Digital Commons Network^™

Lender Discrimination, Black Churches And Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Based on my original empirical research, in this Article, I expose a disparity between the demographics of the roughly 650 religious congregations that have filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy during part of the last decade and congregations nationwide. Churches with predominately black membership — Black Churches — appeared in chapter 11 more than three times as often as they appear among churches across the country. A conservative estimate of the percentage of Black Churches among religious congregation chapter 11 debtors is 60%. The likely percentage is upward of 75%. Black Churches account for 21% of congregations nationwide.

Why are Black …

Understanding How Incoming First Year College Students Develop Academic Performance Expectations: A Qualitative Case Study, Christina Marie Coovert

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research study was to explore how incoming first year students develop their academic performance expectations, differences between students in the development of academic performance expectations, and lastly the role of the university has in communicating expectations to students. The researcher utilized case study research to examine various perspectives related to the development of academic performance expectation. Research methodology included, participant interviews, document analysis and observation. Research findings are highlighted by ten first year college students’ experiences; half of the participants were previously higher performing and the other half were previously lower performing. Performance was based on …

Maurer School Of Law Marks 175 Years Of History, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Holistic Undergraduate Growth Experience: A Case Study Exploring The Development Of A Student Success And Retention Program, Bianca Briana Teats

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This case study depicted the development and implementation of the Holistic Undergraduate Growth Experience (HUGE) student success and retention program that spans the second year of undergraduate study to graduation. This study set out to expand student development theory and practice to include an international perspective, specifically one from the Middle East. An increased amount of attention was dedicated to examining the development of the aforementioned program than to its actual implementation in order to provide a more comprehensive framework. Based on the findings associated with this study, recommendations were made not only to the host institution for the study, …

The Fooding Of Narrative In Contemporary Women's Transnational Fiction, Stacey Marie Amo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Fooding of Narrative in Contemporary Women’s Transnational Fiction examines how foodstuffs are strategically deployed in recent fiction about migration to the United States. The novels examined, all set in the period following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, depict the experience of resettlement from a diverse set of postcolonial sites: Haiti, Cuba, Vietnam, and India. The Fooding of Narrative argues that food is deployed as a structuring trope and acquires narrative significance in articulating the profound sense of identity crisis that frequently accompanies the immigration experience. By focusing on food’s narrative significance in a broad …

Calling On The Cfpb For Help: Telling Stories And Consumer Protection, Pamela Foohey

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Since it began operating in 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has handled more than a million complaints regarding consumer financial product and services. Beginning in June 2015, the CFPB began publishing consumers’ narratives submitted with their complaints. This Article analyses a random sample of 5,000 of these narratives to assess how people engage with the complaint mechanism in light of the CFPB’s role in processing complaints. I find that people predominately use the complaint function for two distinct purposes: to express their anger and frustration about companies’ practices, or to express sadness and fear about how companies’ practices …

Consumer Acceptance Of Licensed Brand Extensions: An Analysis Of Key Success Factors For Extending Into Fashion Categories, Langchao Zhang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Brand extension and lifestyle branding have been the most commonly used marketing strategies. Unlike other consumer goods, fashion products, or other lifestyle products contains strong meaning of the user’s identity, thus, once done well, the parent non-fashion brands could benefit from not only the profit generated by the extension, but also creating a closer and stronger relationship with customers. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to examine how fashion product attributes affect consumers’ behavioral intention towards the fashion extension, to examine how perceived fit and brand extension authenticity affect consumers behavioral intention towards the fashion extensions, to explore the …

Motivation For Tobacco Cessation Among Nicotine Dependent Postmenopausal Females, Mackenzie Rae Peltier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Postmenopausal females continue to smoke despite considerable health risks related to low levels of estrogen in combination with antiestrogenic effects of nicotine. These females face barriers to cessation that are more severe than their male and pre-menopausal counterparts. These barriers include negative affect, weight concerns, and menopausal symptom severity. Brief motivation-based interventions (B-MIs) that incorporate individualized health-related feedback have demonstrated efficacy for smoking cessation, but have not been tested among postmenopausal females. The current study explored the effect of negative affect, weight concerns, and menopausal symptom severity on motivation and readiness to quit smoking, and the effectiveness of a B-MI …

Human-Centered Civil Justice Design, Victor D. Quintanilla

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article introduces a novel approach to improving the civil justice system, referred to as human-centered civil justice design. The approach synthesizes insights and practices from two interdisciplinary strands: human-centered design thinking and dispute system design. The approach is rooted in human experiences with the processes, systems, people, and environments that members of the public encounter when navigating the civil justice system and how these experiences interact with the entangled web of hardships and legal adversities they face in the everyday.

