Digital Commons Network^™

Churn, Baby, Churn: Strategic Dynamics Among Dominant And Fringe Firms In A Segmented Industry, John M. De Figueiredo, Brian S. Silverman

Faculty Scholarship

This paper integrates and extends the literatures on industry evolution and dominant firms to develop a dynamic theory of dominant and fringe competitive interaction in a segmented industry. It argues that a dominant firm, seeing contraction of growth in its current segment(s), enters new segments in which it can exploit its technological strengths, but that are sufficiently distant to avoid cannibalization. The dominant firm acts as a low-cost Stackelberg leader, driving down prices and triggering a sales takeoff in the new segment. We identify a “churn” effect associated with dominant firm entry: fringe firms that precede the dominant firm into …

The Racialization Of Jimi Hendrix, Marcus K. Adams

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

The period of history immediately following World War Two was a time of intense social change. The end of colonialism, the internal struggles of newly emerging independent nations in Africa, social and political changes across Europe, armed conflict in Southeast Asia, and the civil rights movement in America were just a few. Although many of the above conflicts have been in the making for quite some time, they seemed to unite to form a socio-political cultural revolution known as the 60s, the effects of which continues to this day.

The 1960s was a particularly intense time for race relations in …

Herbal Medications: Implications For The Operating Room, Tricia Marcuson

Theses and Dissertations

US households have an increasing number of people using herbal medications as common self treatments. According to Hodges & Kam (2002), 32-37% of Americans have used herbal medications in the last year. Schmidt (2004) states that 1 in 3 Americans consume herbal products each year. Between 1990 and 1997, the use of herbal medicines increased 380% (Ernst, 2004). The interactions between herbal medications and anesthetic drugs become more important and meaningful due to the wide spread use. There are currently 15 million adults in the United States at risk for a potential adverse interaction with a prescription medication and an …

Anesthesia And The Thermal Injury Patient: A Current Literature Review, John Hoscheid

Theses and Dissertations

Problem and Purpose: A major burn is one of the most devastating physiologic and psychologic insults known (McCall & Cahill, 2005). The 2007 American Burn Association fact sheet estimates that each burn center has approximately 200 admissions each year and that the other 5,000 hospitals admit approximately 3 burn injuries on average per year. The recent approach to move some burn care to the rural setting will have a major effect on the rural anesthesia practice. The purpose of this study was to enhance the Nurse Anesthetists ability to care for the burn patient.

Conceptual Framework: This literature review study …

School Counselors Perceptions Of The Importance And Need For Appropriate Training Regarding Preparedness To Deal With Specific Crisis Situations In Schools, Tina Bigante

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

School Counselors Perceptions of the Importance and Need for Appropriate Training Regarding Preparedness to Deal with Specific Crisis Situations in Schools, explored differences among and between school counselors who have been trained and school counselors who have not been trained in crisis intervention with regards to specific crisis situations. The subjects were 70 school counselors employed in public school districts of western Pennsylvania. Thirty-five of the school counselors had received training in crisis intervention either through university coursework and/or workshops. The other thirty-five school counselors had no formal training in crisis intervention. All participants completed the Survey of School Counselor …

The Experience Of Transitioning To The Caregiving Role For A Family Member With Alzheimer's Disease Or A Related Dementia, Kathleen Czekanski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alzheimer's disease is a chronic, debilitating disease that currently affects approximately 5.1 million Americans (Alzheimer's Association 2007). The majority of these individuals are being cared for at home by family caregivers who are known to suffer from more depression and burden than any other group of caregivers. The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to explore the lived experience of transitioning to the role of caregiver for a family member with Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia. The study followed purposeful sampling and eight women and two men with a mean age of 66.3 participated in the study. These …

The Bloody Truth: A Psychological And Cultural Study Of Menstruation As Lived And Experienced By Women, Carolyn Deforest

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present research explores the negation and affirmation of menstrual life as found in culture, theory, and the concrete experiences of individual women. A phenomenological and hermeneutical thematic analysis is used throughout. In this study, the aspects of culture analyzed include language, humor, art, television, film, literature, print and television advertising, menstrual education, medicine, and some of the historical influences in the perception of women. Additionally, the formal psychological literature is examined as part of the cultural data, as is the researcher's own observations and cultural experiences.

