaging system for monitoring strawberry fields provides enough quality image data for computer vision algorithms to make meaningful yield predictions. This report contains a design for a wireless sensor network modified with mesh networking techniques to extend coverage range and a solar energy harvesting system to improve sensor node lifetime. A two hop system with six nodes is implemented in a laboratory environment validating the communication systems integrity over an 800’ range. Moving from a primary battery system to solar energy harvesting increases the module lifetime indefinitely.

Attentional Parsing Networks, Marcus Karr

Master's Theses

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have dominated the computer vision field since the early 2010s, when deep learning largely replaced previous approaches like hand-crafted feature engineering and hierarchical image parsing. Meanwhile transformer architectures have attained preeminence in natural language processing, and have even begun to supplant CNNs as the state of the art for some computer vision tasks.

This study proposes a novel transformer-based architecture, the attentional parsing network, that reconciles the deep learning and hierarchical image parsing approaches to computer vision. We recast unsupervised image representation as a sequence-to-sequence translation problem where image patches are mapped to successive layers …

Hate Speech, Habitus, And Identity Signaling On 4chan’S Politically Incorrect Board, Jonathon Geiger

Master's Theses

Websites, such as 4chan, have provided a place for extremism and hate speech to flourish through anonymous discourse. One group that has been especially important to this growth has been the alt-right. The alt-right is a far-right white nationalist movement that is known for engaging in trolling, creating memes, and generating conspiracy theories. Past research has focused on the amounts of hate speech and characterizing content on the website. However, past studies have not looked at the experience of using the website through the combination of participant observation and content analysis. Here I show that the extensive use of hate …

A Call To Arms: A Comparative Study Of Mississippi And Kentucky Citizens During The Secession Crisis, 1859-1861, Amy Myers

Master's Theses

Many studies of the American Civil War have considered why Mississippi leaders voted to secede, while Kentucky politicians remained in the Union. Scholars have previously focused on political elites to understand the underlying motivations behind each state’s decision. These same scholars have often confined their studies to a synthesis of why secession occurred nationally or at the state level. The question remains as to what the common citizen saw and believed when faced with secession and if their views matched their delegates.

This study utilizes the governors’ papers of John J. Pettus and Beriah Magoffin, the Jefferson Davis papers, and …

My Child’S Keeper: Child Vulnerability And Quality Of Life On Parental Stress And Grit, Abigail Armstrong

Master's Theses

There is a reciprocal relationship between parenting stress and child distress that has been well documented (e.g., Rechenberg, Grey & Sadler, 2017). These effects generalize to physical outcomes such that higher maternal depression has been associated with poorer child health-related quality of life (HRQOL; Jaser, Whittemore, Ambrosino, Lindemann, & Grey, 2008). In the same way that parental distress has been shown to affect the child, parental perceptions of child vulnerability in children with chronic illness has also been associated with negative outcomes, including child depressive symptoms (Mullins et al., 2004), increased health care use (Spurrier et al., 2000), and increased …

Exploring Dissociation As A Facilitator Of Suicide Risk Using Virtual Reality, Nicole Caulfield

Master's Theses

Research shows that suicidal behavior is not a result of a single cause or single event, but instead is an interaction of facilitators. One potential facilitator that needs further exploration is dissociation. Dissociation has been consistently linked to suicidal behavior, and treatment for dissociative disorders seem to be associated with a reduction of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Prior theories have posited that dissociation increases the possibility of a suicidal act because of intensified disconnect from the body. However, these theories do not indicate whether dissociation is a facilitator of suicide risk by increasing suicidal ideation, attempt behaviors, and capability …

Diagonalization Of 1-D Schrodinger Operators With Piecewise Constant Potentials, Sarah Wright

Master's Theses

In today's world our lives are very layered. My research is meant to adapt current inefficient numerical methods to more accurately model the complex situations we encounter. This project focuses on a specific equation that is used to model sound speed in the ocean. As depth increases, the sound speed changes. This means the variable related to the sound speed is not constant. We will modify this variable so that it is piecewise constant. The specific operator in this equation also makes current time-stepping methods not practical. The method used here will apply an eigenfunction expansion technique used in previous …

​Burned Out But Barely Begun: A Qualitative Study On Newer Clergy And Communication Surrounding Emotional Labor And Personal Well-Being In South Mississippi, Lauren Noll

Master's Theses

This study provides an overview of the concepts surrounding clergy burnout,

organizational culture, and emotional labor theory. Furthermore, it explains the need

for  clearer understanding of clergy perceptions of their own personal

experiences with burnout and their emotional wellbeing in relation to their organizational environment and careers as clergy members. The methodology of qualitative interviews sought to understand the narratives and experiences of clergy members from their own words and worldviews rather than from a statistical basis or analysis.