Human-centered civil justice designers empathize with the intended beneficiaries and stakeholders of the civil justice system, seeking to deeply …

An Examination Of The Impact Of Venture Philanthropy On The Mission Of Higher Education, Shon Baker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Across the United States, state legislative funding declines are forcing colleges and universities to rapidly adjust to a variety of shortfalls in revenue. Even the most prosperous universities, normally immune to decreases in funding, find themselves experiencing financial difficulty. To offset fiscal gaps caused by budget shortfalls and legislative decisions, university presidents are increasingly turning to fundraising as a means of filling the financial void and no donors are more poised to give transformational gifts than venture philanthropists. While the donations of venture philanthropists are highly sought, little research has been given to the potential for threats to academic freedom …

The Enduring Integration School Desegregation Helped To Produce, Kevin D. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Rescuing Relationships: Toward An Understanding Of Exchange Relationship Disruption And Recovery, Matthew Mark Lastner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Research investigating business-to-business (B2B) exchange supports the position that cultivating strong exchange relationships is vital to the long-term success of both parties involved in an exchange. However, while much is known about how exchange relationships are developed and organized to yield maximum benefits for buyers and sellers, very little research has been advanced to understand how B2B exchanges experience disruptive events and what impact disruptions have on the long-term health of these relationships. Across three essays, this dissertation utilizes a multi-method approach to examine the nature and impact of disruptive events on inter-firm exchange relationships to address this shortcoming in …

Talent Systems For Law Firms, William D. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

irtually every large US law firm owes its rise and success to a talent system it adopted several decades ago. These talent systems were effective because they created highly skilled business lawyers in a way that aligned the interests of partners, associates, and clients. The most prominent example is the Cravath System, though other business lawyers throughout the US were making similar discoveries at roughly the same time. The tremendous forward momentum of these first-generation talent systems has created the problem of ahistorical partners — owners who collect the late-stage benefits of a talent system approach without understanding its original …

A Mixed Methods Analysis Of School- And Student-Level Effects: Mathematics Course Completion And Achievement Beyond Algebra 2 Among Mexican American Female High School Students, Lester Archer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the United States, as the Hispanic population continues to grow, persistently low mathematics achievement among Mexican Americans continues to exist, particularly among girls. Low mathematics achievement places this group in a disadvantaged position. As such, a multistage mixed method study was implemented to investigate possible factors associated with mathematics achievement and the probability of taking mathematics courses beyond Algebra 2 among Mexican American female high school students. The Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS:2002) database provided the quantitative sample (n = 710) of respondents who self-identified as Mexican American, female, and had a math IRT score. A parallel sample (n = …

Examining The Impact Of Participating In A Nutrition-Education And Culinary Skills-Building Program On Intrinsic Motivation To Prepare Healthy Foods And Diet Quality In High School Adolescents, Derek Charles Miketinas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of these studies was to develop a questionnaire that could measure the psychosocial constructs identified by the Self Determination Theory (SDT) as they relate to adolescents’ food preparation attitudes and their learning environment. The questionnaire included items that measured intrinsic motivation (IM), perceived competence (PC), relatedness, autonomy, and autonomy support. These studies explored the questionnaire’s validity, reliability, and ability to measure construct changes. The Adolescent Motivation to Cook Questionnaire (AMCQ) was developed in the first study to measure high school students’ IM and PC to prepare healthy foods, and their relatedness, autonomy and autonomy support within the classroom. …

The West As Fiction In First-Generation Arab Immigrant Literature, Rimun Murad

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The West as Fiction in First-Generation Arab Immigrant Literature investigates the resemblance between the Arab immigrant experience, in first-generation Arab immigrant literature, and the experience of fiction reading. This dissertation analyzes Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966), Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), Walid Al Hajjar’s trilogy The Search for the Self (1973, 1979, and 1984), Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999), Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago: A Novel (2007), and Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001). Drawing from genre, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, this project argues that the West, for first-generation …