Overall, this research reveals that the experience of menstrual bleeding has been culturally …

Internet Use In Teacher Preparation Programs: The Relationship Between Pedagogy And Practice In The Pennsylvania State System Of Higher Education, Leighann Forbes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The overall purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) teacher educators' pedagogical beliefs and their use of telecollaborative Internet activities in practice. The goal of this examination was to address the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (April 2002) call for collecting data about how digital content is being used and to make recommendations for action. The study collected data, via a web-based survey, about pedagogical beliefs and practices of PASSHE teacher educators. The analysis of descriptive statistics, rankings, Spearman rho correlations, and ANOVA calculations revealed …

Corporations And Commercial Speech, Tamara Piety, Ronald Collins, Mark Lopez, David Vladeck

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Instructor Efficacy And Student Consumerism, Bethany Burge

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Students who endorse the culture of student consumerism do not presume higher education to involve effort, challenge or negative evaluation, but rather expect to be given high grades for being tuition-payers and class attendees. I hypothesize that the interplay between students’ perceptions of teacher effectiveness and their individual pupil performance is influenced by student consumerism and reinforced to promote or dissuade student achievement. Depending on the degree to which the student endorses student consumerism, this interplay can also impact the actual grades the students earn.

Political Consensus: Ability Of Government Students To Make Political Decions [Sic], Ellen Gutman

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

The purpose of this study is to examine the ability of students in an Introduction to American Government class to make decisions and participate in politics. Throughout simulations designed to emulate Congress, students create legislation, attempt to gain support for it, and pass new laws dealing with four separate topics during the semester; my focus is, specifically, on the issue of prayer in public schools. Often, it seemed that students were conforming to the beliefs of the friends they had made in the class instead of supporting and promoting their own beliefs. While dissent was encouraged and some students were …

The Effects Of Childhood Abuse On Parenting, Flavia Vasconcelos

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Childhood abuse has been associated with a broad range of problems in adulthood, including disruptions in parent-child relationships. The majority of research has focused on the effects of childhood sexual abuse on mothers, but it is also important to better understand the effects of childhood abuse on fathers. The current study examined the effect of various forms of childhood abuse on parent-child conflict and relationship quality using the recent replication of the National Comorbidity Survey (NCS-R). The NCS-R is a nationwide household survey of 9,282 participants that included an assessment of the presence/absence of four forms of childhood abuse: physical …

The Role Of A Clergyperson Within An Assertive Case Management Outreach Team, Rachel Adrienne Lee Fayter

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Mental health consumer/survivors living in urban poverty are generally marginalized and devalued by society. To aid in the process of recovery they require a holistic form of treatment to meet their physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs. The current exploratory study investigated the role of a pastor as part of a multidisciplinary team engaged in mental health outreach work and the impacts of this role for people experiencing urban homelessness. Multiple qualitative methods were used to collect data from different stakeholder groups. From multiple participant perspectives, the findings indicate that there are many unique spiritual, relational, and moral aspects of …

'If You're The Alliance For Children And Youth, Where Are All The Children And Youth'?' How The Alliance For Children And Youth Of Waterloo Region Can Help Advance Youth Engagement, Shauna M. Fuller

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Youth engagement (the meaningful participation and sustained involvement of a young person in an activity outside of him or herself; CEYE, 2003), in particular with organizations that affect young people’s lives, has positive effects on both youth and organizations (Driscoll, 2002; Hart, 1992; Zeldin, McDaniel, Topitzes, & Calvert, 2000). Research on youth engagement has identified that successful and sustainable youth engagement requires a combination of local, interagency, and political level structures (Caputo, 2000). Waterloo Region (Ontario, Canada) has isolated pockets of youth engaged in decision-making; however, no regional youth engagement initiative exists at the interagency and political levels. Regional efforts …

Audiovisual Speech Perception: A Speech Production Approach, Michelle A. Jarick

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The purpose of these studies was to test the main assumptions outlined in the Motor Theory of speech perception that (1) speech perception is linked to speech production, (2) audiovisual integration of speech occurs automatically and after the motor commands are activated, and (3) we perceive the intended gestures, which are extracted by a specialized ‘phonetic module’ in the brain. In Experiment 1, we used a Stroop-like paradigm, where participants viewed and listened to a speaker producing speech syllables (/aba/ or /aga/) in three conditions: audio-only, visual-only, and audiovisual. Participants were asked to ignore irrelevant speech stimuli, and to identify …

