Digital Commons Network^™

Nova Quarterly: The University Of Texas At El Paso, The University Of Texas At El Paso University Communications

NOVA

Setting High Expectations

Winter, 2006, Vol. 44, No. 4; No. 168.

Consumer's Adoption Of The Technology Innovations : The Role Of Coping Strategies, Wenjing Bao

Lingnan Theses

Given the accelerated technology innovations and shorter product lifecycles, explaining and predicting consumers’ adoption of technology innovations have been increasingly difficult. With new generations of the same products emerging every few years or less, consumers often face the dilemma of choosing between continuing to use the existing product and upgrading to a new version, and have increasingly experienced a certain level of technology fatigue. They may delay the adoption, frog-leap the new product, and simply ignore its existence. Thus, the traditional models of adoption based on product attributes and consumer innovativeness can no longer accommodate these new realities. Based on …

The Role Of Volunteering In Successful Ageing : Impacts On Psychological Well-Being Of Older Persons, Sin Yui, Sharon Chan

Lingnan Theses

The thesis looks at volunteering, an activity in which time is freely given as a gift to benefit other people, groups and society. Formal volunteering, as opposed to informal helping, entails stronger commitment via organisations that offer more or less organised assistance often on an individual basis. The thesis suggests that older retired persons provide an invaluable pool of formal voluntary workers amidst the growing need for social services and fewer resources for social welfare expenditure. This pool will grow even more in the future. Moreover, the research looks at the experiences of social engagement in older and associations between …

Predicting Alcohol And Substance Abuse Treatment Outcomes Among Hispanic And African American Substance Abusers, Dawna-Cricket-Martita Meehan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alcohol and drug use and abuse are significant concerns in the United States, yet few studies have investigated how cultural factors, such as acculturative type and acculturative stress, impact substance abuse treatment outcomes. In this study, African American (n = 171) and Hispanic (n = 101) substance abusers' acculturative type and acculturative stress levels were compared to substance abuse treatment outcome. Although the results indicated that acculturative type did not predict substance abuse treatment outcome, a positive correlation between acculturative stress and alcohol and substance abuse problems emerged among the combined and Hispanic samples. In the combined and Hispanic groups, …

A Faith-Based Program Evaluation: Moral Development Of Seminary Students At The Louisiana State Penitentiary, Bruce Sabin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation was to conduct an outcomes-based program evaluation for the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) campus of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. The study included one primary research question, with two subquestions. The primary research question asked to what extent students in the program developed moral judgment consistent with program goals of rehabilitating students and preparing them for effective ministry. The first subquestion asked whether statistically significant differences existed in the moral reasoning of students of different class years. The second subquestion asked whether statistically significant differences existed in the moral reasoning of students of different …

The Relationship Among Wellness, Severity Of Disturbance, And Social Desirability Of Entering Master's-Level Counseling Students, Heather Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A wellness paradigm may hold promise for unifying and strengthening the identity of the counseling profession. The construct of wellness may also hold implications for assessment of entering master's-level counseling students, as a tool for continuous evaluation of students, or for overall program evaluation. In this study, the only counseling-based wellness assessment measure, the Five Factor Wellness Evaluation of Lifestyle, was tested for its relationship to two other constructs: psychological disturbance and social desirability. In order to test the research hypotheses, a total of nine programs (in five states) and 204 entering master's-level counseling students completed instrumentation packets comprised of …

Orienting Of Visual-Spatial Attention With Augmented Reality: Effects Of Spatial And Non-Spatial Multi-Modal Cues, Christian Jerome

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advances in simulation technology have brought about many improvements to the way we train tasks, as well as how we perform tasks in the operational field. Augmented reality (AR) is an example of how to enhance the user's experience in the real world with computer generated information and graphics. Visual search tasks are known to be capacity demanding and therefore may be improved by training in an AR environment. During the experimental task, participants searched for enemies (while cued from visual, auditory, tactile, combinations of two, or all three modality cues) and tried to shoot them while avoiding shooting the …