A Graph-Based Taxonomic Intelligent Tutoring System Utilizingbloom’S Taxonomy And Item-Response Theoretic Assessment, Dennis Gordon Castleberry Ii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation details an intelligent tutoring system which aims to raise student trait abilities across concepts and levels of Blooms taxonomy within an educational program. The system utilizes Item Response Theory, a probabilistic theory of assessment which accounts for item discrimination, difficulty, and probability of guessing in its assessment of student trait ability. A modification to Item Response Theory which accounts for question dependencies is used to assess the probability that a student will answer a given question correctly given prior responses on the dependency questions. It also draws from theories of memory and forgetting present in the ACT-R model …

Local Embeddedness Matters: A Study Of Hip-Hop Artists' Interaction With Their Local Community, Castel Vette Sweet

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation study is an exploration of hip hop and rap artists’ embeddedness in local communities, and their interpretation of the connectedness between their work and their communities. I explore the influence of place and space in the identity development of artists, and how artist use those identities to guide their interactions with their local community. I also investigate the significance of artists’ interactions and relationship in the cultivation of social and cultural capital. In contrast to previous scholarship emphasising the negative influence rap and hip-hop artists have on their communities, I utilize in-depth interviews with artists to examine the …

Differential Effects Of Gratitude And Positive Peer Reporting Interventions On Student Subjective Wellbeing, Classroom Behavior, And School Connectedness, Rachel Marie Olinger Steeves

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Recent research and development in the ever-growing area of systems-level change in schools, including positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS), school climate, and social-emotional learning (SEL), has stressed the importance in fostering positive outcomes for students. The additional focus on encouraging and promoting positive school-based relationships and cultivating individual student strengths has shown promising outcomes, including higher academic achievement, lower levels of problem behavior, and a greater sense of belonging in schools. However, in some disadvantaged and high-needs school districts, implementing systemic approaches or obtaining the personnel to implement individualized student services can prove exceedingly difficult, namely due to limited …

Thoreau's Melancholia, Walden's Friendship, And Queer Agency, Julia Morgan Leslie

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Walden queers its readers. While many have investigated Thoreau’s queerness, there has been little notice of Walden’s queerness. This project begins with a situational analysis that identifies the melancholic antecedents of Walden in Thoreau’s life and his choices that led to the illumination of his melancholia. Thoreau had already been experimenting with what Branka Arsić identified as “literalization.” Nevertheless, a period of crisis, detailed by Robert Milder, made him aware of what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have referred to as the melancholic’s blind skill of “demetaphorization.” I suggest that Thoreau exploited this skill to produce Walden’s unique …

Predictive Analytics' Punishment Mismatch, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Terrible Telegrams, Cara Lindsay Reid

LSU Master's Theses

In compliance to the curriculum at Louisiana State University and Swine Palace’s Actor Training Program, M.F.A. Acting candidates are required to create and develop a one-person show. The objective is to foster the actor’s creative virtuosity and to give them the confidence, capability, and skill set to continue to create their own work after graduation. My play is about Lucy James, a recent college graduate, who moves to New York to follow her dreams of becoming an actress. Lucy's love for the craft is challenged when she takes a demoralizing job and her life begins to spiral out of control. …

The Ontological Nature Of Theology: On Heidegger's "Phenomenology And Theology", Casey Garrett Spinks

LSU Master's Theses

Following his newfound celebrity upon publication of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture in 1927 and 1928, titled “Phenomenology and Theology,” where he discussed how his recent groundbreaking work in existential phenomenology relates to Christian theology. Far from offering his philosophy as a method for theology, he instead attempted to utterly separate the two, setting the former as fundamental ontology and the latter as a positive science more akin to history, with the Christian faith as its positive object of study. The lecture was left unpublished until 1969, when Heidegger added an appendix, a piece exemplary of the …

Louisiana State University During World War I: A Military Tradition, Angela Michelli Fleming

