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A Descriptive Study Of Intercollegiate Athletics In Mississippi's Public Community And Junior Colleges, Brian Colson Alexander

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to provide an assessment of the involvement of Mississippi's community and junior colleges in intercollegiate athletics during the academic year 2007–2008. These data could assist community and junior college presidents, vice presidents residing over athletics, athletic directors, and other policy makers in their decision-making processes concerning intercollegiate athletics. They could compare their institution with other institutions in the state. This study included the entire population of Mississippi's public community and junior colleges that offered intercollegiate athletics. Frequencies and percentages were utilized by the researcher to report the information. Data were collected to provide an …

Building Community Among Older Oromo Women Struggling With Sadness In A Large Urban Setting, Fatuma Kotile

Theses and Graduate Projects

Older Oromo women who immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s have experienced several stressful life events including war, famine, acculturation, harsh northern climate, a new language (English), and multiple experiences different from those in their native country, Ethiopia. Coping with these new experiences, correlates with a high level of depressive symptoms that Oromo people call "sadness." The purpose of this project is to create and describe a transcultural model of nursing practice in community that aims to decrease sadness among older Oromo women by promoting community building and healthy life choices in the midst of change. A …

Creating Community For Those Who Work With Wool, Susannah L.K White

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

Creating Community for Those Who Work with Wool The purpose of this project was to create opportunities for reflection and to gather information from a diverse group of people (both geographical and occupational) who have an interest in working with wool. Using various thinking skills tools in small focus groups to identify needs, occupations, interests and themes of individuals, it attempts to create a common format suitable for connecting individual vocations to the wider community of woolworkers. The appropriateness of the use of a web site, and the form that it might take are examined. A great deal of useful …

Aquatecture: Architectural Adaptation To Rising Sea Levels, Erica Williams

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Our world is drastically changing. Temperatures are rising, skies over cities are blanketed with smoke, and melting glaciers are raising sea levels at alarming rates. Although the destruction we face is already threatening the quality of life for billions around the world, it could just be the beginning. What is projected to come in the future could be catastrophic.

It is crucial to realize that climate change is already happening. One of the main concerns relating to climate change is that as the polar ice caps continue to melt, rising water will invade our coastal cities around the world. In …

Disentangling Individual And Community Effects On Environmentally Sensitive Behaviors, Mary P. Harmon

Sociology Dissertations

A major criticism of the environmental behavior literature is the nearly exclusive focus on the role of attitudes and individual-level characteristics. Despite this concentration on individual-level causes, variation in environmental behavior remains. As individual behavior becomes an increasingly significant source of pollution, a better understanding of the influences individual behavior is critical to addressing environmental degradation. This research re-directs the focus on individual-level influences on environmental behaviors by building models examining the varying dimensions of environmental behaviors as influenced by community characteristics. This is accomplished by testing a series of hypotheses under the auspices of two theoretical frameworks: the neoclassical …

Cactuss: Clustering Of Attack Tracks Using Significant Services, Christopher Thomas Murphy

Theses

Network analysts are bombarded with large amounts of low level data, posing great challenges for them to differentiate and recognize critical multistage attacks. Multistage attacks are performed by hackers to compromise one or more machines in a network to gradually gain access to critical information or network operation hidden behind layers of firewall rules. These multistage attacks, composed of correlated Intrusion Detection System (IDS) alerts, can be diverse in the way they progress and penetrate the network. There exists no current literature defining how these diverse multistage attacks may be classified or categorized. This work aims to perform unsupervised learning …

The Effect Of Looping And Teaming On Rural Black Middle School Students' Sense Of Belonging, Tanisha Shantelle Westerfield

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine rural black middle school students’ sense of belonging in looping and teaming settings. This research is based on prior research that school offers an essential source of support for adolescent students as they come to an all-important crossroad in their life journey: the merging of school culture, home culture, and the transition to adulthood. The literature on adolescent psychology confirms that sense of belonging is important during adolescence. The importance of this study lies in its ability to examine how the constructs of teaming and looping contribute to rural black middle school …

Walking On The Wild Side: An Examination Of A Long-Distance Hiking Subculture, Kristi Mcleod Fondren