This research found answers to key questions involving communication about burnout in the context of organizational culture and emotional labor, including …

Exposing Evil: My Lai, The Media, And American Atrocities In Asia, 1941-1975, Joshua Caleb Greer

Master's Theses

In both the Pacific War against Japan from 1941 to 1945 and the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, United States combat troops—emboldened by a combat culture of dehumanization through racism and a military that enacted policies of attrition— committed atrocities against Asian soldiers and civilians. This trend continued into the Vietnam War unabated beginning in 1965. Incidents of atrocities committed by American troops overseas were not publicly discussed until the My Lai Massacre of 1968 was revealed to the American people in 1969. Once the massacre became a national news story published in outlets all over the country, American …

A Comparison Of Two Protein Supplements On The Healing Of Stage Iii And Iv Pressure Injuries In Enterally Fed, Ventilator Dependent Long – Term Care Residents, Kalli Talaska

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the change in stage III or IV pressure injury size of enterally fed, ventilator dependent, long-term care residents after receiving one of two protein supplements in addition to enteral feeding meeting 100% of calculated needs. The two protein supplements were Beneprotein™ (powder) and Pro T Gold™ (liquid). The injuries were evaluated for change in size at two weeks and four weeks post initiation of protein supplement. Sixty subjects were reviewed – 30 for each supplement. Subjects included 20 males (33%) and 40 females (67%). The analysis indicated for the total sample, a …

Inducing The Overview Effect Using Virtual Reality, Nhat Quang Le

Master's Theses

Astronauts who return from space missions have reported and demonstrated a significant increase in their feelings of connection to humanity and the planet. This shift towards a more humanistic, global perspective in astronauts was termed the “overview effect” by White (2014). There is a lack of research on the overview effect despite the significant, positive changes in those who have experienced it. This study aims to provide empirical evidence of and a possible induction method for the overview effect. We hypothesized that it might be possible to induce the overview effect using virtual reality (VR). In the current study, 81 …

Parental Influences On Adolescents' Risky Media Usage, Dahyeon Jung

Master's Theses

The present study investigated how parenting styles influence adolescents’ risky media usage and how these associations vary according to media-specific parenting practices and adolescent characteristics. Participants included 315 adolescents aged 13-18 in the United States, who completed questionnaires on parenting styles (i.e., authoritative, authoritarian, permissive), media-specific parenting practices (i.e., active conversational practices, coercive monitoring, preventive practices), and their depression, self-esteem, and risky media usage. Findings indicated all three parenting styles were associated with adolescent exposure to risk through media, but only authoritarian and permissive were related to internet addiction. Across parenting styles, adolescents with parents who engaged in high compared …

The Moderating Role Of Agreeableness And Conscientiousness On The Relationships Between Burnout And Withdrawal Behaviors, Nikoo Samee

Master's Theses

It has been shown that employees who experience burnout are more likely to engage in withdrawal behaviors, which are behaviors that harm the morale of employees and the bottom line of an organization. There has been some research on the moderating effect of situational variables (e.g., leadership style) on the relationship between burnout and withdrawal behaviors, but there is a lack of research on how personal characteristics may play a role in such relationships. The purpose of this study was to examine the moderating role of agreeableness and conscientiousness on the relationship between burnout and three withdrawal behaviors: lateness, absenteeism, …

Easy In Any Language: Syntax, Semantics, And Pragmatics Of Activity-Oriented Adjectives In Six Languages, David Koffman

Master's Theses

Words that denote the degree of effort required for some activity, called easy adjectives here, have distinctive behavior. This behavior is explored in six languages to determine how the semantics of these words is reflected in the expressions to which they can apply, the constructions in which they appear, and their use in discourse. For four Indo-European languages, English, Spanish, German, and Russian, the analysis is based on random samples from linguistic corpora. For two non-Indo-European languages, Japanese and Swahili, the analysis is based on consultant elicitations and published examples. The analysis confirms that easy adjectives have distinctive behavior compared …

Optimal Parameter Values For Accurate And Repeatable Nanoindentation Of Human Trabecular Bone, Stephen Matthew Kmak

Master's Theses

Nanoindentation techniques have not been standardized for use on bone tissues, making comparison of bone material properties obtained via nanoindentation across studies difficult and unreliable. This study determined a set of optimal parameter values for thermal drift correction time, dwell time, and loading rate that can be used to obtain accurate and repeatable material properties from human femoral trabecular bone through experimentation and statistical analysis. All testing was conducted using a single nanoindenter on a single trabeculae, with the assumption that material properties within the individual trabeculae were internally consistent. Parameters not of interest during this study, such as ambient …

A Water Balance And Sediment Yield Analysis Model For The Lopez Lake Reservoir, Lee Joon Faraca

Master's Theses

Lopez Lake Reservoir is the primary source of potable water for the Cities of Arroyo Grande, Grover Beach, Pismo Beach, and to the Community Service Districts of Oceano and Avila Beach. In this study, a water balance and sediment yield analysis model was developed for the reservoir’s watershed. The model was used to estimate evaporation from the lake and to examine the effects of a wildfire on the reservoir. Evaporation and wildfire are dependent on variables that change on a spatial and temporal scale, making modeling challenging. The County of San Luis Obispo uses pan coefficients to estimate evapotranspiration losses …