Digital Commons Network^™

An Analysis Of The Factors Influencing Self-Rated Health In East Asia, William Charles Stangler

Theses and Dissertations

An accurate assessment of a population’s health is a valuable tool for a nation in terms of planning and policy making. In this paper, I use cross-sectional data from the 2010 East Asian Social Survey to create a model for self-rated health. In this paper I pay particular attention to how factors that affect psychological well-being influence one’s self-rated physical health. These factors include measures of religion, trusting other people, and refraining from visiting a doctor. What I find is that among the respondents of the East Asian Social Survey, non-religious people are 11% more likely to have a high …

Powwow As Spaces Of Public: Circulated Meanings Of A Native Practice For Non-Natives, Joshua Eugene Young

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the status of the relationship between Natives and non-Natives utilizing powwow as the representative anecdote of the intercultural space of interaction between these two groups. Where most scholars ask how Native Americans use powwow to reclaim Native identity, I shift the focus to non-Natives, whose relationship to powwow has gone largely unexamined. I argue that powwow serves as a public space for staging diversity for non-Natives, a fact that has wide-ranging implications for Natives, too. Utilizing rhetorical theories of ritual communication and publicity as a way to interrogate this relationship, I argue that the publics attending to …

How Shared Experiences Impact Teachers Who Remain In American Indian Elementary Schools More Than Five Years, Rae Marie Wilkie-Villebrun

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study examined shared experiences of teachers who remain at American Indian schools teaching for five years or more in an attempt to help administrators understand what factors impact a teacher’s decision to stay. Teachers, regardless of their race or gender, who have worked at an American Indian school for five years or longer, were interviewed. The teachers were recruited to participate in this study through their superintendent/principals and personal contacts. The theoretical framework used to guide this study was a social support model studied by LaRocco, House, and French in 1980. They examined the effect of perceived social …

Examining Openness To Pedagogical Change Among Secondary Mathematics Teachers: Developing And Testing A Structural Model, Cathy J. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (NGA & CCSSO, 2010) and other career and college readiness standards have prompted changes in the pedagogical practices of secondary mathematics teachers in the United States. The purpose of this study was to examine factors contributing to a math teacher’s willingness to alter pedagogical approaches. Key to the research was development of an instrument for measuring openness to change. The survey tool was created based on constructs drawn from the literature and was emailed to secondary mathematics teachers in the United States

(N = 571). The instrument consisted of 65 …

Junior Level Baccalaureate Nursing Students' Lived Experiences With Test Anxiety: Can Music Serve As A Means To Reduce Test Anxiety And Increase Self-Efficacy?, Keeley Clark Harmon

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Test anxiety is a pervasive problem in education programs. Nursing education is not an exception as approximately 30% of nursing students are impacted by varying levels of test anxiety that can affect their ability to succeed. This mixed methods study utilizes concepts from Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, the Cognitive-Attentional (Interference) Model, and the Georgi Lozanov method to explore the lived experiences of junior level baccalaureate nursing students with test anxiety. The 39 participants in the quantitative portion of the study were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The experimental group (n=18) listened to a nine minute and 27 second …

A Tale Of Two Cultures: A Qualitative Narrative Of Nigerian Immigrant Parenting In The United States, Chinwe Onwujuba

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Current demographic estimates indicate that the foreign-born population makes up about 13% (40 million) of the total U.S. population. This number consists of immigrants from all over the world, with a larger majority originating from Latin America and Asia. Research in the area of immigrant adaptation is robust and compelling; however, it is replete with studies on immigrants from the cultural regions identified above, and not as much on other regions with relatively less numerical representation, specifically Africa. From this region, Nigerian individuals and families make up a larger portion of this immigrant group. This study employs a qualitative research …

Utopian Literature And Imperialism, Musab Adnan Bajaber

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the utopian literary genre is an imperial construct that is contingent upon its imperial discourse. I argue that imperialism and utopian literature are intertwined with each other not only because of the different themes related to imperialism present in utopian literature, but also because utopian literature can only speak through imperial tropes and language. This dissertation traces the relationship between utopian literature and imperialism through the 16th, 19th, and late 20th century. The texts it discusses are More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana, Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Morris’ News From …

Tamworth Conservatism And The Repeal Of The Corn Laws: The Foundation Of Modern Conservative Political Discourse, Jonathan James Hedeen

Theses and Dissertations

In the early morning hours of May 16th, 1846 Parliament gathered for the final reading to repeal the Corn Laws. While the Corn Laws had been a highly contested topic within Britain for over two decades, it was at this juncture that the Conservative party of Sir Robert Peel fractured. As this study shall demonstrate, the Corn Law crisis of 1846 did not destroy Peel’s version of Conservativism as has often been argued, but rather put it into a state of suspended animation. The division of the party only twelve years after its formation has long been a topic of …

