Digital Commons Network^™

Epiphany Through Chaos, Sibel Borquez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This essay examines how each individual in a family going through a divorce is fighting through their own chaos and storms of the process. Psychological examinations, statistics, cases and personal experience are used as examples to demonstrate how these struggles help create and shape the children in the family and their identity; as well as the parents.

Who Is Really Behind The Username? (Re)Affirming Oneself In The Digital Age, Taylor Dixon

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

I am going to study authenticity and see the fluidity of the word over the passing decades and see if the meaning has changed due to societal changes. I am then going to study the digital age and show the progression of the internet. Starting from when at home computers were created to present day. After researching those topics I’m going to see if social media users are about to be authentic and true to their identities while using these online platforms. I want to look at case studies that represent authentic identities as well as inauthentic identities.

Effects Of Classroom Relationships Between Students And Teachers On Emotional Development Of Elementary School Students, Hannah R. Allen

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Today, the current education system does not foster the emotional development of elementary school students. As a consequence, this affects student’s emotional development. Through the use of literature review, interview of a teacher, anonymous survey with five teachers and twenty-six elementary school students, this senior capstone research examines the effects of classroom relationships between students and teachers on the emotional development of elementary school students. The results indicate that classroom relationship does in fact foster the development of student emotional skills.

Beyond Financial Need: Predictors Of Student Loans And Student Loan Attitudes, Jill M. Norvilitis, Meghan J. Batt

Journal of Student Financial Aid

Although public concern about student loan debt has been increasing, little research has examined predictors of debt beyond financial need or demographic factors. The present study explored the role of several psychological and attitudinal variables in student loan debt among 189 college students. Results indicate that loan initiative and loan resignation attitudes predicted level of student loan debt. In addition, locus of control, delay of gratification, and social comparison are also related to loans and loan attitudes. Parental instruction marginally predicted loan attitudes, but not loan totals. Overall, these results suggest the need to consider non-need based factors when counseling …

Which U.S. Households Use Education Loans?, Chungwen Hsu, Patti J. Fisher

Journal of Student Financial Aid

This empirical study uses the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to investigate the characteristics of households that hold at least one loan for educational expenses. The benefit of using household-level data is that a single household may have education loans for multiple people in the household, including the household head, spouse/partner, and children. In studies of the education loan debt of individuals, the true effect on households may be overlooked. The present results show that the respondent’s age, respondent’s marital status, having at least one dependent child under the age of 18, net worth, home ownership, stock ownership, being …

Time, Death, And Retribution, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

The heart of a Lackey claim is that when a death row inmate is kept waiting too long for his execution, this delay can amount to cruel and unusual punishment — either because they delay is itself cruel and unusual, or because the execution on top of the delay is. All Lackey claims brought by death row inmates have failed, but not for want of trying. The usual complaint against Lackey claims is that those who, by their own appeals, delay their execution date cannot turn around and use that delay as an argument against their death sentences. I agree …

Hands, And Numbers, And Dots Oh My! Examining The Effect Of Nearby-Hands On Counting And Subitizing, Gabriel Allred

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The “nearby-hand” effect (Tseng, Bridgeman, & Juan 2012), an alteration of performance caused by the presence of our hands in the visuospatial area, has been found in learning, attention, and working memory tasks (Brockmole, Davoli, Abrams, & Witt, 2013a). However, no work to date has been published demonstrating a relationship between the nearby-hand effect and judgments of magnitude, including subitizing and counting. It is suggested by Tseng, Bridgeman, and Juan (2012) that nearby-hands affect attentional disengagement, yet little experimental evidence is available to support this notion. Given the serialized nature of counting, which requires attentional disengagement from item to item …

Nursing Students’ Nonacademic Barriers To Success On High Stakes Exams, Jennifer Bussen Bussen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Every nursing program wants its graduates to pass the NCLEX-RN licensure examination the first time they take it. For those who fail, entry into practice is delayed until they can pass the NCLEX-RN. The nursing programs that graduated students who fail may experience a loss of reputation, decreased numbers of potential applicants, and, ultimately, state board of nursing sanctions. In an effort to determine which students are likely to be successful in taking the NCLEX-RN, many programs have turned to end-of-program predictor exams such as the Health Education System Inc. (HESI) exit examination (E2) (Lauer & Yoho, 2013; Nibert & …

School Connectedness: Comparing Students With Emotional And Behavioral Disorders To Their General Education Peers, Robert Jordon Marsh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

School connectedness is the extent to which a student feels that adults and peers on their school campus care about their behavioral and academic success as well as their overall wellbeing. School connectedness is comprised of four factors: (a) bonding, (b) attachment, (c) engagement, and (d) climate. Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) may experience difficulty with developing high levels of school connectedness, which may lead to engagement in health-risk behaviors.

