Digital Commons Network^™

Incorporating Environmental Stimuli Into The Service Profit Chain In A Retail Grocery Context: A Structural Equation Modelling Approach., Treasa Kearney

Doctoral

Several theoretical contributions are highlighted; firstly that employee environmental stimuli construct contained five sub-factors, these were termed, E-design, E-music, E-lighting, E-olfaction and E-layout. This highlights the complexities of the environmental stimuli for employees. Furthermore this research found a significant direct link between employee environmental stimuli and employee satisfaction. Considering the literature examining the effects of environmental stimuli on employee behaviour is astonishingly scant (Skandrani et al., 2011), this is an important contribution to several literature streams. Secondly, examining a global configuration of the environmental stimuli can provide a fuller framework for understanding and exploring customer and employee behavioural responses. In …

Aesthetic Qualities Of Websites And Their Effects On Public Perceptions Of Agricultural Issues And Organizations, Chase Tyler Hundley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study sought to evaluate perceptions of agricultural issues and organizations based on how information is presented visually in websites. Researchers intended the results to be used to help the agricultural industry more effectively communicate information through better website design and increased persuasiveness. The study was conducted through the use of three focus group sessions as mapped out by Krueger (1998a, 1998b, 1998c) and Morgan (1998a, 1998b). The study used non-agriculture students purposively selected from a class in the University of Arkansas School of Human Environmental Sciences as participants in the study. The subject demographics closely resembled the primary demographics …

Beyond Neighborhood Play: Factors That Predict Child Civic Engagement, Tracy Waters

All Dissertations

This study utilized a unique mixed methodology to examine perceptions of neighborhood characteristics, independent mobility, and child civic engagement among 101 child-caregiver dyads. Children between the ages of 7 and 13 years completed a neighborhood walk with a member of the research team, identifying neighborhood boundaries, taking pictures of important places, and explaining their day-to-day activities. Responses from a written survey and neighborhood observations complimented the neighborhood walk data. Results revealed that spatial neighborhood and independent mobility did not vary significantly by age or gender. However, spatial neighborhood and independent mobility were positively related to several child and caregiver measures …

Evaluation Of A Practice Change To Improve Screening, Identification, And Management Of Patients With Prediabetes, Murrita C. Bolinger

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Background: The prevalence rate of type 2 diabetes among adults in West Virginia (WV) is 10.85, which ranks fourth in the United States in 2007. Furthermore, WV ranks as second highest state for diabetes related deaths in the nation. Prediabetes increases the risks for development of type 2 diabetes. Studies have supported lifestyle modification education for prediabetic adults in an effort to reduce progression to type 2 diabetes.;Objective: To evaluate the use of an EMR reminder to improve the screening, identifying, and documentation of treatment plans for patient at risk for prediabetes.;Methods: A provider focused education session was offered to …

Mindfully Teaching In The Classroom: A Literature Review, Nicole J. Albrecht, Patricia M. Albrecht, Marc Cohen

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The practice of mindfulness is being used with increased frequency in schools around the world. In the current literature review we outline some of the core concepts and practices associated with mindfulness and discuss studies analysing the process of mindfulness teacher training. Preliminary research in this emerging field suggests that mindfulness has the potential to improve classroom management, teacher-student relationships and instructional strategies. Mindfulness instructors recommend that before teachers can feel comfortable and effectively teach mindfulness in the classroom they need to embody and practice mindfulness in their own lives. It is proposed that in order to improve our knowledge …

Prospective Teachers' Comprehension Levels Of Special Relativity Theory And The Effect Of Writing For Learning On Achievement, Ali Yildiz

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

In the present study, the comprehension levels of special relativity theory in prospective teachers who take the Introduction to Modern Physics lesson in the faculty of education science teaching department and the effect of writing for learning on their achievement is researched. In the research, a control group pre-test post-test quasi-experimental research model was used. Research data were obtained by using open-ended questions prepared by the researcher. The lesson was conducted in the beginning by using the verbal-written explanation method. Then each student in the experimental group wrote a summary which clearly explains the special relativity theory for a high …

How Do Early Childhood Students Conceptualize Play-Based Curriculum?, Avis Ridgway, Gloria Quinones

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The study’s purpose was to discover student understanding of play-based curriculum. Traditionally, play has been misunderstood in pedagogical terms, and was widely interpreted in our study. The Early Years Learning Framework suggests educator guidance in sustaining play is essential for learning and development. As teacher educators, we wanted to reflect on Play and Pedagogy (A new fourth year unit) that expected students to create a conceptual play model for use in practice. Twenty-six students volunteered de-identified assignments. From these, common conceptual elements were identified. We selected quotes from student’s work to support identified concepts and entered a methodology of dialogue …