Missionary Education And The Problem Of Language: The International Missionary Council In Colonial Senegal, 1917-1935, Deborah Leah Lowder

Theses and Dissertations

Between the World Wars, as France refined its colonial structure and control over

Senegal, allowing international missionary networks to develop their own concepts of the

mission civilisatrice. Utilizing the concepts of tutelage and moral education, missionaries

in the International Missionary Council (IMC) defined their role in the French empire as

imperative to the development of African peoples. As self-proclaimed thwarters of the

degradation of the French secular state in Senegal, the IMC used concepts of tutelage and

moral education within the debates surrounding education defined the place of

missionaries within French colonialism in interwar Senegal. Through letters,

publications, and negotiations …

Expertise And Disbelief: Post-1945 American Attitudes Toward The Authority Of Knowledge, Terry Wagner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“You can’t beat brains,” said President John Kennedy of the intellectuals and technicians he assembled in his cabinet. Kennedy was perhaps the greatest political champion for the virtues of expertise. However, all over America during the 1960s and ‘70s, diverse groups voiced doubts about how much experts, such as social scientists, policy specialists, and others, actually improved life. This dissertation examines how movements on the political left and right, and spiritual ruptures such as the rise of ‘60s counterculture and of evangelicalism, spoke in different language to express a similar point: human mastery over the world is profoundly limited. Many …

Evaluating Technical Adequacy Features Of Sentence Verification Technique As A General Outcome Measure Of Content Knowledge, Ren&Eacutee E. Lastrapes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Once students have mastered the mechanics of reading, they are expected to learn new material by reading. This new material, however, becomes increasingly more complex as students enter upper elementary and especially middle and high school. If students fail to comprehend what they read, they risk failure in content courses such as science and social studies. Early assessment of risk and appropriate response to that risk is a goal of effective education. One problem with the risk reduction sequence is that there are limited formative assessments that have been validated as technically adequate for assessing content knowledge. The present study …

A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers And The Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910, Helana E. Brigman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Until recently, critics have devalued the Victorian cookbook as an object of literary inquiry, regularly dismissing it as “Victoriana”—cultural, anthropological histories detailing bland culinary traditions. A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers and the Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910 seeks to provide a framework by which we can explore the Victorian cookbook as a literary text appropriated by writers responding to and advocating for cultural, educational, and artistic reform during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Looking specifically at how women used recipes to discuss food preparation, dining, and household management, I argue that British women writers participated in a collaborative tradition, borrowing and sharing …

Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that out of postmodernity, subjectivity has seen distinct mutations inflected by consumer technology. As postmodern mediators of ordinary people, reality TV, Facebook, and YouTube are steeped in concerns about authenticity. Reality TV, for example, cannot escape its authenticity problem because of the conventional hierarchy of production it maintains, a hierarchy that prompts consumer skepticism regarding its truth value. However, seemingly democratic Internet platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, promise consumer engagement in which users can break down those hierarchical barriers preventing authentic expression. Under the guise of presumed mediational accuracy, the resulting feedback loop between …

“Princes Upon Stages”: The Theatricalization Of Monarchy In The Reign Of Elizabeth I, 1558-1569, Kimberly Reynolds Rush

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The reign of Elizabeth I of England is one of the most celebrated reigns in history and is renowned for the renaissance of the arts, theater, and culture. Authors, playwrights, and artists venerated her in their art in what became known as the Cult of Gloriana. At her accession, however, her position was far from secure. Many considered her illegitimate and she was a female entering a male-dominated world. In addition, Elizabeth inherited a religiously divided nation. In response to this, Elizabeth and her councilors initiated a propaganda campaign that created an image of Elizabeth as a wise, just, and …

Trait Affective, Behavioral, And Cognitive Factors Of Anxiety And Depressive Symptoms In Children And Adolescents: A Hierarchical Model, Reanna Elise Whiting

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Researchers have proposed a vulnerabilities model that attempts to explain the similarities between the internalizing disorders via a hierarchical pathway of trait affectivity and cognitive factors among adults. The current study aimed to replicate and extend this model to symptoms of four internalizing disorders among youth: obsessions and compulsions, generalized anxiety/worry, social anxiety, and depression. Regression-based path analyses utilized data from a community sample of 105 youth aged 12-17 (67.6% female, 80% white, non-Hispanic). Results largely replicated prior models in the adult literature and overall supported a hierarchical paradigm. Trait negative affect and avoidant behavior predicted mid-tier cognitive vulnerabilities (anxiety …

Ernst Mahle: A Pedagogical Edition Of His Four Concertinos For Piano And Orchestra, Joao Paulo Casarotti

