Digital Commons Network^™

An Empathetic Approach To Physical Education Teacher Education, Tony Monahan

Open Access Dissertations

The current crisis in societal obesity and other inactivity-related chronic health disorders has become a widespread concern in the United States. Physical Education (PE) with its propensity for physical activity has the potential to provide solutions to many chronic health issues. However, a large body of literature suggests that generations of students have been "turned off' to lifelong physical activity because of negative experiences in traditional PE classes. A more student-centered approach may be needed to ensure that all students have an opportunity to lead a healthy, physical life. The purpose of this research study was to determine the effect …

Rhetorics Of Place And Ecological Relationships: The Rhetorical Construction Of Narragansett Bay, Matthew Ortoleva

Open Access Dissertations

As an ethnographic study of how language and rhetorical acts are used to construct, challenge, and change ecological relationships to the Narragansett Bay watershed, this dissertation argues that there are three architectonic, master discourses that dominate the discursive domain of the Narragansett Bay watershed: the discourse of science, the discourse of economics, and the discourse of spirituality. These master discourses construct and authorize particular world-views, give human agents the vocabulary to speak about the world in particular ways, and produce multiple other sub-discourses, which in turn construct different ecological relationships to Narragansett Bay and lead to particular attitudes, beliefs, and …

Yours, Mine & Ours: The Use Of Social Networks In Co-Creation, Adriana M. Boveda

Open Access Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation is to empirically test factors believed to influence customer decision to co-create and evaluation of customer co-created products using social network theory as a foundation. Manuscript I: Customer Competence and Product Co-Creation examined the process surrounding the customer's decision to engage in co-creation through two empirical studies. Study I determined drivers of customer co-creation, through a survey conducted among students. Study II and Study IIA, determined if firms gain a competitive advantage selling customer-designed products to non co-creating customers. Findings suggest that competence is the strongest driver of customer decision to co-create, and to co-create …

The Role Of Family Functioning In Ethnic Identity And Well-Being In Jewish Late Adolescent Women, Aliza Krieger

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore how late adolescent Jewish women identify, explore and commit to their Jewish ethnicity. Moreover, the importance of family to Jewish culture was assessed using measures of family togetherness and flexibility on ethnic identity and psychological well-being in Jewish females. A Multivariate analysis of variance was run to compare how Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jewish females differ on psychological well-being, general ethnic identity, and Jewish cultural and Jewish religious identity. No differences were found except on Jewish cultural and Jewish religious identity. Orthodox women had the strongest cultural and religious identities and Reform …

Rewriting The Script: Using Rhetorical Theory To Mitigate The Effects Of Media Violence, Lee H. Marshall

Open Access Dissertations

Statement of problem. The approach that communications researchers have taken to try to combat media violence effects is inadequate. While some promising interventions have been discovered, the complexity of reactions to media and the differences in personal characteristics of viewers make empirical studies of limited use. Rhetorical theory is a more appropriate fit for analyzing media violence. The recent work by composition scholars dealing with the role emotion plays in moving people to action suggests a promising area for the development of theory. Educators can take the lead in responding to the media research findings appropriately, not through unnecessarily restrictive …

Possessing New Worlds: Eliciting Abstract Thought And Empathic Response Through Image Construction, Nancy Noonan

Open Access Dissertations

In this study, secondary students' responses to literature were examined in the context of a visually rich curriculum. Working within a conceptual framework inspired by Rosenblatt's theories about aesthetic transactions with text, two groups of tenth grade readers negotiated and responded to shared class readings of works by John Steinbeck using artistic viewing strategies in combination with metacognitive comprehension strategies. Study participants viewed slides of abstract and figurative artwork and responded by drawing and writing about narrative relationships. The resulting visual representations were analyzed by level of abstraction, while students' written responses to literature were analyzed for interpretive depth using …

Cambodian And Laotian Americans' Cultural Values And Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Services, Manivone Thikeo