A Professional Experience Learning Community For Pre-Service Secondary Mathematics Teachers, Michael S. Cavanagh, Thomas Garvey

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This paper reports the development and implementation of a collaborative professional experience learning community for a group of nine pre-service secondary mathematics teachers. The pre-service teachers and their methods lecturer made 12 school visits over one academic year to a local secondary school. The pre-service teachers observed and co-taught problem-solving lessons in two Year 8 classes. They discussed the lessons with the teacher and the university lecturer, and later posted reflective comments to an online forum. Data from questionnaires, interviews, and reflections indicate that participation in the learning community helped pre-service teachers make stronger links between theory and practice, learn …

Dismantling The American Dominant Ideology: Anderson's "There Will Be Blood", Dan Ketchum

Cinesthesia

No abstract provided.

From The "War On Poverty" To Reagan's "New Right," What's In A Name? : The Symbolic Significance Of The "Welfare Queen" In Politics And Public Discourse., Kem Roper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a rhetorical analysis of the political discourse surrounding the role of poor African American women within the American social and political economy beginning in 1965 with Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty initiatives and extending to the early 1980s with Ronald Reagan and the "religious right." I argue that an ideology of whiteness permeates both the Johnson and Reagan administrations even though each worked towards different ends. In Chapter 1, I begin by discussing how America's establishment as a capitalist society made it a nation ill-fitted for government-funded social programs. In particular, I discuss the impact of distinctions …

A Model Of Resilience In Children At Risk For The Development Of Anxiety., Matthew David Hartman Schrock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anxiety is a common and debilitating disorder in children. Until recently, research in the field of child anxiety has focused on the identification of specific risk factors in the development of child anxiety. More recent studies have begun to explore more complex models of the etiology of child anxiety, but most still focus on the interplay of risk factors. Studies examining the development of child anxiety should focus on the confluence of vulnerability, risk, and protective factors to provide a more complete picture of the development of child anxiety. The current study reviews current conceptual and empirical research to propose …

Ambient Intelligence With Wireless Grid Enabled Applications: A Case Study Of The Launch And First Use Experience Of Wejay Social Radio In Education, Helen Patricia Mckenna

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

Wireless grid and ambient intelligent (AmI) environments are characterized as supportive of collaboration, interaction, and sharing. The conceptual framework advanced for this study incorporated the constructs of innovation, creativity and context awareness while offering emergence theory -- emergent properties, structures, patterns and behaviors -- to frame and investigate a wireless grid enabled social radio application which was theorized to be potentially transformative and disruptive. The unintended consequences and unexpected possibilities of wireless grid and smart environments were also addressed.

Using a single case study, drawing upon multiple data collection methods, this research investigated the deployment and use experience of …

A Paradigm For Surviving Severe Macro Economic Disruption: The Promethean Life Engagement Practices Framework, Larry G. Straub

Student Scholarship

Unemployment is rapidly becoming an American epidemic of social, political and economic crisis, even more so for “at risk” groups such as older workers. This study focuses on issues and factors surrounding chronic under-employment, unemployment and even un- employability of our older workforce in America. As the American “social contract” i.e. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are under enormous strain; much will be at stake as America deals with how social, societal, political, educational, legal and economic institutions handle this very complicated and multi-facetted issue... answering the question... “Will Americans over 50 be our next lost generation?” This study analyzed …

Developing Leadership Talent In Family Businesses: Embracing Risk Or Playing It Safe, Stephen P. Miller

Student Scholarship

On-the-job experiences are emphasized as powerful developers of leadership talent in leadership and family business literature. Our qualitative study of 37 family business leaders from mid-market privately held family firms found that it is not just having experiences but the nature of those experiences that determines whether or not authentic leadership talent is actually developed, particularly in next-generation family enterprise leaders. The "family effect," the extent to which actors in a family firm embrace risk in the development of nextgeneration leaders, is identified as central to the development of leadership competencies. We propose a conceptual framework with four factors that …

The Power Of Systemic Fraud: Implications For The Fraud Triangle From The Professional Investing Community, Joseph Wall

Student Scholarship

Fraud is a powerful tool for profit in organizations and for individuals. Professional investors control more than half the world's GDP and continue to commit fraud at an increasing scale which threatens entire countries and regions. Auditors utilize the framework of the fraud triangle for detection and deterrence. However, when fraud is systematic, both become challenging. Literature is silent concerning the lived experiences of the professional trading community, and there is a paucity of knowledge regarding fraud within it. Semi-structured interviews with 31 professional investors yielded insights into how fraud functions. Our analysis suggests that while opportunity and capability hold …