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

German-born composer Ernst Mahle (b. 1929) holds a respected position in the music field in Brazil, his adopted country since 1951. Mahle is the artistic director and co-founder of the “Escola de Musica de Piracicaba,” one of the most important musical institutions in Brazil. His work has focused on conducting, composition, and elementary music education. The main focus of this research will be to examine Mahle’s four concertinos for piano and orchestra intended for young performers. This paper will also provide information regarding Mahle’s sixty years of musical legacy in Brazil and his pedagogical idiom for piano solo. For a …

The Federal Right To Recover Fugitive Slaves: An Absolute But Self-Defeating Property Right, Jeffrey M. Schmitt

School of Law Faculty Publications

A key insight of modern property scholarship is that property rights are limited by the rights of others. In the antebellum era, slave owners’ property rights in fugitive slaves who escaped into the North existed in tension with the rights of free blacks who might be wrongfully claimed. At first, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, as supplemented by the law in most Northern states, limited a slave owner’s property rights by providing limited legal protections to free blacks against being erroneously claimed as slaves. As attitudes towards slavery changed, however, state laws in the North became increasingly protective of …

Impact And Management Of The Mexican Rice Borer (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) In Bioenergy Crop Agroecosystems, Matthew Travis Vanweelden

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Mexican rice borer, Eoreuma loftini (Dyar) (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) is an invasive stem borer pest of sugarcane, rice, corn, and sorghum, and poses a threat to the production of dedicated bioenergy feedstocks in the U. S. Gulf Coast region. Studies were conducted to assess insect-plant interactions between E. loftini and bioenergy and conventional cultivars of sugarcane and sorghum, including yield response, oviposition preference, and host suitability. In addition, the efficacy of select cultural and biological control tactics to manage E. loftini in these crops was assessed. Bioenergy sugarcane (energycane) and sweet sorghum exhibited reduced E. loftini injury; however, these crops …

Dwelling Poetically, Proceeding Orphically: The Platonic Tradition And The Heideggerian Humanism Of Ernesto Grassi, Geoffrey Alexander Leeves Bain

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Martin Heidegger exerted an immense influence over twentieth century thought by providing profound insights into the nature of Being as well as scathing social critiques, focused on the destructive force of late modern technological reductionism. As part of Heidegger’s project, he elaborated upon a sophisticated history of Being in which two great monsters of Platonism and Humanism are cast as Antichrist and False Prophet. Subsequently, however, his own student Ernesto Grassi argued that Renaissance Humanism was not a stepping stone towards subjectivism and technological thinking, but rather stood in conformity with the fundamental essence of Heidegger’s own project. This study …

Va-Et-Vient, The Goin' And Comin' Of Infinitival 'To': A Study Of Children With And Without Specific Language Impairment In Cajun English, Andrew Mandell Riviere

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine Cajun English (CE)-speaking children’s marking of infinitival TO. To do this, CE-speaking children’s marking of infinitival TO was compared to the marking of infinitival TO by Southern White English (SWE)- and African American English (AAE)-speaking children. Marking of infinitival TO also was examined as a function of the children’s clinical status (i.e., Specific Language Impairment, SLI, or typically developing, TD) and by the verb contexts that preceded the infinitival TO forms.

The data came from 180 kindergarteners who lived in four rural towns in Assumption Parish, Louisiana. The children’s dialect classifications were …

A Performer's Guide To Ivor Gurney's The Western Playland (And Of Sorrow), Ridley Chauvin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this document is to serve as a performance guide for Ivor Gurney’s song cycle, The Western Playland (and of Sorrow), a song cycle for baritone, piano and string quartet, consisting of eight songs set to the poetry of A. E. Housman. Within this performance guide an analysis of each song and poem in The Western Playland (and of Sorrow) will be explored, along with performance recommendations for each of the eight songs. Given that there were relatively few composers writing works for string quartet, piano and solo voice during the years Ivor Gurney was composing, the author …

"Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction In Victorian Literature And Culture, Mary Timothy Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Examining a broad range of texts,“‘Superbly Sterile:’ Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture,” argues that Thomas Hardy’s final naturalist novels, popular nineteenth-century vampire narratives, and the fiction of Oscar Wilde queered the bildungsroman (or novel of development) through characters who failed or refused to progress along sexual and maturational timelines. Where these texts’ critics have tended to read them as cautionary tales about homosexuality or predatory female sexuality, this dissertation contends that they also presented alternate forms of kinship and reproduction. They do so through the use of recursive, inverted, or otherwise backward relationships to time. Where Victorian sexology …