Open Access Dissertations

Several studies have reported that Asian Americans, including Cambodian and Laotian Americans, tend to under utilize mental health services, both inpatient and outpatient although they display high levels of psychological problems related to significant psychological trauma experienced in their native land or while living in refugee camps. Underutilization may not be related to the lack of need but it may relate to cultural factors such as shame and stigma as well as acculturation and lack of health insurance. Although some Asian American research about help seeking exists, no previous research has specifically addressed this question with a Cambodian and Laotian …

Extreme Group Comparisons: Nature, Prevalence, And Impact On Psychological Research, David C. Ahern

Open Access Dissertations

Normative comparisons for psychological and neuropsychological measures, as well as predictions made from studies of specific populations, suffer when such groups are improperly constructed. It was posited such inappropriate group formation is common in psychological science, partly from a between-group failure to identify the clinical distinction of interest, and in part from a within-group failure to mirror the characteristics of the overall population by placing undue emphasis on group purity (that is, exclusion of participants with comorbid conditions). Furthermore, participants are often selected for group membership due to the extremity of the condition, eliminating diagnostic ambiguity but sacrificing generalizability to …

The Effect Of Perinatal Morbidity, Child Health And Maternal Influences On Social Competence At Age 12 Years In Formerly Preterm Infants, Nicole C. Smith

Open Access Dissertations

Prematurity is a national problem with rates climbing to the highest levels in four decades. Social competence is a critically important skill for children to master in order to become socially competent adults. Social competence is not fully studied in children born prematurely. Yet they are at risk for poorer social competence due to their physical, cognitive, motor and developmental difficulties. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of perinatal morbidity, child health, and maternal influences on social competence at age 12 in a sample of formerly preterm infants and a full term comparison group. Two hypotheses …

Taking Stock Of The Warehouse Cooperative School: A Personal Inventory Of The Formation Of Adolescent Subjectivity In The Context Of 1970s Alternative Education, Theo Greenblatt

Open Access Dissertations

Constructed according the conventions of a subgenre the author defines as "formation text," this creative non-fiction work is an experiment in form that addresses the experimental coming of age of a subject within an experimental era and within the more specific context of an experimental education. Playing off the name of a school the author attended in the 1970s, The Warehouse Cooperative School, its structure employs a series of lists, both organizationally--as a textual version of inventorying, and as metaphor for storage and retrieval of memory. As an overt challenge to the bildungsroman, and its unacknowledged influence on contemporary memoir, …

The Healthy Emotional Reliance Scale And Deconstruction Of Dependency: A Latent Variable Model Of Relationship Functioning In Female Couples, A. Cassandra Golding

Open Access Dissertations

The current study was designed to meet two overarching goals. The first goal was to test an empirical and theoretically driven structural model of dyadic dependency and relationship functioning for female couples. This model tested mediating pathways between early life experiences: negative family environment and childhood sexual abuse (CSA), outcome variables: relationship functioning (i.e. communication style, power equality, relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction and domestic violence) and psychological symptoms (i.e. depression, anxiety and somatization). Mediating latent variables included adult sexual victimization, dyadic dependency, social support and identity. The second goal was to establish support for construct validity of the Healthy Emotional …

Bodies Of Evidence: Critical Theory And Audience Response To American Gothic Narratives, Bruce G. Johnson

Open Access Dissertations

Some academic critics are making claims about audience reactions and responses to American Gothic literature and film in order to provide arguments about this particular genre. In presenting their predictions about audience behaviors, however, these critics typically fail to test the accuracy of their theories by providing any empirical evidence regarding the ways in which actual readers and viewers are impacted by these texts. This exploratory study, then, offers a preliminary method for measuring demonstrable audience responses to American Gothic literature and film in order to illuminate whether or not some of these critical theories about audience reactions are verifiable. …

The Role Of Pedagogical Documentation In Developing Young Children's Thinking Processes, Leslie A. Sevey