LSU Master's Theses

When the United States first joined World War I it had long been without a large standing army, it soon became apparent that there was a need for soldiers and training facilities. To solve this problem, the United States utilized colleges and universities as training camps. Because of its strong military tradition, Louisiana State University (LSU) was mobilized for this purpose. Although this mobilization was a serious turning point in the school’s development, not many scholars have written histories of the changes during this time. LSU began as the Seminary of Learning of the State of Louisiana in 1860, but …

Charting A Path: How A Group Of Urban Elementary Music Teachers Understand Their Career Decisions, Joseph J. Casselberry

LSU Master's Theses

This qualitative study was an investigation of the career journeys of two elementary music teachers employed in a large urban district. The study also examined the job changing experiences of eight other elementary music teachers in the same district. Perceived employment considerations (factors that are weighed when considering working at one school over another), and the detailed employment experiences of two of these teachers, were explored in order to better understand teacher mobility and attrition. An open ended electronic questionnaire was sent to all 28 elementary music teachers employed by the district. Two teachers were later purposefully sampled from the …

Physiological And Psychological Well-Being During The Spring Season In Female Soccer Players, Adam Conrad Lowe

LSU Master's Theses

Female student-athletes are an understudied population that are exposed to athletic stressors in addition to academic and social stressors. This study is designed to investigate the physiological and psychological well-being during the spring season in female Division I soccer players. During the 2017 spring season, participants competed in five matches over five weeks and participated in three to four soccer training sessions in between match days. To measure well-being, both objective and subjective measures were used. Activation state was collected via the Activation Deactivation Adjective Checklist (AD-ACL) before all matches. Heart rate and heart rate variability were measured during all …

In-Group Effects Of News Use On African Americans, Folasade A'Lyce Adesanya

LSU Master's Theses

The topic of this thesis is how frequent news exposure affects the Black community’s perceptions of the world and trust in institutions. The purpose of this thesis is to uncover whether African Americans with more news exposure are more likely to view the world with skepticism and fear when compared to those with less news exposure. My hypotheses predicted that African Americans who have had frequent exposure to news will perceive the world as a meaner and scarier place (H1), will exhibit less trust in police officers (H2), and will exhibit less trust in news media (H3) than those who …

Unlikely Allies: A Case Study On Cross Class Protest In Guatemala, Daniel B. Bollich

LSU Master's Theses

Cross-class mobilization in developing countries can be a powerful force for precipitating political change, but the literature on cross-class protest movements in developing countries has focused almost exclusively on democratization movements and has not dealt adequately with cross-class protest in other contexts. Additionally, the literature on protest movements typically focuses on the lower classes, while the upper classes are either ignored or assumed to be one-dimensional, uniform, self-interested actors who only protest when it is in their own best economic and political interest. These deficiencies in the literature have been illuminated by the massive protests that occurred in Guatemala in …

Sociodemographic, Health, Health-Related, Health Risk, Psychosocial, And Treatment-Related Characteristics Associated With Retention Among Community Mental Health Clients In An Integrated Health Program, Katherine Anne Thomas

LSU Master's Theses

Individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) have higher rates cardiometabolic conditions than the general population, which put them at increased risk for early mortality. Treatment retention is especially important as it may prevent worsening of mental and physical health symptoms and lower such risks. Models of integrated primary and behavioral health care (PBHC) are promising for treating co-morbid mental and physical health conditions common to individuals with SMI. Previous research identified that individuals with SMI drop out of care at higher rates than other individuals with mental illness. Past studies on treatment retention with this population have been qualitative and …

Gender Beyond Birth: Gender Non-Conforming Students Lived Experiences Residing On-Campus In The Southeast, Tiffany Marlene Shierling

LSU Master's Theses

In this study, using a qualitative approach, gender non-conforming students lived experience living on campus in the south is being investigated. “Trans* students remain largely invisible through college records as no data is collected consistently on their enrollment” (Nicolazzo, 2016 p. 539). Although this is true of all gender non-conforming students, it is even more relevant to those that attend universities in the Southeast. Gender non-conforming students are attending universities in higher numbers than every reported before and yet, student affairs still does not have a theory that relates to these students when teaching their graduate students. The psychological literature …