Digital Commons Network^™

Keynote Speech: Walking The Line: Modern Gerrymandering And Partisanship, Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos

Georgia Law Review

INTRODUCTION I am going to be discussing an ongoing project of mine that I call hyperpartisan election law. I make three main arguments in this project. The first is that almost all of election law was created during an unusually nonpartisan period in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Consistent with this period's very low level of partisanship, election law originally did not intend to, and did not actually have the effect, of addressing partisan cleavages. The second claim is that as the country's voters and politicians have become ever more partisan over the last generation, election law has adapted in …

Collective Efficacy And Police Homicides: Evidence From California In The 1990s, Jayme Reynolds

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines certain factors relating to collective efficacy; loosely defined as the strength of a community, and the effect those factors have on police homicides in the respective communities. More specifically, this study analyzes three components that contribute to collective efficacy: linguistic isolation, residential stability, and educational attainment. Data utilized in this study include U.S. Census data as well as data from a unique dataset containing California state-wide homicides during the 1990s. Using a negative binomial regression on pooled zip code data shows that, in relation to the factors mentioned above, educational attainment is the most influential characteristic analyzed …

To “Own Yourself A Little More”: Afropolitan Feminism In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, Bridget Tetteh-Batsa

Theses and Dissertations

Afropolitanism, in part, accounts for itinerant and so autonomous Africans who shape the contours of a late-modern global history. If Afropolitanism describes the work and activism of 21st century Africans in Euro-America determined to challenge western discourses that malign Africa, it is important to witness the distinctive character and voice Afropolitan women bring to that history defining exercise. Otherwise, as critics and scholars interested in what Afropolitanism brings to the work of reframing master narratives hitherto encircled for western primacy, we risk reinforcing the injustice we address.

To fill this gap in the literature, I employ Selasi’s initial conception of …

Educational Technology Integration Among Community College Instructors, Oybek Turayev

Theses and Dissertations

Over the last two decades, educational technology (ET) integration has become an increasingly important aspect of higher education, particularly with the growth of online, distance and hybrid courses and degree programs. Furthermore, accrediting agencies such as the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) are paying close attention to online and hybrid courses and degree programs, making effective use of ET even more important to colleges and universities. Even in traditional, on-campus classrooms, some instructors are not using ET effectively to augment teaching and learning.

The main purpose of this research study was to examine a holistic view of educational technology integration into …

A Mixed Method Study Of The Impact Of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, And Dual Enrollment Courses On College Transition And Success, Kazimir Bartley Gazdzik

Theses and Dissertations

In an educational environment that has limited resources, and greater pressures for increased academic standards, what is the best option to help prepare high school students for college academics? This research study: A Mixed Method Study of the Impact of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Dual Enrollment Courses on College Transition and Success attempted to investigate the impact of advanced courses on college transition.

The results of this research showed no statistical difference in academic success or transition to college between students who had taken advanced classes and those who had not. There were also no statistical differences between students …

Successful System Use: It’S Not Just Who You Are, But What You Do, James Eric Gaskin, Stephen Godfrey, Alex Vance

Faculty Publications

Information and communication technologies are so embedded in contemporary society that we have arrived at the point at which learning to use technology successfully may affect our day-to-day lives as much as learning to eat or exercising properly. However, we lack research that explains and predicts successful system use (i.e., system use that adds value to the user). We theorize that adaptive behaviors (e.g., trying new features, repurposing features) mediate the relationship between user characteristics and successful system use. To better understand successful system use, we used an online survey to study how undergraduate students enrolled in an information systems …

Representations Of Health And Wellness In Children's Literature, Emily Kate Murphy

Honors Program Theses

The term health is multifaceted. Health can refer to one’s physical, spiritual, or mental state, among other things. The goal of this study was to determine how educators can use children’s literature to support students being introduced to healthy habits regarding these aspects at a young age, through children’s literature. A content analysis was conducted over a selection of 16 children’s literature texts. It was organized by thematic categories matching the aforementioned facets of health and assessed through a Likert scale. This analysis resulted in the development of a website intended to serve as a tool for teachers to implement …

Translucent Voices: Creating Sound Pedagogy And Safe Spaces For Transgender Singers In The Choral Rehearsal, Gerald Dorsey Gurss

Theses and Dissertations

While transgender rights and issues are gaining an increasing amount of attention in both pop culture and, to some extent, in the education sector, little information is available for the choral conductor that provides pedagogical tools for transitioning voices. This document provides conductor-educators with both a brief look at the transgender experience and also tools to create safe learning environments, from gender-inclusive language to vocal exercises to encourage healthy vocal transitions in transgender singers