Open Access Dissertations

This study examines the role of pedagogical documentation on young children's thinking processes. Pedagogical documentation is utilized as part of the Reggio Emilia Approach for several purposes, such as assessment, curriculum planning, and instructional accountability. This study was conducted in a kindergarten classroom that utilizes the Reggio Emilia Approach, at a laboratory school on a college campus. Acting in the role of participant observer I spent nine weeks observing and at times interacting with the students as they engaged in activities involving science kits. I specifically looked at the experiences of the children as they interacted with the pedagogical documentation, …

Writing Across The Curriculum: Faculty Workshop Practices (1977-1997), Owen Brian Kaufman

Open Access Dissertations

During the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement's formative years, programs were launched at hundreds of higher education institutions across North America. WAC programs incorporated workshops as the primary delivery mechanism to introduce participants to WAC pedagogy. To explore how workshops changed teaching practices, this study presents an account of patterns the researcher observed when analyzing archived materials generated from WAC workshops held in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and run primarily by Toby Fulwiler. Fulwiler attended Rutgers University's 1977 NEH Institute in the Humanities workshop where he learned of the work of James Britton and other education researchers who …

Factors Influencing The Evaluation Of Expert Witness Testimony In The Behavioral Sciences Under Daubert, Kenneth V. Heard

Open Access Dissertations

Surveys on the evaluation of the scientific merit of expert witness testimony were mailed to 600 doctoral-level members of the American Psychological Association with professional experience in psychology and the law. Participants were asked questions related to their training, education, and professional experience, and questions aimed at clarifying participants' understanding of the error rate and general acceptance of methods. Participants were also asked to estimate the weight they would place on variables of potential relevance to the admissibility of expert witness testimony, and to estimate the weight they believe a judge would place on a subset of those variables. 126 …

Making Waves With Critical Literacy: A Teacher Researcher Study Around The Texts, Contexts, And Recontextualizations Of An Upper Middle Class Public High School, Carolyn Fortuna

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is a teacher researcher qualitative study that explores the work of critical literacy in an upper middle class public high school. As a participant and an observer, I studied how a confluence of authority, privilege, curriculum, and pedagogy created context and shaped the meaning and quality of our collective literacy learning experiences. Using the tools of teacher research through narrative inquiry, my study traces school authority figures' reproduction of dominant ideologies, my struggles as a social justice educator to break through those definitions of "normal" with a privileged student population, and the hope that resulted when my students …

School Psychologists' Attitudes Toward Bullying And Homosexuality, Kimberly M. Hill Perry

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate school psychologists' attitudes regarding bullying and homosexuality, to explore perceived differences between general bullying incidents and gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) related bullying incidents, and to gather information about the presence of anti-bullying policies and programs in schools. Three hundred and thirty-one randomly sampled school psychologists who were current members of the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) participated in the study. Participants' attitudes regarding bullying and homosexuality were explored. The results were encouraging as the school psychologists endorsed factors that suggested they are not tolerant of bullying behaviors as measured by …

Homeless Chic: Cultural Contradictions In Contemporary American Literature, Jennifer Joyce Kissko

Open Access Dissertations

The dissertation, "Homeless Chic: Cultural Contradictions in Contemporary American Literature," explores and responds to certain problems and questions that matter with regards to the ways in which homelessness gets represented in literature. It considers the problems United States culture faces in its attempts to think differently about homelessness -- at the ways it appropriates or makes use of figures of homelessness, and the ways literature markets, thematizes, racializes, and symbolizes homelessness. Using contemporary American literature, the dissertation examines how U.S. culture likes certain narratives that challenge the ability to think differently. The readings model how conflicted American readers are on …

The Development And Validation Of The Survey Of Attitudes Toward Research Methods, Elizabeth S. Dimond