Narrowed Interpersonal Worlds: Gender Differences In Affiliation-Focus And Dominance-Focus, Oshrat A. Hodara

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The purpose of this research is to investigate whether there are gender differences in the perceptions of affiliations of dominance behaviour over a large sample of social interactions. We were particularly interested in the variability of these perceptions and whether they differ in men’s and women’s perceptions of themselves and others. This research utilizes the framework of interpersonal theory, in which the two main features of people’s behaviour, affiliation and dominance, are proposed to be unrelated to each other and form a circumplex structure. In study 1, a subset of personality adjectives was selected, which demonstrated good circumplex structure. These …

Hemispheric Sensitivity To Thematic Role Information Derived From Active And Passive Verbs: An Event Related Brain Potentials Study, Christopher A. Schwint

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Recent research examining differences in the way the left (LH) and right (RH) hemispheres of the brain process language have used the visual half-field (VHF) paradigm to examine whether each hemisphere can independently process information from sentences. The current study expanded upon such work by using event related brain potential (ERP) measures to examine how the comprehension of thematic role knowledge, a process essential to successful sentence comprehension (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenbeerg, 1994), is undertaken in each hemisphere. During language comprehension, agents (entities that initiate action in an event) depicted by nouns (e.g., cop) have been shown to be associated …

Interviewing Children About A Repeated Event: Does Prior Practice In Describing A Specific Instance Of An Unrelated Repeated Event Improve The Amount And Quality Of Elicited Information?, Sonja P. Brubacher

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Five- to 6- and 7- to 8-year old (N=118) participated, in groups, in 4 sessions of the Laurier Activities over a 2-week period. The Laurier Activities centered around tasks such as listening to a story, completing a puzzle, mild physical exercise, relaxation, getting refreshed, and getting a surprise. Across sessions of these activities, instantiations of each task (e.g., the content of the story) were presented at different frequencies. Instantiations were fixed (the same every time), variable (changed every time), or “Hi/Lo” (the Hi frequency instantiation presented at 3 sessions, the Lo frequency instantiation presented at 1 session). …

Gender Differences In Reward Allocation Among Boys And Girls Who Receive Allowance, Sarah Clift

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Gender differences emerge at a very young age in children. Through socialization boys and girls are encouraged to adopt gender stereotypes. Among adults, salary is an area where there are consistent gender differences, with females typically asking for and receiving less than males. The present study examined differences in reward allocation (i.e., pay) among 91 boys and girls who receive an allowance or “pocket money” in grades one through four, to try to determine whether the differences noted among adults appear with first early pay experiences. Children were asked to complete a series of five tasks regarding gender stereotypes, occupations, …

Understanding The Lived Experiences Of Jamiacan Immigrant Youth In Two Southern Ontario Cities, Kathleen M. Hogarth

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Research done with immigrant youth in Canada has been largely focused on educational outcomes. The experiences of Jamiacan immigrant youth in Canada have not been explored in great depth in the literature. Canadian statistics show however that Jamiacan immigrant youth account for the largest grouping of Caribbean immigrant youth in Canada. Other data sources point to the fact that Jamiacan youth are more likely to be criminalized and face added challenges in society because of racial stereotyping. The goal of this thesis therefore was to explore the experiences of Jamiacan immigrant youth in Kitchener and Toronto, Ontario through an investigation …

The Role Of Christian Faith In The Acculturation And Identity Development Of Chinese Immigrant Youth, Lynn Chyi-Ing Liao

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Immigration is a life-altering experience that significantly contributes a context for identity formation, a critical and salient task during the years of late adolescence and emerging adulthood. Religion as a influential factor in the lives of youth has often been overlooked and considering the transnational quality of Christianity, it may have an important role to play in the acculturation and identity development of immigrant youth.