Adversary To Ally: A Relational Approach To Shifting Buyer Paradigms, Donald P. Addison Ii

Student Scholarship

Scholarly literature supports the notion that businesses benefit from long term collaborative relationships with trading partners, yet arm's length, adversarial relationships between buyers and sellers persist. Although scholarly research provides insights regarding conceptual and operational aspects of buyer-seller collaborations, very little has been published concerning the preparation or activities that lead into collaborative relationships. To address this gap this study conducted research involving semi structured interviews with buyers and sellers to understand how collaboration evolves in buyer seller relationships. Of specific interest is how buyer seller relationships, characterized by fear of opportunism and guarded behavior, transition to collaboration characterized by …

The Use Of Two Indicators Of Market Value-Added And Return On Capital Invested In Measuring The Performance Of The Iraqi Banking Sector, Shihab Aldin Hamad Alnuaimi

Journal of Economics and Administrative Sciences

For a long time, the intensification of profit represented a major goal for the company management ,but this goal confirmed a series of restrictions such the constriction on short period, the time rather than on long and medium strategic goal, the relationships with customers ,the supplies, employees , This goal is replaced by another one (intensification of the company's value) ,and the fortune of the share holders itself ,for the purpose of creating value, the company must generate great outcomes to cover the operating expense and to insure the a suitable compensation to the invested capital (the market value added) …

The Effect Of Emotional Intelligence Competences And Transformational Leadership On Organizational Performance An Investigation Study At Al-Rafidain Bank, Ghani Dahham Alzubaidi, Bilal Kamel Awda

Journal of Economics and Administrative Sciences

The research deal with three variables of exceptional importance to organization business firms. These variables are emotional intelligence, transformational leadership, and organizational performance. The aim of this research is to determine the effect of emotional intelligence and transformational leadership on organizational performance at the banking sector, which is represented by Al-Rafidain Bank. The problem of the research is expressed by many questions related with the nature of the interrelationships and effects among research’s variables. The researcher has depended upon the descriptions - analytical approach. on a random sample of (80 ) managers working at more than sixteen branches of Al-Rafidain …

The Impact Of The Dominions Of Mindfulness On The Organizational Innovation “Descriptive Analytical Study In Some Faculties Of The University Of Baghdad”, Asmaa Taha Nouri

Journal of Economics and Administrative Sciences

Research seeks to test the impact of the dimensions of mindfulness on organizational Innovation, proposed in the light of the review literature on two variables of the research, which referred in General to the dynamic relationship between them, as result of weakness of mindfulness as one important factor driving the diversity of innovation and time, ways to sustain and preserve and then support innovations made by creators, weakness in the overall level of organizational Innovation, this represents the problem research, data collection over designing identification, distributed to sample Formed from (30) head Department at a number of colleges of the …

The Effect Of Transformational Leadership In The Employee’S Motivation In The Organizations, Alia Jawad Mohammed

Journal of Economics and Administrative Sciences

The transformational leaderships in all organizations considerMotivations policies which isone of the main and basic policies adapted by the successful leadershipsin all organizations, in order to be able to achieve essential goals, such as enhancing loyalty of employees towards their organizations and also developing and empowering their capacities and abilities in work, leading to development and increasing productivity and reducing production costs to the minimum, then reaching immense profits and benefits, in addition to development of excellence inthe market of competition. The research was performed in the (General Company of Leather Industries/ in Baghdad,in alkarada) the study reached to many …

Hopeful Measures: Characteristics Of Hope At A Community College, Thomas C. Priester

Education Doctoral

Snyder’s Hope Theory defines the construct of hope as the “sum of perceived capabilities to produce routes to desired goals, along with the perceived motivation to use those routes” (Snyder, 2000, p. 8). Hope is a tenant of positive psychology that can be used to measure personal as well as academic potential (Seligman, 2002). In fact, Lopez (2009) claims that “hope predicts GPA and retention in college, and hope scores are more robust than high school GPA, SAT, and ACT scores.” Researchers have measured the relationship between hope and academic performance in college students at four-year, baccalaureate degree granting institutions …

Testing The Strength Of The Safety Net: Temporary Assistance To Needy Families (Tanf) Recipients’ Persistence At Laguardia Community College, Michael A. Baston

Education Doctoral

This study, which used a quantitative, quasi-experimental constructed comparison group design, explored the persistence of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients’ at LaGuardia Community College over a six year period. TANF is the nation’s primary cash assistance program for public assistance recipients. This study operationalized community college student persistence using three outcomes: (1) semester to semester retention, (2) rate of credit accumulation and (3) rate of graduation for the treatment group (TANF participants in a drop-out prevention program) compared to the control group (constructed comparison group). TANF recipients’ persistence rate as measured by semester to semester retention, credit accumulation, …