Theses and Dissertations

A great deal of previous sociological research has examined the social contours of subcultures, focusing either on highly transient subcultures (e.g., among youth) or, conversely, stable institutionalized subcultures (e.g., among professionals). More recent scholarship has examined how leisure subcultures are formed and sustained around a particular interest or activity (e.g., windsurfing). However, little attention has been paid to the role of recreational settings (i.e., specific geographical locales) in the formation of leisure subcultures. Using the Appalachian Trail as a case study, I aim to fill that gap by examining a long-distance hiking subculture. I use ethnographic data collected from long-distance …

It Is Not Good That Man Should Be Alone: What Adam And Eve Can Teach Us About Relationships In Learning Communities, Julene Bassett

Theses and Dissertations

Human existence (or be-ing) is profoundly relational. Yet educational environments often assume that learning happens individually. Though many educators are trying to rectify this problem by introducing community into the learning process, these efforts are too often simply overlaid onto a system that works through competition and rewards individual achievement. Therefore, an alternative perspective for who we are as humans and how we should be together is needed. In this dissertation, I examine what it means to be fundamentally related and show how such an understanding might impact learning. We often think of “community” as a place, but I also …

Tritrophic Interactions In Forests: Direct And Indirect Interactions Between Birds, Insect Herbivores, And Oaks, Nicholas Anthony Barber

Dissertations

This study examines direct and indirect relationships between three trophic levels to determine effects on plant damage, herbivore abundance and community structure, and bird distribution in forest ecosystems. Exclusion experiments on white oak (Quercus alba) revealed that bird predation effects to not vary spatially despite variation in abundance of both birds and insects. Using a leaf quality manipulation, I demonstrated that bird impacts do not differ with host plant quality. Rather, birds and plant traits had additive effects on herbivore damage. Bottom-up effects of leaf quality were also more important than top-down effects of birds in structuring the insect herbivore …

Investigating The Antecedents And Consequences Of Perceived Connectedness To Brand Users: Brand Communities Versus Brand Collectivities, William Carroll Martin

Theses and Dissertations

Brands can often be highly capable of linking individuals to one another. Many brand admirers feel a psychological connection with one another, a feeling referred to in this dissertation as perceived connectedness to brand users (PCBU). Though this connection has been almost wholly studied among brand consumer engaged in recurrent brand-oriented social interaction (i.e. brand communities), brand consumers need not be engaged in social interaction in order to feel an implicit connection with one another. In this dissertation, a collection of individuals who feel a connection with a brand’s consumers, while engaging in minimal to no recurrent brand-oriented social interaction, …

From Mass Consumer Society To A Society Of Consumers: Consumption And Community In Late Modernity, Matthew Russell Colling

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines a late-modernity model of society where consumption is the conduit through which individuals meet society. This model is contrasted with Wilkinson's (1991) model that sees the community as the place where individuals make contact with society. Using Brown et al.'s (1996) Outshopping Index, residents of two rural Mississippi Delta communities were asked how often they shopped for 30 consumable items outside of their communities both in 1996 and again in 2007. Logistic regression demonstrates a significant interaction effect between year and outshopping such that outshopping was significantly and positively associated with community sentiment in 1996 but not …

Digging It: A Participatory Ethnography Of The Experiences At A School Garden, Branimir Cvetkovic

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This case study of a school garden focuses on concepts of community that are fostered and embodied at this setting. By utilizing participatory ethnographic methodologies, this research explored gemeinschaft and gesellschaft concepts of community. Data reveals that students are able to learn mastery, belonging, generosity and independence while participating in the garden work. Teachers manage students who attempt to challenge the boundaries of this community by utilizing and ethic of care which allows teachers to de-emphasize authority and to first consider the networks of relationships and how to mend and improve them. Students are able to experience governmentality and an …

Framework For Self Sustaining Eco-Village, Eric Holtgard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Why are modern American cities fundamentally dependant on outsourced resources and dirty power? Why can't modern cities support themselves and their inhabitants without relying on resources from half way across the world? Even within the city itself, community neighborhoods are disconnected and bisected by massive expanses of life endangering highways. Why can't we wake up and open our eyes to the urban reality we are creating for future generations. Future cities must look past immediate gain and focus on long term sustainability rather than compiling L.E.E.D. points or making a selfish profit.