Twenty-first century choruses are not the first institutions in the realm of Western art music that have faced visual, aural, and enigmatic conceptualizations of gender and …

The Impact Of Collaborative Strategic Reading On Students’ Comprehension Of Secondary Social Studies Texts, Kaitlyn Mathews

Theses and Dissertations

This action research study evaluates the impact of the literacy intervention, Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), on students’ comprehension of social studies texts in secondary classrooms at a high school in East Tennessee, and their perceptions of the intervention as an activity for learning. The identified problem of practice this study sought to explore is whether explicit, collaborative literacy instruction would impact students’ comprehension of grade-level appropriate social studies texts, and to evaluate students’ responses to such literacy instruction. Pre- and post-tests assessing students’ comprehension of informational articles pertaining to eras of United States history, and semi-structured interviews with students, provided …

Everyday Occupations: Traffic, Hazards, And Mobility In The West Bank, Alice Arnold

Theses and Dissertations

Mobility in the West Bank is inherently tied to the Israeli military occupation. Each new stage of the decades old conflict comes with new implications for the way Palestinians move around the West Bank. The past years have seen a transition during which the severe mobility restrictions that constituted the closure policy of the second intifada eased and intercity travel has increased. In this study I examine day-to-day experiences of mobility in the West Bank in the post-closure period. In doing so I highlight the ways in which routine experiences of mobility, those with traffic, road hazards, and infrastructure, bring …

Building Consumer Place Loyalty And Brand Loyalty: An Assessment Of The Microbrewery Taproom Experience, Scott Taylor Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

One of the most successful industries of the last few decades in the U.S. is the craft beer industry. Past studies have suggested that the neolocalism movement, the growing desire of people to reconnect with local communities, is one of the main drivers for the success of this industry. Likewise, studies have suggested that individuals who visit microbrewery taprooms do so for various reasons. Although studies have discussed the importance of the neolocalism movement and the motivations behind visiting taprooms, it is still unclear how consumers’ perceptions of the microbrewery taproom experience influence behaviors such as attachment or loyalty.

The …

Environmental Impacts On Enterococcus In Shem Creek, South Carolina, And Characterization Of Changing Land Use, Maria Elizabeth Zubizarreta

Theses and Dissertations

Zoning and land-use practices have a direct influence on hydrologic systems and can impact water resources. Linkages between change in land uses and degradation of water quality in stream and watershed environments have been well established. Shem Creek, located in Mount Pleasant, SC, has a history of fecal indicator bacteria levels that exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s recreational water quality standards. With recent coastal population and development trends, proper management and the sustainability of beach and estuary environments are a rising public health concern. The objective of this study is to determine what climatic and water quality parameters are associated …

Reading Material: Personal Libraries And The Cultivation Of Identity In Revolutionary South Carolina, Gabriella Angeloni

Theses and Dissertations

In South Carolina, a colony known for its wealth and transatlantic connections, private libraries offer a unique lens through which to explore the culture of reading and book ownership that was an essential part of daily provincial and early national life. Largely overlooked by historians, personal libraries functioned as statements of wellrounded, often cosmopolitan identities before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. A careful reading of newspaper advertisements, probate inventories, loyalist claims, and correspondence, in conjunction with extant books, bookcases, portraiture, and spaces allows us to reconstruct the culture of reading and book-ownership that dominated Lowcountry society before 1800. Doing …

Comparison Of Sentinel-2 And Landsat 8 Oli In The Mapping Of Soil Salinity In Hyde County, North Carolina, Eleanor Davis

Theses and Dissertations

This study presents the first comparison of Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel-2A MSI imagery in identifying soil salinity using soil physiochemical, spectral, statistical, and image analysis techniques. By the end of the century, intermediate sea level rise scenarios project approximately 1.3 meters (4.2 feet) of sea level rise along the coast of the southeastern United States. One of the most vulnerable areas is Hyde County, North Carolina, where 440 square miles of agricultural lands are being salinized, endangering 4,200 people and 40 million dollars of property. To determine the best multispectral sensor to map the extent of salinization, this study …

Characterizing Health Behavior Information: Developing A Surveillance Text Mining Framework Using Twitter For Diet, Diabetes, Exercise, And Obesity, George Shaw Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies have documented the relationship that exists among diabetes, diet, exercise, and obesity. Obesity increases people’s risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Exercise and proper dieting are modifiable lifestyle behaviors that can help with reducing people’s overall weight and risk to various chronic conditions like diabetes. A national survey conducted by the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) is the annual Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS). Twitter provides researchers with a new opportunity and alternative data source to collect information regarding health behaviors using real-time data. Previous studies have demonstrated Twitter’s ability to monitor …