A Performer's Guide To Richard Danielpour's A Woman's Life, Carline Waugh

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This document serves as a guide to the song cycle A Woman’s Life composed by Richard Danielpour in 2007. The document presents relevant biographical information on the composer and a discussion on his influences and style. Each movement of the cycle has been selected by Dr. Maya Angelou from her poetry collections and collectively forms the narrative of A Woman’s Life. A brief discussion is presented on the life and some of the works of Angelou. Readers of this document will gain further insight into the life of soprano Angela Brown, for whom the cycle was composed. A discussion on …

Empire Of Faith: Toleration, Confessionalism And The Politics Of Religious Pluralism In The Habsburg Empire, 1792-1867, Scott Michael Berg

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The issues of religious toleration and confessionalism are complex, with deep roots and unresolved, enduring legacies. This project takes a look on one sustained attempt to tackle this problem by looking at the Habsburg Empire after the death of Joseph II (r. 1780-1790), whose far-reaching reforms established extensive state control over the Catholic Church and introduced toleration for Protestants, Orthodox Christians and, in a more limited way, to Jews. Yet ultimately, religious toleration was one of the many factors that caused Joseph’s reign to end in failure. In addition, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars created conditions that promoted confessionalism, …

Metamorphoses Of The Pygmalion Myth In French Literature 1771 – 1886, Carrie L. O'Connor

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Writers have long explored and attempted to portray the visual artist’s challenge of creating the ideal in the real world through art. My thesis asserts that the Pygmalion myth, originally told in written form in Ovid’s 8 A.D. Metamorphoses, is the quintessential model to explore the changing, and sometimes problematic, relationships between the artist, the creation, and the creative process. The three main characters in the Pygmalion myth – the sculptor, the sculpture, and the divine intervention – each appear, albeit in different manifestations, in its later adaptations. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in French literature, authors explored …

Regulatory Impacts Of Assembled Pol Iii Complexes On Neighboring Pol Ii Transcribed Genes In Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, Qing Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

RNA polymerase III (Pol III) transcribes tRNAs as well as other small non-coding RNAs. tRNA genes contain internal promoter sequences (A- and B-boxes) which can be specifically recognized and bound by TFIIIC. Binding of TFIIIC facilitates TFIIIB recruitment, which in turn targets Pol III to be recruited and initiate transcription. In addition to typical tRNA genes, there are other chromosomal regions, referred as extra-TFIIIC (ETC) sites, that are only bound by TFIIIC. Apart from transcription of genes, both complete and partially assembled Pol III complexes perform extra-transcriptional functions such as influencing nearby Pol II transcription, displacement of nearby nucleosomes, as …

Articulating Situated Knowledge And Standpoints In Our Responses To Contemporary Street Fiction: A Book Club Case Study With African American Women, Yvette Rachele Hyde

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary street fiction is a form of literature that has been growing in popularity since the 1990s. Such novels are set in contemporary urban contexts and present the experiences of historically oppressed groups. Sold in venues such as independent bookstores, the Internet, barbershops, beauty salons, flea markets, street vendors, and churches (Hill, Pérez, & Irby, 2008; McClellan, 2011), this genre is especially popular among African American females. Because much of the scholarship concerning engagement with contemporary street fiction focuses on improving school literacy skills, the purpose of this study was to investigate readers’ responses in a book club held at …

An Exploration Of How Closely Upper Elementary Magnet School Reading Teachers' Perceptions Of Evidence-Based Practices In Reading Compared To Actual Practices In Their Classrooms, Rhonda Ann Cross

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore how closely upper elementary magnet school reading teachers’ perceptions of evidenced-based practices in reading compared to actual practices in their classrooms. Literacy instruction, beginning in the third grade, places more emphasis on comprehension and higher expectations on the students than in the early elementary grades. There has been little research conducted on how teacher beliefs about reading and their actual instructional practices affect reading scores on national tests. Perhaps in the understanding of teachers’ beliefs about evidenced-based practices and the actual instructional practices used in the classroom can help in the development …

An Afro-Brazilian Landscape: African Oil Palms And Socioecological Change In Bahia, Brazil, Case Watkins

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Palm oil extracted from the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) is the world’s most produced vegetable oil, commanding a roughly 50 billion dollar global industry. In contrast to the agroindustrial firms and monocultures that dominate global production, a biodiverse cultural landscape of African oil palms in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia has for centuries supplied local alimentary and spiritual demands for palm oil—an essential resource in Afro-Brazilian cultures. Drawing on fieldwork, ethnography, archives, GIScience, quantitative analysis, and travelers’, rare, and secondary accounts, this dissertation provides the first comprehensive study of Bahia’s palm oil landscapes, cultures, and economies. Analyzing …

Undergraduate Student Catalog 2015-2016, Nova Southeastern University

Undergraduate Programs Course Catalogs

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