Middle School Mathematics Teacher Certification, Degree Level, And Experience, And The Effects On Teacher Attrition And Student Mathematics Achievement In A Large Urban District, Bonnie Swan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the backgrounds and experiences of middle school mathematics teachers that often distinguish "quality" teachers, including certification, experience, degree type, and degree level and how those demographics and others vary for different types of schools. The emphasis was on profiling teachers in a large urban district by describing their basic features and distributions, as well as how middle school mathematics teachers, according to those differences, relate to student mathematics achievement, teacher attrition and teacher mobility. Student achievement was measured by test results from the Norm Reference Test-Normal Curve Equivalent (NRT-NCE) mathematics portion of …

Examining Employee Use Of Family-Friendly Benefits With The Theory Of Planned Behavior, Heather Seiser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the factors that may be related to employees' decisions to use the family-friendly benefits (e.g., maternity/paternity leave, flexible work schedule) that are offered to them by their employers. Research has shown that both employees and organizations benefit when employees use family-friendly benefits. However, research has also shown that many employees do not take advantage of such benefits. Studies examining this issue are limited, and much of the research that has been conducted is anecdotal and atheoretical. The present study overcame this problem by empirically examining the use of family-friendly benefits within …

Dissolving The Divide: Cross-Racial Communication In The Restorative Justice Process, Krista Smith

Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies

Restorative justice encounters often bring together participants of differing races. The communication style of participants has a significant impact on such encounters. To date, the restorative justice literature has given little attention to the effect of cross-racial communication on the encounter process. This paper discusses this issue by exploring the risks and opportunities present when an individual from a traditionally marginalized race openly shares her experience of the crime with an individual from the dominant race. In order to draw these risks and opportunities into high relief, the author relies on a single example: a restorative justice encounter between a …

Smith’S Humean Criticism Of Hume’S Account Of The Origin Of Justice, Spencer J. Pack, Eric Schliesser

Economics Faculty Publications

Adam Smith criticizes David Hume's account of the origin of and continuing adherence to the rule of law for being not sufficiently Humean. Hume explained that adherence to the rule of law originated in the self-interest to restrain self-interest. According to Smith, Hume does not pay enough attention to the passions of resentment and admiration, which have their source in the imagination. Smith offers a more naturalistic and evolutionary account of the psychological preconditions of the establishment and morality of justice than Hume had. Smith severs the intimate connection that Hobbes and Hume made between justice and property.

Integration Of Sound And Color| An Experiment In Synaesthesia Involving Music And The Visual Arts, Diane Evelyn Jordan

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God. By Dallas Willard, Godfrey J. Ellis

BYU Studies

Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.

Blended, S. Brent Scharman, Janet S, Scharman

Marriage and Families

No abstract provided.

The Veil Between Fact And Fiction In The Novels Of Kristian Ostergaard, John Mark Nielsen

The Bridge

The bicentennial of the births of Hans Christian Andersen and August de Bournonville and the 150th anniversary of the death of Soren Kierkegaard provide opportunity to reflect and celebrate how artists and philosophers interpret and express the complex network of values and ideas inherent in any culture. Great artists and thinkers are particularly successful in producing work that transcends a specific culture and achieves universality recognizable beyond the boundaries of that culture into which they were born. Certainly the works produced by Andersen, Bournonville, and Kierkgaard are not just Danish; their work engages and invites audiences to consider what it …

“The State Turning To Language”: Power And Identity In Russian Language Policy Today, Lara Ryazanova‐Clarke

Russian Language Journal

The first years of the twenty‐first century in Russia saw a considerable rise in the state’s regulation of language. In the words of one of the agents of this regulation, Natalia Liashchenko, a Consultant for the Committee for the Nationalities, “Определенный поворот к проблемам русского языка произошел и в органах государственной власти России.” The engagement of the state by way of regulations in the national discussion of the nature and quality of the Russian language demonstrates ‘the state power turning to language’.