State Specific Poverty Thresholds Adjusted For Cost Of Living Differences, Melissa Gentry

Theses and Dissertations

While poverty is undoubtedly one of the most widely used domestic indicators of social wellbeing, its measurement has a critical shortcoming. Using national poverty thresholds ignores the potential differences in the cost of living across states. States use the national poverty threshold when conducting poverty research and assessing community demographics. Theoretically price level differences between states could mean that, if poverty thresholds were adjusted for cost-of-living by state, the adjusted poverty rate could be different than the official poverty rate Using data specific to individual states that can be found in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, geographically specific thresholds …

The Play’S The Thing: Engaging 6th Grade Social Studies Students Through Movement, Karen Clinkert Paggi

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is a description of a proposed action research study driven by a problem of practice. The problem for this action research is that the teacher-researcher’s sixth-grade social studies students lack critical thinking skills. Critical thinkers are engaged and learners who analyze complex issues and challenges within society. The teacherresearcher observed her students performing well on standardized benchmarks that rely on recalling facts, while simultaneously struggling to analyze explicit and implicit information from primary and secondary sources in order to make relevant and logical conclusions. After observing sedentary teaching practices in her classroom, the teacherresearcher began to review a …

Investigating Drug-Related Violence In Indian Country: The Lumbee Tribe Of North Carolina, Asa Alena Revels

Theses and Dissertations

Drug-related violence (DRV) impacts the over-all wellbeing of communities, with disparate health outcomes observable in many poor, minority communities. The purpose of this study was to better understand the multi-level social and environmental factors influencing elevated rates and prevention of DRV within the Lumbee, a southeastern American Indian Tribe. This was accomplished via in-depth, one-on-one interviews with 37 Lumbee Tribal Members and Key Leaders. The findings align with existing research, revealing the influence of such factors as poor socioeconomic conditions, coping strategies, broken family structures, and the influence of federal policy. Of interest was the substantial influence of the local …

The Importance Of Person And Place In Predicting Prostate Cancer Incidence And Mortality Among United States Veterans Seeking Veterans Health Administration Care, Peter Georgantopoulos

Theses and Dissertations

T Introduction: There are several unique characteristics in the epidemiology of prostate cancer (PrCA) that make it an interesting and important cancer to study. The first is that while prostate cancer is the most common cancer that men develop, it is one of the least common cancers that men die from. This indolent nature of PrCA has led to the idiom among health scientists that “men are more likely to die with PrCA than due to PrCA”. Just like other cancers, several individual-level risk factors (e.g., family history of the disease, age, and race) are well established for both PrCA …

An Analysis Of Perceptions Of Restaurant Authenticity At Food Tourism Destinations In The Southeastern U.S, Jamie A. Levitt

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to develop a comprehensive scale, containing multiple restaurant attributes and authenticity conceptualizations, to measure restaurant authenticity; to test a model examining the mediators and outcomes of restaurant authenticity at independent, full service Southern-style restaurants at food tourism destinations in the Southeastern U.S.; and to determine if the influences of restaurant authenticity differ between food tourists, general tourists, and locals.

A four-step approach adapted from Netemeyer et al. (2003) was used to develop the restaurant authenticity scale (RAS). Ultimately, the RAS contained six authenticity conceptualizations, 20 items and three dimensions: restaurant heritage and environment, food …

Multi-Scale Flow Mapping And Spatiotemporal Analysis Of Origin-Destination Mobility Data, Xi Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

Data on spatial mobility have become increasingly available with the wide use of location-aware technologies such as GPS and smart phones. The analysis of movements is involved in a wide range of domains such as demography, migration, public health, urban study, transportation and biology.

A movement data set consists of a set of moving objects, each having a sequence of sampled locations as the object moves across space. The locations (points) in different trajectories are usually sampled independently and trajectory data can become very big such as billions of geotagged tweets, mobile phone records, floating vehicles, millions of migrants, etc. …

Sir Walter Scott And Lady Anne Lindsay: New Light On Their Relationship, Sarah Flatt

Theses and Dissertations

While Sir Walter Scott is best known for his Waverly novels and Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, he also played an important role in helping lesser known writers publish their work. In particular, he was known for helping women writers. Scott’s relationship with Lady Anne Lindsay (later Barnard), however, is especially interesting. Lindsay is best known for her poem, “Auld Robin Gray.” There is far more to Sir Walter Scott’s relationship with Lady Anne Lindsay than first meets the eye. The two knew of each other through family and social connections, but they never met in person. They did, however, …

Catchment Hydrology In The Anthropocene: Impacts Of Land-Use And Climate Change On Stormwater Runoff, Chen-Ling Jenny Hung