The purpose of this study was to determine the levels of school connectedness of students with EBD and compare them to the levels of their general education peers. …

Behavioral Reactions To Emotional And Physical Infidelity: An Evolutionary Perspective, Mandy Walsh Walsh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis examined the effects of sex and type of partner infidelity, including both physical (i.e., sexually involved with another person) and emotional (i.e., emotionally involved with another person) infidelity, on mate abandonment behaviors. Previous research has demonstrated sex differences in emotional responses to infidelity, where men react more negatively to physical infidelity and women react more negatively to emotional infidelity. While various studies have investigated perceived behavioral reactions using imagined scenarios, this study expands current research by utilizing actual retrospective reports. It was hypothesized that males would engage in significantly more mate abandonment behaviors after experiencing a physical infidelity, …

Firearm Injury Prevention In Clinical Practice: Staying On Message., M Denise Dowd

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

No abstract provided.

I Matter, As Does The World: Critical Consciousness In Higher Education, Myra Dutko

Dissertations

This dissertation describes how graduate students in a community organizing class move along the critical consciousness pathway. Critical consciousness in the academic arena is critical to the development of democratic participation and agency in students. Critical consciousness is the ability to see, judge and act on issues of injustice in order to create social change. In addition, this research examines what barriers arise in that process. Research participants from an urban, private university in the Midwest narrate the creation of a learning environment and the process of moving towards critical consciousness awakening through journaling and focus group discussions. The data, …

Minority Middle And High School Students' Interest In Science: An Exploration Of Teachers' Perceptions, Caroline Makere

Dissertations

A high school teacher conducted a study about minority middle and high school students’ interest in science. The problem was to find out why African American and Hispanic students were showing very little interest in science. The researcher used four middle school science teachers and nine high school science teachers, all from inner city schools in a big city of the Midwest United States except for one middle school teacher from a nearby suburb. The participants answered a survey questionnaire followed with a face-to-face recorded interview. The findings of the study confirmed that students showed little interest in science due …

An Exploration Of Student Views On Grading And Learning In An Alternative School Setting, Lisa Heipp

Dissertations

Reducing barriers to learning is vital. High school teachers focus tirelessly on how best to engage students in learning; however, grading, which is a fundamental aspect of a teacher’s responsibilities, may be a significant barrier to learning. This dissertation examines students’ views on grading and learning in an alternative high school setting. The twelve students who are the focus of this research have experienced traditional school settings and an alternative charter school setting, thus they offer a perspective on grading and learning that is more widely informed than the majority of students in schools. This study is motivated by three …

Directly Comparing Handoff Protocols For Pediatric Hospitalists., Elizabeth H. Lazzara, Robert Riss, Brady Patzer, Dustin C. Smith, Y Raymond Chan, Joseph R. Keebler, Sarah D. Fouquet, Evan M. Palmer

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Handoff protocols are often developed by brainstorming and consensus, and few are directly compared. We hypothesized that a handoff protocol (Flex 11) developed using a rigorous methodology would be more favorable in terms of clinicians' attitudes, behaviors, cognitions, or time-on-task when performing handoffs compared with a prevalent protocol (Situation Background Assessment Recommendation [SBAR]).

METHODS: Using a between-groups, randomized control trial design (Flex 11 versus SBAR) during a pilot study in a simulated environment, 20 clinicians (13 attending physicians and 7 residents) received 3 patient handoffs from a standardized physician, managed the patients, and handed off the patients …

The Weapon Focus Effect: Testing An Extension Of The Unusualness Hypothesis, Curt A. Carlson, William E. Pleasant, Dawn R. Weatherford, Maria A. Carlson, Jane E. Bednarz E. Bednarz

Psychology Faculty Publications (Archived)

The weapon focus effect (WFE) occurs when a weapon distracts eyewitnesses, harming memory for the perpetrator and other details. One explanation is that weapons are unusual in most contexts, and unusual objects distract eyewitnesses. We extended this unusualness hypothesis to include typical objects used in a distinctive manner, as criminals often make use of a typical object as a weapon (e.g., tire iron, beer bottle). Undergraduates (N = 963) viewed a video depicting a man with a handgun, distinctive object, typical object and action, or typical object used as a weapon. Only the handgun reduced eyewitness identification accuracy relative to …