Sustainable Infrastructure is the first step towards freeing …

Mental Health Care At The Margins: A Critical Ethnography Of Psychological Practice In An Inner City Mental Health Setting, Katy Sampson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within the past several decades, the field of psychology has attempted to improve psychological services for a greater diversity of people. However, despite these attempts, research continues to document a "gap" when it comes to mental health care services for marginalized populations. Various studies have addressed the issue of this "gap" in mental health care; however, most adhere to positivist assumptions regarding sociocultural aspects of experience, understanding culture and identity as immutable qualities existing within individuals, rather than as an interpersonal phenomenon that is negotiated between and among people and institutions. As a result of these assumptions, many past studies …

Cultural Characteristics Of Western Educational Structures And Their Effects On Local Ways Of Knowing, Cheryl L. Woolsey Des Jarlais

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This critical ethnography is a study of how the interfaces between Western educational structures and Native cultural structures function in the daily operations of a privately owned school in a Native community, how these functions have evolved, drawbacks and strengths of both Western and Native cultural structures, and current challenges in relating to the mixtures of philosophy, value systems and socialization expectations of these systems.

The review of literature exposed a variety of assumptions regarding individualism, bureaucratization, homogenization, universalism, meritocracy, and rationalization reflected in Western educational structures. The study done at Valley Grove Mission School illuminated the assumptions and expectations …

Strutting It Up Through Histories: A Performance Genealogy Of The Philadelphia Mummers Parade, Corey Elizabeth Leighton

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the cultural performances of the parade community in one of the oldest and largest parades in the country: the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. The modern parade celebration consists of groups of mostly working-class white men from South Philadelphia who dress up in extravagant sequined and feathered costumes and, beginning in South Philadelphia, march toward City Hall on one of the largest streets in the city on New Year’s Day. The parade is competitive and marked by performance competitions at the end of each parade. The parade’s history in the city of Philadelphia is extensive but contested. Many locals …

Community Social Capital And Suicide Rates, Anna Cutlip

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The integrating capacity of social institutions on community organization and the consequential benefits of community cohesion are well-known, i.e. lower crime rates, better health outcomes, economic and social stability. Drawing on the civil society and civic community literatures, this study applies the theory of social capital to study of suicide. Rather than focus on individual level data, macro-level data are analyzed to determine the relationship between the social capital of an area and the prevalence of suicide. Negative binomial regression is used to examine U.S. counties of 100,000 residents or more (urban) and counties of 1,000 to 25,000 residents (rural) …

Identification Of Falls Risk Factors In Community-Dwelling Older Adults: Validation Of The Comprehensive Falls Risk Screening Instrument, Jennifer Marie Fabre

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Identifying risk factors and those at risk for falls is necessary. The first purpose of the dissertation was to validate the Comprehensive Falls Risk Screening Instrument (CFRSI) that weights falls risk factors and includes the subscale scores of history, physical, vision, medication, and environment, and a total falls risk score. The CFRSI total falls risk score was compared to subscale scores, physical activity, physical function, health-related quality of life (HRQL), and history of falls (Study 1). The second purpose of the dissertation was to determine associations between the CFRSI total falls risk score, race, education, and income (Study 2). Data …

An Ethnography Of "Hang It Out To Dry", Danielle Sears Vignes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study is an ethnography of a performance ethnography. The performance “Hang It Out To Dry” explores the experiences of residents from Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This dissertation traces “Hang It Out To Dry” from the beginning of fieldwork to the aesthetic staging of collected narratives and through two years of community building as the performance toured the nation. Particularly, I develop methods for collecting materials from fieldwork for adaptation to the stage. The study demonstrates the intellectual work of performance composition in scripting and staging a performance ethnography. In doing so, I mark …

Puebloan Plain-Weave Pointed/Rounded-Toe Sandals, David Toy Yoder

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An assemblage of 226 Puebloan pointed/rounded-toe sandals from sites throughout the northern Southwest was examined to answer the following questions: how were these sandals constructed, when where they used, and where were they distributed. The answers to these questions were then used to investigate cultural boundaries, communities of practice, and interaction among the Anasazi. Methods of analysis included a technical analysis, soft X-ray radiography, microscopic fiber identification, spatial analysis, AMS radiocarbon dating, and experimental reconstruction.

Based on these analyses it appears that pointed/rounded-toe sandals were used as early as A.D. 631 to as late as A.D. 1178. Spatially, this sandal …