The Reality Of Computer-Mediated Communication: An Examination Of An Online Dating Service, James W. Peoples Iii

Student Work

This was an exploratory study to investigate how online users portrayed themselves when using online personals in order to introduce themselves to a prospective partner in hopes of friendship, dating, or possible marriage. The primary method of examining the applicants was by the use of the online resumes that they placed on Yahoo. This study used 72 resumes from heterosexual applicants, male and female, between the ages 18 and 67, evenly proportioned across 5 year age groups, to examine the close-ended answers and open-ended statements that applicants provided. The main perspectives used in analyzing the resumes included Erving Goffman’s Presentation …

The Unexpected Value Of Litigation: A Real Options Perspective, Joseph A. Grundfest, Peter H. Huang

Publications

In this Article, we suggest that litigation can be analyzed as though it is a competitive research and development project. Developing this analogy, we present a two-stage real option model of the litigation process that involves sequential information revelation and bargaining over the surplus generated by early settlement. Litigants are risk-neutral and have no private information. The model generates results that, we believe, have analytic and normative significance for the economic analysis of litigation

From an analytic perspective, we demonstrate that negative expected value (NEV) lawsuits are analogous to out of the money call options held by plaintiffs and that …

Punishment, Democracy And Victims, Michael M. O'Hear

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Interventions Organisationnelles Et Santé Psychologique Au Travail : Une Synthèse Des Approches Au Niveau International, Steve Harvey, François Courcy, André Petit, Julie Hudon, Mike Teed, Olivier Loiselle, Alexandre Morin

États de la question, rapports d’expertise et revues de littérature

Ce rapport fait le point sur l’état des connaissances dans le domaine des programmes et des stratégies d’intervention organisationnelle touchant la santé psychologique (stress) en milieu de travail. Les trois objectifs spécifiques de ce rapport sont les suivants :

1.

• Présenter un cadre de référence rassemblant et décrivant, dans une typologie signifiante, les méthodes d’intervention organisationnelle
• Examiner la documentation évaluant l’efficacité et l’efficience de ces interventions organisationnelles
• Proposer quelques domaines d’application futurs ainsi que les champs où des recherches plus approfondies et une attention particulière seraient souhaitables pour les organisations au Québec

Méthodologie : Pour atteindre ces objectifs, nous avons …

Organization Interventions And Mental Health In The Workplace: A Synthesis Of International Approaches, Steve Harvey, François Courcy, André Petit, Julie Hudon, Mike Teed, Olivier Loiselle, Alexandre Morin

États de la question, rapports d’expertise et revues de littérature

This report examines current knowledge on organizational intervention programs and strategies aimed at mental health (stress) in the workplace. Specifically, the three objectives of this report are to:

1. 

• Present a framework that meaningfully captures and explains the types of organizational intervention methods
• Review existing research evidence of the effectiveness and efficiency of these organizational interventions
• Propose some potential applications and areas in need of research or attention for Quebec organizationsm

Method: In order to address the objectives, an extensive literature review using nine search engines (e.g., PsychInfo, Medline) and dozens of key terms was conducted. We also contacted researchers …

Space, Place, And Speech: The Expressive Topography, Timothy Zick

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Speech And Spatial Tactics, Timothy Zick

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Thomas Aquinas And The Metaphysics Of Law, William S. Brewbaker Iii

Articles

Despite modernity's longstanding aversion to metaphysics, legal scholars are increasingly questioning whether law can be understood in isolation from wider questions about the nature of reality. This Article examines perhaps the most famous of metaphysical legal texts—Thomas Aquinas's still widely read Treatise on Law—with a view toward tracing the influence of Thomas's metaphysical presuppositions. This Article shows that Thomas's account of human law cannot be fully understood apart from his metaphysics. Attention to Thomas's hierarchical view of reality exposes tensions between Thomas's “top-down” account of law and his sophisticated “bottom-up” observations. For example, Thomas grounds human law's authority in its …