Open Access Dissertations

Students' attitudes toward research methods may affect their learning approaches and outcomes in such courses. The four studies in this dissertation developed and provided evidence for the validity of the Survey of Attitudes Toward Research Methods (SATRM), a measure with which students' attitudes toward research methods can be better understood. The first objective was to develop the measure, including adaptation of items from an existing measure, the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (Schau, Stevens, Dauphinee, & Del Vecchio, 1995), to reflect research methods, and determining the factor structure and the questions best representing those factors. The SATRM was then administered …

Older Adult Alcohol Misuse: Attitudes, Knowledge, And Support For Prevention Policies And Practices Among Aging Services Practitioners, Crystelle A. Egan

Open Access Dissertations

Alcohol misuse is prevalent among older adults and is projected to increase. Alcohol misuse includes: 1) at risk consumption patterns and 2) problem use already resulting in negative consequences. An increase in alcohol misuse prevention efforts targeted to adults 65 and older is necessary to address this public health issue. Aging services practitioners are key gatekeepers to the older population, yet anecdotal discussion in the research literature suggests that negative attitudes about older adult alcohol misuse (denial, fatalism, and therapeutic nihilism) may decrease their likelihood of supporting prevention efforts. A national sample of 136 Resident Service Coordinators completed an online …

Flight Of The Mind: Reading Virginia Woolf Reading, Maria Chiancola Glade

Open Access Dissertations

Virginia Woolf was always a voracious reader, and the act of reading was for her both labor and pleasure, both an act of understanding and an act of production, and it was always already entangled with the act of writing. A record of her notes taken while reading exists, though unpublished and understudied, and these notebooks offer Woolf scholars access into the mind of the author at the moment of creative inception. Arguably, the extant sixty-seven notebooks, available at the Sussex University Library and the New York City Library's Berg Collection, offer a vast collection of material and a rich …

Relationship Between Psychosocial And Interpersonal Factors And Implicit Sex-Submission Associations In Hispanic/Latina And White Women, Myriel Rodríguez Boissén

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate implicit sex-submission associations for Hispanic /Latina and White women. Furthermore, this study examined how childhood sexual abuse, anticipated negative partner reaction-refusal, psychosexual functioning, sexual assertiveness-refusal and communication, and hyperfemininity are associated with women's implicit sex-submission associations. These interpersonal and psychosocial factors were analyzed for Hispanic/Latina and White women to help us determine if these associations are found for two different groups of women.

Previous research has demonstrated that individuals associate sex with power and aggression at an unconscious level (Bargh et al., 1995; Mussweiler & Forster, 2000; Zurbriggen, 2000). For men, implicit …

The Social Capital Of Decision-Making Groups, John J. Schibler

Open Access Dissertations

The manuscripts that follow explore various aspects of bonding social capital--how it is formed, how it influences performance, and how it can be measured. The first manuscript examines bonding social capital as a dependent variable. I review the underlying theory of social capital and explore the concept in the context of Top Management Teams (TMTs) including how bonding social capital emerges from the relationships among group members. Based on this theoretical foundation, I advance propositions on how organizational, team, individual and temporal factors influence its formation. The second manuscript explores group bonding social capital as the independent variable. Using the …

Cultural-Historical Activity Perspectives On The Effects Of Participation In Teacher-Mediated, Computer-Mediated Reading Instruction, Rita M. Menendez

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of participation in Read 180, a teacher-mediated, computer-mediated reading instruction program, on the reading proficiency of 4th and 5th grade English Language Learners. The students who participated in the Read 180 program scored below the 25th percentile on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). Cultural-historical activity theory guided the research. Research questions for the study were answered with quantitative and qualitative methods. The questions asked were: 1. What are the effects of participation in Read 180, a teacher-mediated computer-mediated-integrated learning system that provides reading instruction, on the growth in reading …