Use Of The Mmpi-2 Masculine-Feminine Pathology Scale In Determining Gender-Related Symptom Expressions Among Outpatients, Priyanka M. Parikh

Theses and Dissertations

Gender exerts a strong influence over psychopathology experience and expression. The Masculine-Feminine Pathology (Mfp) scale is a recently developed research scale for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Second Edition (MMPI-2), intended to reflect gender-influenced psychopathological symptoms. The current study was designed to examine whether Mfp scores serve as a useful moderator in the interpretation of MMPI-2 scores in terms of identifying gender-related symptom expression in an outpatient adult psychiatric sample. The sample consisted of 186 participants who had undergone outpatient psychotherapy. MMPI-2 scales include selected clinical scales, Restructured Clinical (RC) scales, content scales, supplementary scales, and Personality Psychopathology-Five (PSY-5) scales …

Design And Development Of A Physiological Stress Monitoring/Alert System Using A Wristband, Ritesh Varma Pathapati Thyagaraju

Theses and Dissertations

The design and development of wearable physiological systems for stress monitoring have gathered a lot of attention during the past few years. These systems have undergone much-needed development to tackle long-term effects such as a headache, depression, insomnia, high blood pressure, confusion, inability to make correct choices, etc. Accurately measuring physiological signals that are helpful to detect stress in its early stages using wearable technology have long been a goal in the healthcare industry. Current commercial products such as Fitbit and Empatica only monitor either the heart rate (Fitbit) or electrodermal activity in real time (Empatica) but these devices have …

Soteria: A Persuasive Esecurity Assistant, Punica Bhardwaj

Theses and Dissertations

“…security is only as good as the weakest link, and people are the weakest link in the chain.” – B Schneier, 2002 Humans are often referred to as the “weakest link” in the security chain because of the poor security decisions taken by them. There can be many reasons for these decisions, such as lack of understandability of the software, lack of education, and lack of relevant information required to do that particular action. In this Thesis, we focus on the lack of relevant information required at the time of performing the action. In order to provide the user with …

A System For Detecting Malicious Insider Data Theft In Iaas Cloud Environments, Jason Nikolai, Yong Wang

Research & Publications

The Cloud Security Alliance lists data theft and insider attacks as critical threats to cloud security. Our work puts forth an approach using a train, monitor, detect pattern which leverages a stateful rule based k-nearest neighbors anomaly detection technique and system state data to detect inside attacker data theft on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) nodes. We posit, instantiate, and demonstrate our approach using the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure where we observe a 100 percent detection rate for abnormal login events and data copies to outside systems.

An Examination Of How Ratings Of Airlines Are Effected By Different Types Of Information: A Mediation Analysis, Abdullah Selim Ozyurek

Theses and Dissertations

Many dynamics directly or indirectly influence the decision-making process. An individual’s demographic features, such as gender, country of origin, and emotions are some of the dynamics. In the aviation domain, air passengers purchase their air travel tickets under those dynamics. The purpose of this study was to determine if the airline type, gender of participants, and participants’ country of origin had an effect on ratings of an individual’s perception of safety and willingness to fly, and which emotions had a mediating effect on this relationship. The study included Lufthansa Airlines and Turkish Airlines from Europe. The affect was the participants’ …

Consumer Likelihood To Complain In The U.S. Commercial Airline Industry, Xinpei Lu

Theses and Dissertations

Consumer emotions play an important role in the marketplace nowadays, which can either directly or indirectly affect the marketing outcomes. Consumer complaints are believed to occur if consumers begin to generate negative emotions due to an unfavorable service experience. However, there are also existing controversies. Moreover, males and females tended to show different attitudes towards complaining in different situations. There is a great significance of doing the research of consumer complaints in commercial airline industry because a majority of the predominant research concentrates on the consumer complaint behaviors in market places such as restaurant, hospital, hotel, and shopping mall. The …

An Examination Of The 16pf Validity Scales As Predictors Of The Scale Of Accurate Personality Prediction (Sapp), Katherine E. Schmieder

Theses and Dissertations

The Scale of Accurate Personality Prediction (SAPP) was derived from the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16-PF) as a measure of self-knowledge by comparing the degree of similarity of a participant’s predicted and obtained 16 PF results. The purpose of this study was to examine the utilization of the16PF validity scales as potential predictors of an individual’s score on the Scale of Accurate Personality Prediction (SAPP). A series of multiple regression analyses were performed on the current database of 641 respondents. Additionally, to provide additional validity, the database was split into two halves, and the multiple regression analyses were run on …

