Digital Commons Network^™

Desisting In Prison: Myth And The Council For Unity Model, Kevin Moran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a qualitative examination of aspects of the desistance process among incarcerated men in both prison and jail. Data collection for this project occurred in and around the correctional version of the Council For Unity program, which is also examined in this write up. The premise of this project is that a minority of men do desist whilst incarcerated and thus the research presented here analyzes how prisoners act towards their attempts to desist from crime in terms of the meaning this process has for them, their interaction with others during this process, and the interpretative progression by …

Who Posts Selfies And Why?: Personality, Attachment Style, And Mentalization As Predictors Of Selfie Posting On Social Media, Nancy Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the phenomenon of selfie posting on social media and its relationship to narcissism, the Dark Triad, impulsivity, attachment style, rejection sensitivity, and reflective functioning. The sample was made up of 499 participants who completed an online survey consisting of personality measures and open- and closed-ended questions about selfie posting behavior. Data were analyzed using a negative binomial regression model.

Results: The study found that individuals with high levels of the Dark Triad trait of psychopathy post more selfies on social media than do individuals with low levels of the trait. The Dark Triad trait of narcissism was …

Enhancing And Evaluating Scientific Argumentation In The Inquiry-Oriented College Chemistry Classroom, Annabel D'Souza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The research presented in chapters 2, 3, and 4 in this dissertation uses a sociocultural and sociohistorical lens, particularly around power, authority of knowledge and identity formation, to investigate the complexity of engaging in, supporting, and evaluating high-quality argumentation within a college biochemistry inquiry-oriented classroom.

Argumentation skills are essential to college and career (National Research Council, 2010) and for a democratic citizenry. It is central to science teaching and learning (Osborne et al., 2004a) and can deepen content knowledge (Jiménez-Aleixandre et al., 2000; Jiménez-Aleixandre & Pereiro-Munhoz, 2002). When students have opportunities to make claims and support it with evidence and …

Vim Parat: Patterns Of Sexualized Violence, Victim-Blaming, And Sororophobia In Ovid, Melissa Marturano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues for the importance of understanding the depiction of sexualized violence and rape in the Roman poet Ovid’s extensive corpus through the modern feminist concepts of victim-blaming (blaming victims of sexual abuse for their own abuse) and sororophobia (female figures participating in misogyny). It explores sexualized violence and rape in Ovid long-form, examines the discernible patterns that emerge and the deviations from them as he depicts that violence throughout his texts, and more importantly, introduces victim-blaming and sororophobia into an analysis of these patterns. Despite the fact that previous scholars have done substantial analyses of the patterns of …

Parental Influence On Second Generation Chinese-American Youth’S Career Choice And Development, Yingli Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A large body of literature supports the claim that the role of parents in shaping Asian-American youth's career development is significant (Leong & Serafica, 1995; Leong & Hardin, 2002; Yuan, 2012; Sandhu, 2017; Qin, 2011). When considering the family impact on Asian-Americans’ vocational choices, researchers should examine the phenomena through culturally specific lens so that variables that are more cultural relevant are captured. This is a pilot study with the goal to provide a preliminary understanding of the ways in which first-generation Chinese immigrant parents influence the choice and development of a career to their second-generation young adult children. In …

The Effects Of Social Power Bases Within Varying Organizational Cultures, Ayanna Cummings

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on social power in the context of organizational culture and how this relationship impacts outcomes of follower compliance and trust. Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or a course of events (Handgraaf, et al., 2008). There are six different types of social power, including informational, referent, legitimate, coercive, rewarding, and expert (Fontaine & Beerman, 1977). Each type of social power may lead to varying psychological outcomes, such as compliance, satisfaction, and agreement. To date, the empirical literature has not fully addressed the issue of whether one type of power is more …

The Behavioral Effects Divorce Can Have On Children, Wanda M. Williams-Owens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to a statistical study (Cherlin et al. 1991) 40% of children who live in the United States will experience parental divorce before they reach the age of 18. Consequently, many children are affected by the process of divorce and its finalization. When my daughter was just nine years old, she asked incredulously why my husband and I were the only married couple in our neighborhood? After twenty-two years of marriage, I realized long-term marriages in my community are not conventional. When parents’ divorce, children often face the loss of one parent's constant presence and economic stability; as a result, …

The Racialization And Exploitation Of Foreign Workers By The Law, Seiko Ishikawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intense demand for cheap labor in the United States has resulted in a widespread effect of employing high skilled immigrants in STEM fields. Examining how companies use high-skilled visa categories to create a flexible cheaper immigrant workforce, this paper demonstrates that skilled immigrants from Asia are being exploited through neutral skills-based criteria that are de facto racially biased. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness of how, from the perspective of law and society, skills-based immigration works primarily to benefit the technological industry rather than skilled immigrants.