In this qualitative study, I chose to interview Chinese immigrant youth aged 18-23, who are recent immigrants and self-identify as Christian. The central idea of this exploratory inquiry is that each individual interprets experiences of …

Planting The Seeds: The Experiences Of Community Psychology Graduates As Agents Of Systemic Social Change, Peggy Ann Weston

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Social change is a part of human existence, but other than charismatic individuals such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, little has been published about the lived experience of social change agents. Time (era, passage of time, etc.) is often neglected as an important temporal factor of analysis in systemic social change (SSC) activities. The intent is to explore the experience of people working as SSC agents and discover what influences their work. A better understanding of this experience would contribute to more effective SSC work and perhaps address challenges facing change agents. The main research question, “What …

Adult Impersonation: Rape By Fraud As A Defense To Statutory Rape, Russell Christopher, Kathryn Christopher

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Examination Of Fixed And Multi-Tier Source Monitoring Training With Children, Sean Curtis Cameron

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The current research consists of two studies examining children’s source monitoring training. As previous research (e.g., Thierry & Spence, 2002; Poole & Lindsay, 2002) on source monitoring training is somewhat inconsistent, this research examined two different types of source training with 3–8 year old children. In Study 1, 131 children across two age ranges (3–4 and 7–8 years) were given comparable source training to that completed by Thierry and Spence (2002). General results indicated that the training benefited 7–8 year olds at two delay times, but only benefited younger children that met the established criterion in training. In Study 2, …

Golden Pheasants And Eastern Kings: The German District Administration In The Occupied Soviet Union, 1941–1944, Stephen A. Connor

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

No abstract provided.

Artificial Immune System Based Algorithms For Optimization And Self-Tuning Control In Power Systems, Mani Hunjan

Masters Theses

"Artificial immune systems (AIS) are new computational intelligence methods inspired by various mechanisms of the biological immune system. AIS are adaptive systems inspired by theoretical immunology and its functions, principles and models. The work depicted in this thesis centers on the applications of AIS based algorithms for optimization and self-tuning control in power systems. The optimization is carried out using an algorithm based on the clonal selection principle and the self-tuning characteristics of control for parameters are inspired by the humoral immune response of the human body. The work in this thesis is written in two papers as follows: Paper …

Instructional Design With Expertise In Mind (Part 1), Eric Frierson

LOEX Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Social Capital In Contemporary Society : Decline Or Change, Eleonor Domenichini

Theses, Dissertations, and Projects

This theoretical thesis is going to explore social capital and its relation with trust, civic engagement, and leisure to better understand the complexity of social capital. Some of the concerns advanced by scholars stating that there is a decline of social capital in contemporary society are challenged. Controversies regarding theoretical and methodological applications, and a review of how "special" interests might have been used to promote particular causes affecting intervention and division of resources, are going to be examined. The intent is to show that there are alternative explanations for changes that do not pertain or predict decline. A discussion …

Individual Differences And The Impact Of Forward And Backward Causal Relations On The Online Processing Of Narratives, Stephen W. Briner, Christopher A. Kurby, Danielle S. Mcnamara

Psychology Faculty Publications

This paper investigated the impact of causality on reading time by examining the contributions of forward antecedent and backward consequence connections. Undergraduate students read four narrative texts, sentence by sentence. Reading times for each sentence were regressed onto the number of antecedents connecting forward to a sentence and backward to prior sentences. Overall, forward antecedents and backward consequences explained unique variance in reading times, with increases in antecedents and consequences predicting decreases in reading time. However, causal consequences did not contribute unique variance to participants with higher literature knowledge. Further, the presence of forward antecedents significantly attenuated reading time differences …

Perceptions And Needs Of Rural Young People In The South-West Of Western Australia : Implications For Pedagogy, Rhonda Oliver, Lynelle Watts, Joan Strikwerda-Brown, David Hodgson, Marilyn Palmer

Research outputs pre 2011

The original purpose of this study was to investigate youth needs, specifically in the south western region (the 'South West') of Western Australia, and then to explore how these needs might be addressed in terms of current curriculum and teaching practices. The following research questions guided our investigation:

- What are the educational and occupational aspirations of young people from the South West of Western Australia?

- What do young people identify as influences on their educational and occupational aspirations and attainment?

As the data collection progressed, it was evident to all those involved that, whilst there were expressed needs, …