Correlates Of The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured Form (Mmpi-2-Rf) Scores For Asian Indian College Students, Saloni Taneja

Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to investigate empirical correlates of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF) for Asian Indian college students using the NEO Five Factor Inventory-3, College Maladjustment Scales and Measures of Psychosocial Development. The study utilized an Asian Indian college student sample (N=48) from a private university in Florida. Pearson Product Moment correlations were computed to establish correlates of the MMPI-2-RF scale scores. Overall, a large number of significant correlates with large effect sizes were found across the three measures. Some correlates found in the study provided an expansion for the interpretation of the MMPI-2-RF scales for Asian …

Evaluation Of User Perceived Qoe In Mobile Systems Using Social Media Analytics, Ahmed Yaseen Mjhool

Theses and Dissertations

In mobile system environments, the quality perceived by users is inconstant and reliant on many factors such as cellular network, data connection, cost, coverage area, etc. Even though Quality of Service (QoS) management is enabled in most modern telecommunication systems, it does not guarantee the actual user’s perceived Quality of Experience (QoE) level. Many cellular networks rely on engineering test research, such as drive testing or smart mobile applications, to collect the required parameters in order to provide better service quality to users. However, this approach does not always yield customer satisfaction. Hence, user opinions should be considered. These opinions …

The Effects Of Active Learning Technology On Instructors’ Practices And Students’ Engagement And Grades: A Mixed Methods Study, Jeremy C. Van Hof

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

Partly in response to university teachers’ changing pedagogies marked by flipping instruction, lecture capture technologies are evolving into active learning systems. Little published research exists on the effects of active learning technology on either teachers or students. This two-phase sequential explanatory mixed methods study details the effects that active learning systems have on instructor practices and on student grades and engagement. Phase one combined quantitative data collection with instructor interviews. Phase one findings show higher student engagement levels correlate with the use of the active learning system only in the presence of very specific, flipped classroom practices. Phase two, a …

Weighted Distance Based Discriminant Analysis: The R Package Wedibadis, Itziar Irigoien, Francesc Mestres, Concepcion Arenas

The R Journal

The WeDiBaDis package provides a user friendly environment to perform discriminant analysis (supervised classification). WeDiBaDis is an easy to use package addressed to the biological and medical communities, and in general, to researchers interested in applied studies. It can be suitable when the user is interested in the problem of constructing a discriminant rule on the basis of distances between a relatively small number of instances or units of known unbalanced-class membership measured on many (possibly thousands) features of any type. This is a current situation when analyzing genetic biomedical data. This discriminant rule can then be used both, as …

Variants Of Simple Correspondence Analysis, Rosaria Lombardo, Eric J. Beh

The R Journal

This paper presents the R package CAvariants (Lombardo and Beh, 2017). The package performs six variants of correspondence analysis on a two-way contingency table. The main function that shares the same name as the package– CAvariants– allows the user to choose (via a series of input parameters) from six different correspondence analysis procedures. These include the classical approach to (symmetrical) correspondence analysis, singly ordered correspondence analysis, doubly ordered correspondence analysis, non symmetrical correspondence analysis, singly ordered non symmetrical correspondence analysis and doubly ordered non symmetrical correspondence analysis. The code provides the flexibility for constructing either a classical correspondence plot or …

Edible Insects As A Source Of Food Allergens, Lee Palmer

Department of Food Science and Technology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Increasing global population increasingly limited by resources has spurred interest in novel food sources. Insects may be an alternative food source in the near future, but consideration of insects as a food requires scrutiny due to risk of allergens. Currently, the insect Dactylopius coccus, known as cochineal, is used to produce carmine, a natural red pigment used in food, which has caused allergic reactions. This study investigated allergens of cochineal focusing on purification from the pigment. Mass spectrometry identified a previously described major allergen of cochineal and a tropomyosin, although further work is required.

Tropomyosin is a major cross-reactive allergen …

The Artists Journey- Strolling The Edges Of The Universe, Mary P. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Space exploration has always fascinated me, and so has the idea ( so far fictional) that humankind may someday encounter extraterrestrial life. My series of paintings and prints are a visual expression of the awe and wonder I feel as I follow our species’s unending drive to expand the boundaries of its known world.

But the unknown is not just out there in interstellar space. And there are other lifeforms to encounter right here on our own planet. Another series of my paintings documents Earth’s flora. Our ties to the microorganisms, animals, and plants on our planet, and the life …