Trump’S “America First” Trade Policy And The Politics Of U.S. International Investment Agreements, Jesse Liss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous sociological studies on U.S. trade policy institutions concluded that “free trade” political actors had durable power to determine U.S. trade policy. This conclusion was proven wrong when the Trump administration promised “a new direction” and to implement an “America First” trade policy. My dissertation serves to explain the U.S.’ political transition away from “free trade” and towards “nationalist” trade policy. I do this by examining the politics of U.S. international investment agreements, which are central to U.S. trade policy. As case studies, I use the investment agreements from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership …

Culture And Mental Health: Considering The Role Of The Complex Cultural-History In Irish-American Population, Tiffinie Patricia Sesko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates the mental health of Irish immigrants and first generation Irish Americans. As the Irish-American population makes up such a large portion of the entire population of the United States, it is important we acknowledge its origin and take that into account where mental illness and treatment are concerned as the Irish culture has a pronounced effect on mental health. The intended audience of this review are expert and non-expert members of the clinical setting and community who may gain insight on helping a client or family member find a way to understand and express repressed feelings affectively. …

Bodies Of Knowledge: An Anatomy And Kinesiology Of The American Prison Nation, 'Human'-Making, And Twenty-First-Century Techno-Gods, Lyndsey Karr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity.

Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I …

An Experimental Investigation Of Emotional Labor Display Rules And Performance In A Human Resources Sexual Harassment Interview Simulation, Jolie M.B. Terrazas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Human Resource (HR) professionals are expected to engage in emotional labor (EL), or, management and control of their own emotions and emotional expression, during sexual harassment (SH) investigations. This EL expectation, or display rule (DR), is dynamic and complex requiring suppression of emotions and expressions of neutral empathy and is thus termed a dynamic neutral-empathic DR. Prior research shows that DRs in other occupations function as job demands that can deplete employees’ personal resources and negatively affect performance. The current study investigates the impact of the dynamic neutral-empathic DR by testing a process model that was developed via an …

Individual Levels Of Bias And Immigration Policies In The United States: A Test And Extension Of The Dual Processing Model Of Bias, Lorraine Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study was a test and extension of the Dual Process Model of bias on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the United States. The Dual Process Model predicts that people who score higher on either the Social Dominance Orientation scale or the Right Wing Authoritarian scale will hold more negative attitudes toward immigrants, particularly if immigrants are viewed as a threat. A sample of 315 participants from across the United States was recruited using Amazon’s M Turk site. This study used a combination of attitudinal measures, policy scales, and experimental vignettes. The study found that the Dual …

Parallels Of Love And Hate Defined By Attachments, Nicole Spann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The assertion, “It’s a thin line between love and hate,” is often referenced to express the relative ease of a sole emotion morphing from one extreme to next. Both love and hate generate the same physiological fluctuations which include, but are not limited to, a racing pulse, sweaty palms, releasing of hormones, and some degree of excitability. While physiologically the responses are the same, psychologically and philosophically they are considered opposites. In the sphere of psychology, it is going from what is considered normal behavior or a normal response to abnormal behavior or an abnormal response (McKay, 2016). For this …

Underrepresentation Of Women In Politics: Focus On New York City, Yuliya Szczepanski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how the factors that account for underrepresentation of women in American politics play out in New York City. Although women comprise more than a half of the country’s population, and more women than men are registered and turn out to vote, the United States is below average in terms of percentage of women politicians as compared to other countries, and keeps dropping in those ratings. Further, New York City, arguably one of the most diverse and liberal cities in the U.S., has never elected a female mayor, and, in 2017, only about a quarter of the city …

From Targets To Agents: Women's Perceptions Of Their Vulnerability And The Strategies They Use To Resist, Alexis Halkovic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Women in the U.S. are sexually victimized at high rates and are socialized to believe they are unable to defend themselves. While there is ample evidence that women can successfully fight off assailants using physical force (Clay-Warner, 2002; Ullman, 2007), women’s self-defense training initiatives are not funded by the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) or any national anti-violence organizations (Carlson, 2014). The NRA, on the other hand, tailors programs to instruct women to use guns for self-defense leaving them as the only national organization promoting women’s right to defend themselves (Carlson, 2014). This project interrogates how women think about their …

Grounding, Causation And The Unity Of Ontological Structure, Thomas Kivatinos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unity is enchanting. That is, it is an enchanting idea that although reality seems to be fragmented in various ways, this apparent fragmentation belies a fundamental unity. This dissertation is an attempt at theoretically capturing such unity via the theoretical unification of causation and grounding. And this unification supports another: the unification of reality’s causal structure and reality’s hierarchical structure.