Emotion Recognition Using Glottal And Prosodic Features, Alexander Iliev Iliev

Open Access Dissertations

Emotion conveys the psychological state of a person. It is expressed by a variety of physiological changes, such as changes in blood pressure, heart beat rate, degree of sweating, and can be manifested in shaking, changes in skin coloration, facial expression, and the acoustics of speech. This research focuses on the recognition of emotion conveyed in speech. There were three main objectives of this study. One was to examine the role played by the glottal source signal in the expression of emotional speech. The second was to investigate whether it can provide improved robustness in real-world situations and in noisy …

A Comparison Of Adjacent Categories And Cumulative Dsf Effect Estimators, Karina A. Gattamorta

Open Access Dissertations

The study of measurement invariance in polytomous items that targets individual score levels is known as differential step functioning (DSF; Penfield, 2007, 2008). DSF methods provide specific information describing the manifestation of the invariance effect within particular score levels and therefore serve a diagnostic role in identifying the individual score levels involved in the item's invariance effect. The analysis of DSF requires the creation of a set of dichotomizations of the item response variable. There are two primary approaches for creating the set of dichotomizations to conduct a DSF analysis. The first approach, known as the adjacent categories approach, is …

Manipulating Embryonic Neural Precursor Cells For Therapeutic Transplantation Into A Rat Model Of Neuropathic Pain, Orion Furmanski

Open Access Dissertations

Persons with spinal cord injury (SCI) suffer life-long consequences including paralysis, loss of involuntary bodily functions, and chronic pain. A subset of SCI patients develop neuropathic pain (NP), a chronic condition resulting from damage to the spinal cord. Hyperexcitability of spinal cord sensory neurons near damaged tissue is believed to underlie SCI-related NP. Although many therapies have been employed clinically to combat SCI-NP, few give satisfactory long-term relief. Transplantation of cells that release GABA, a molecule that inhibits neuronal activity, is being explored as an alternative to current SCI-NP therapies. My experiments made progress toward preclinical modeling of GABA cell …

The Influence Of Music On Depression, Affect, And Benefit Finding Among Women At The Completion Of Treatment For Breast Cancer, Julie J. Stordahl

Open Access Dissertations

Women at the completion of treatment for breast cancer experience relief along with continued physical and psychological distress. This study explored the effectiveness of two forms of a Relaxation Intervention in providing psychosocial support to women at the completion of treatment for breast cancer. The two conditions included (1) Music-Assisted Relaxation (MAR), in which contemporary, sedative music was paired with standard, spoken relaxation directives, and (2) Relaxation Alone (RA), in which only spoken relaxation directives were used. Individual sessions were held once each week for four weeks. This study included a mixed method design. Quantitative measures included The Center for …

The Effects Of A Chinese Music Curriculum On Cultural Attitudes, Tonal Discrimination, Singing Accuracy, And Acquisition Of Chinese Lyrics For Third-, Fourth-, And Fifth-Grade Students., Ming Tu

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of 10 minutes of daily exposure for 10 weeks to a Chinese Music Curriculum and its effect on generating positive cultural attitudes towards the Chinese people, improving tonal discrimination skills, singing accuracy of tonal patterns, and accuracy of singing Chinese lyrics for third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students, compared to a comparison group not receiving the Chinese Music Curriculum. In an elementary school in Miami-Dade County, Florida, 6 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classes were chosen and randomly assigned to either an intervention or a comparison group. A Chinese Music Curriculum was …

Parents' Impressions Of Their Child's Minor Surgical Procedure With Nitrous Oxide, Tina Shapiro-Stoler

Open Access Dissertations

Invasive procedures are often painful and distressing for children and disturbing for their parents. The purpose of this study was to develop a substantive theory of parental perceptions of their school-aged child's responses to an outpatient minor surgical procedure with nitrous oxide. The sample included 22 parents of 21 children who underwent a nitrous procedure. Participants were recruited from the pediatric surgery department at a children's hospital. Semi-structured, audio-recorded interviews were conducted with each participant. Grounded theory method was used to simultaneously collect and analyze the data using the constant comparative method. The findings of the study revealed parental impressions …