Theses and Dissertations

Urbanization and climate change are associated with extreme changes to hydrologic processes that alter the amount and timing of runoff delivery in the Anthropocene. This dissertation research examined the degree of urbanization, climate change, and hydrologic responses in Rocky Branch Watershed (RBW), a small, highly urbanized catchment with dense vegetation canopy in Columbia, South Carolina. This dissertation is composed of three parts: (1) an automated algorithm for mapping building impervious areas (BIA) from remote sensing data for estimating percent impervious area (PIA), (2) a paired watershed study contrasting a forested with an urban watershed, and (3) a hydrologic simulation model …

A Divisive Community: Race, Nation, And Loyalty In Santo Domingo, 1822 – 1844, Antony Wayne Keane-Dawes

Theses and Dissertations

On 8 February 1822, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer entered Santo Domingo and ended the short-lived experiment of a moderate republic and the triumph of a popular and radical vision of nationhood. For the next two decades, this unified Haitian Republic faced the scrutiny of Spanish, French, and British slave empires, fueled by the accounts and reports of those Dominicans who rejected this change in events. Using government correspondences, reports, pamphlets, and proclamations, this study argues that the Haitian Unification affected Dominican political allegiances and drove white elites to support Spanish monarchy in contrast to those in Santo Domingo who supported …

“Catering To The Local Trade”: Jewish-Owned Grocery Stores In Columbia, South Carolina, Olivia Brown

Theses and Dissertations

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe fled persecution, anti-Semitism, and violence in search of the “American dream.” Both the Rivkin family and the Kligman/Baker family found their way to Columbia, South Carolina, rather than staying in urban centers like New York and Philadelphia. While both families eventually operated grocery stores in Columbia, their respective roles within their communities were very different.

Jacob Rivkin, and later his son Caba, originally ran a grocery in the heart of the Jewish community that sold kosher products unavailable elsewhere in the city. The popularity of Rivkin’s Grocery led to …

Frontier Re-Imagined: The Mythic West In The Twentieth Century, Michael Craig Gibbs

Theses and Dissertations

T The author begins by reviewing Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “Frontier Thesis” and by surveying the twentieth-century consensus of the “New Western Historians.” The author then poses a question: even though the physical frontier “closed” in the late-nineteenth century, did American writers turn away from the imaginative frontier? To a great extent, the writers of literary fiction did turn to other material during the modernist period. Simultaneously, however, Westerns began to dominate popular fiction and film. More notably, writers such as Raymond Chandler began to transform the traditional Western. In Philip Marlowe, Chandler created an urban cowboy; this cowboy locates …

Urban Social Landscapes And Urban Places: Processes Of Making And Informing Maronite Identity In Beirut, Divin Boutros

Theses and Dissertations

This research looks at the Maronites of Beirut and examines, from their perspective, the role of belonging, imagined geographies, and memories of place in the processes of making and informing Maronite identity in Beirut after the civil war of 1975. The civil war of 1975 allows me to examine the city’s change in demographics in relation to the Green Line that divided the city between a Muslim West Beirut, and a Christian Eastern Beirut during the civil war. The thesis approaches Beirut’s homogenous neighborhoods, a result of the city’s cantonization during the civil war, as problematic for the future of …

Investigation Of Hydrologic Change In The South Fork Edisto Basin 1981-2016, Alexander Preston Butler

Theses and Dissertations

Increased demands on water resources coupled with an increased awareness of the need to preserve environmental flows have led to a need to understand how anthropogenic activities may have impacted water resources in South Carolina. The South Fork of the Edisto River has been facing increasing demands for both surface water and groundwater. This research investigated if and why hydrologic change, as indicated by a change in the rainfall/ stream discharge relationship, occurred in the South Fork Edisto Basin, in South Carolina, between the years 1980-2016. A double-mass curve analysis, which is corroborated by runoff coefficients, indicates that a fundamental …

Smallholder Farmers, Environmental Change And Adaptation In A Human-Dominated Landscape In The Northern Highlands Of Rwanda, Apollinaire William

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Climate change and crop intensification are key challenges to the livelihoods and wellbeing of the majority of rural smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly in human-dominated, climate-sensitive landscapes such as the northern highlands of Rwanda where issues of fluvial floods, soil erosion pose serious threats to the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. In this mixed methods study conducted between August and December 2015, I explored smallholder farmers’ perceptions by examining what barriers might hinder the process of agroforestry adoption by smallholder farmers, what socio-economic and physical factors and attitudes influence crop choices, motivations for smallholder farmers’ willingness to plant trees within …

Economic Diversity And Regional Development: Geographical Scale, Structural Measurement, And Modeling Method, Jing Chen

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

No abstract provided.