To propose a unification of causation and grounding, I employ a common conception of grounding on which grounding is understood as a dependence relation. On this conception, if the Xs ground the Ys, then the existence of …

Music In Haredi Jewish Life: Liquid Modernity And The Negotiation Of Boundaries In Greater New York, Gordon A. Dale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I seek to understand tensions regarding boundary maintenance, music, and cultural continuity among the contemporary Haredi (“Ultra-Orthodox”) Jewish community of Greater New York in the context of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity. While Bauman suggests that modernity has melted familiar institutions and created an unstable and rapidly shifting world, I argue that for Haredim, the non-liberal religious community and its cultural productions solidify social bonds. While many Haredi Jews strive to continue the musical practices of pre-WWII Europe, some Haredi musicians push or disregard the boundaries of accepted practice by experimenting with Western popular music …

Constructing Music Of Rebellion In The Triumphant Empire: Punk Rock In The 1990s United States, David Pearson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late 1980s, the punk scene in the United States was plagued by Nazi skinheads, the macho violence of “straight-edge hardcore,” and musical stagnation. Moreover, Ronald Reagan, the symbol of all that punks detested, was no longer president, the Cold War was coming to an end, and the United States was fast becoming the world’s sole superpower. These dilemmas put punk rock’s viability as a music of rebellion against the dominant order in a state of crisis.

Emerging out of this late 1980s malaise was a new wave of (leftist) political bands that took lyrical aim at the New …

Tackling The Health Gap: The Role Of Psychosocial Processes, Nancy E. Adler, Jacinth J. X. Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In The Health Gap, Michael Marmot describes how, starting even before birth, social conditions set individuals on trajectories that eventuate in inequities in health and longevity. In addition to race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status linked to income and education plays a major role in determining health trajectories. The effects emerge not only at the very bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum, but across the whole range.1 The fact that health effects persist at levels where resources are more than adequate to fulfill material needs suggests that the health gap is not due only to material privation associated with poverty, but also …

Combining Machine-Based And Econometrics Methods For Policy Analytics Insights, Robert J. Kauffman, Kwansoo Kim, Sang-Yong Tom Lee, Ai Phuong Hoang, Jing Ren

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Computational Social Science (CSS) has become a mainstream approach in the empirical study of policy analytics issues in various domains of e-commerce research. This article is intended to represent recent advances that have been made for the discovery of new policy-related insights in business, consumer, and social settings. The approach discussed is fusion analytics, which combines machine-based methods from Computer Science (CS) and explanatory empiricism involving advanced Econometrics and Statistics. It explores several efforts to conduct research inquiry in different functional areas of Electronic Commerce and Information Systems (IS), with applications that represent different functional areas of business, as well …

Multidimensional Analysis Of The News Consumption Of Different Demographic Groups On A Nationwide Scale, Jisun. An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Examining 103,133 news articles that are the most popular for different demographic groups in Daum News (the second most popular news portal in South Korea) during the whole year of 2015, we provided multi-level analyses of gender and age differences in news consumption. We measured such differences in four different levels: (1) by actual news items, (2) by section, (3) by topic, and (4) by subtopic. We characterized the news items at the four levels by using the computational techniques, which are topic modeling and the vector representation of words and news items. We found that differences in news reading …

Legal Issues In Higher Education - Handout: Board Of Higher Education And Ma State College Association

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

No abstract provided.

Panel: Age Discrimination Issues In Higher Education - Handout: Essay On Age Discrimination In Faculty Hiring (R. Mckee)

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

No abstract provided.

Panel: Student Debt - We Pay For What We Value, Jamie Dangler, Mary Taber

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

Student Debt: Data Analysis to Inform Policy Objectives

Panel: Graduate Student Employees - Collective Bargaining After The Nlrb's Columbia University Decision (Cle) - Handout: Yale Decision Final

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

No abstract provided.

2017 Conference Program

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

This document is the program of the 44th annual conference of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.

Out Of The Box: Homegrown In Greater Lafayette [Extracts], Bridget Curry, Teresa Kennelly, Sara King, Connor D. Rose

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

Students from the Honors 299 course, “Homegrown,” researched local Hispanic culture, sound, green spaces, and coffee shops, among other areas of study, as well as the role of each in establishing a sense of place.

Out Of The Box: Researching A Divided Country, Christian Clase, Melissa Deach, Lauren Feagler, Sarah Weaver

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

A group of undergraduate students from Purdue University’s Department of Political Science and the Brian Lamb School of Communication attended the 2017 Presidential Inauguration and subsequent Women’s March on Washington to research political divisions in America. For many of the students, this was their first experience with qualitative research.

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 93, No. 4, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news. This issue contains articles:

• Alvey, Rebekah. New School Created in Ogden College – Engineering & Applied Sciences
• Kast, Monica. Balancing Act – Budget
• Waters, Adrianna. FFOYA House Receives Grant to Conduct Workshops – Domestic Violence
• Allen, Mike. International Year of Bosnia Events Continue
• DeLetter, Emily. Renters’ Rights Coalition Awarded Ally of the Year
• King, Jennifer. Editorial Cartoon re: Hard Classes
• Hormell, David. Bad Liberals
• Hovell, Nolan. The Art of Symbolism: Finding Meaning in Normality
• Dollins, Abigail. Growing Hope – Richard Grant, Farming
• Fletcher, Griffin. Global Brothers – Beta Gamma …