European American Therapist Self-Disclosure In Cross-Cultural Counseling, Alan W. Burkard, Sarah Knox, Michael Groen, Maria Perez, Shirley Hess

College of Education Faculty Research and Publications

Eleven European American psychotherapists' use of self-disclosure in cross-cultural counseling was studied using consensual qualitative research. As reasons for self-disclosing, therapists reported the intent to enhance the counseling relationship, acknowledge the role of racism/oppression in clients' lives, and acknowledge their own racist/oppressive attitudes. Results indicated that therapists typically shared their reactions to clients' experiences of racism or oppression and that these self-disclosures typically had positive effects in therapy, often improving the counseling relationship by helping clients feel understood and enabling clients to advance to other important issues.

Conditional Love: Incentive Trusts And The Inflexibility Problem, Joshua C. Tate

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article examines the contemporary phenomenon of incentive trusts: trusts that use money to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. Using evidence from Internet websites, practitioner articles, and newspaper articles, the Article considers the likely provisions that a typical incentive trust might have, and explains how such trusts might lead to a problem of inflexibility when they are not drafted so as to take into account the possibility of changed circumstances. The Article also examines current law regarding trust modification and termination as well as recent reform proposals, and suggests some alternatives that might better take into account the particular characteristics …

Deconstructing Hate Speech In The Drc: A Psychological Media Sensitization Campaign, Johann Vollhardt, Marie Coutin, Ervin Staub, George Weiss, Johan Deflander

Journal of Hate Studies

This article describes an interdisciplinary and theory-based radio campaign that has been developed to counteract, and sensitize citizens to hate speech in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The article provides a brief overview of the instrumentalization of hate speech and the violent effects it has had in the Great Lakes region of Africa. A summary of the most recent events in the DRC is given. Here, hate speech was used in the presidential election campaigns in 2006, contributing to a polarization of the country and giving the campaign an ethnic underpinning. A radio program developed to counteract hate …

The Formative Influence Of French Colonialism On The Life And Thought Of Malek Bennabi (Malik Bn Nabi), Phillip Chiviges Naylor

History Faculty Research and Publications

Malek Bennabi (1905–73) fut un intellectuel algérien de premier rang. Cet article étudie l’effet du colonialisme sur sa vie et ses idées. L’étude considère ses livres et offre une comparaison entre Bennabi et Frantz Fanon. Bennabi montre qu’il n’était pas « colonisable » à cause de sa formation et sa conscience historique.

Filmmaking In The Precinct House And The Genre Of Documentary Film, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores side-by-side two contemporary and related film trends: the recent popular enthusiasm over the previously arty documentary film and the mandatory filming of custodial interrogations and confessions.

The history and criticism of documentary film, indeed contemporary movie-going, understands the documentary genre as political and social advocacy (recent examples are Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 and Errol Morris's Fog of War). Judges, advocates, and legislatures, however, assume that films of custodial interrogations and confessions reveal a truth and lack a distorting point of view. As this Article explains, the trend at law, although aimed at furthering venerable criminal justice principles, …

Improving Prosecutorial Decision Making: Some Lessons Of Cognitive Science, Alafair Burke

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article draws on cognitive psychology to develop a new explanation for prosecutorial misconduct. Traditionally, commentators have clothed the study of prosecutorial decision making in the rhetoric of fault. They have attributed overcharging, undisclosed exculpatory evidence, and convictions of the innocent to bad prosecutorial intentions and widespread prosecutorial wrongdoing. This fault-based lens colors both the description of the problem and the recommended solutions. In the language of fault, the problem is a culture that values obtaining and maintaining convictions over justice. The solution is to change prosecutorial values through, for example, more stringent ethical rules and increased disciplinary proceedings and …