Self-Perceptions Of Senior African Americans Who Participate In Formal Volunteering, Monique C. Adams

Education Doctoral

An ever-growing resource in America today is our aging population. One out of every five adults will be age 65 or older by 2030. Indeed, Americans are living longer now than at any other time in history, and they have better health, education and a lifetime of experience to offer when volunteering. This study used the Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work as a theoretical framework. The Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work includes three types of resources: human capital, social capital and cultural capital. Although a large body of literature has documented that those factors are present in the general population, …

Zumba® Fitness As A Cultural Mediator, Cole E. Durain

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This ethnography describes local experience as it pertains to aspects of music, dance, and fitness which are compiled into Zumba® Fitness classes of the Rio Grande Valley. While Zumba is not unique to this region, it is locally interpreted based on geo-cultural factors of the Texas-Mexico border region. A large part of Zumba’s success in the Valley can be attributed to the way music is used to identify with regional popular culture and becomes a catalyst for changing the way locals think about health. Research gathered through participant-observation shows that Zumba has become a cultural expression where participants perform both …

Event-Related Potential (Erp) Studies Of Spatial Working Memory, Chui Luen Vera Hau

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This dissertation aims to characterize the neural processes in association with the updating and storage of spatial information. Selective information processing has been suggested as the underlying mechanism for updating and selective maintenance of object information in working memory. It is unclear whether similar mechanism is involved in updating spatial information. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the neural representation of no longer relevant spatial information would show transient or sustained effects on working memory. Two event-related potentials (ERPs) experiments were conducted to examine (1) the neural processes involved in selecting relevant spatial locations from working memory and the subsequent effect …

Asymmetric Retrospective Voting: A Theoretical Model And Empirical Evidence Of Negativity Effects In Voters' Response To The Economy, Roland Kappe

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Prospect theory tells us that humans pay more attention to losses than to comparable gains. My dissertation seeks to apply this insight to the field of retrospective voting and in particular economic voting.

First, I develop a formal model of asymmetric retrospective voting which allows for incorporating loss aversion. Then, the empirical implications of this theoretical model are tested using a variety of methodological approaches. First, the model's predictions about human behavior are tested directly in a laboratory experiment using a simplified version of the asymmetric retrospective voting model. In a second step, the analytical focus is widened, turning from …

The Paradise Within Thee: The Undying Promise Of Transcendence In Paradise Lost, Thomas Christopher Mistler

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

John Milton's Paradise Lost in its simplest sense is a poem about disobedience, loss, and sin. Borrowing much of its inspiration and material from the Book of Genesis, the great English epic tells of the Fall of Man, or the choice of Adam and Eve to disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. The consequences of this action are, according to Milton and Christian tradition, tremendous. The very first lines of Paradise Lost emphasize this point, telling how "Man's first disobedience" brought "death into the world and all our [humanity's] woe" (I.1, 3). In my …

Modeling Guidance And Recognition In Categorical Search: Bridging Human And Computer Object Detection, Yifan Peng

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Although various object detection methods have been widely studied, state-of-the-art performance of object detectors still lag far behind human performance. Humans can perform object detection tasks on various object categories hundreds of times a day in an effortless manner. The main effort in computer vision community is aiming at improving the performance of object detectors, while on the other side only little research has been done on understanding how humans perform in the object detection process. In this thesis, we analyze the relationship between human behaviors and object detection methods in computer vision on both guidance and recognition task. In …

Smart Ladies Sit Still: Women, Modernism And Photography, Lauren M. Rosenblum

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This dissertation examines the relationship between modern women writers and photography. Modernism was long understood as being opposed to mass culture and mediums of mass production, but this project argues that the movement was in fact dependent upon women's engagement with mass cultural forms, like photographs and the magazines that presented the images. I argue that modern women writers thematically and stylistically integrated photography to critique a complicated and evolving visual culture, one in which a woman's mechanically copied appearance became an increasingly vital means for her to express her subjectivity. Jean Rhys, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag …

A Classroom Research Study On Strategies To Promote Vocabulary Retention In The Lote Classroom, Rosalia Scafidi-Iannone

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Stony Brook University The Graduate School Doctoral Defense Announcement Abstract A classroom research study on strategies to promote vocabulary retention in the LOTE classroom By (Rosalia Scafidi-Iannone) Vocabulary is an essential component of second language acquisition. Second language learners are faced with the challenging task of remembering many new words. Exactly how learners can best accomplish that task is disputed. The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of certain types of activities on long-term retention of vocabulary. In this dissertation the literature in the field of vocabulary retention is reviewed. Unlike to the vast majority of research …