Digital Commons Network^™

Mothers Of Adult Children Who Have Down Syndrome: Understanding The Meaning Of Religion And Spirituality In Perception, Hope, And Coping, Stephanie G. Gotay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Since the 1970s, the number of individuals living with Down syndrome has continued to increase. Many of these individuals live with their families, and mothers are the primary caretakers for most of these children. As the life expectancy of individuals who have Down syndrome continues to rise, theses caregiving roles are expected to last longer. Unfortunately, the supports offered to families, and specifically mothers, have been inconsistent and often inadequate. Spirituality and religion offer some mothers additional supports and can enhance their resilience and endurance. This qualitative study employed a phenomenological approach to explore the experience of spirituality and religion …

Teachers' Evaluation Of Usefulness Of Professional Development Activities: Examining Roles Of Teacher Collaboration And Administrative Support, Joseph Grovogui

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This study uses a national sample of middle and high mathematics teachers from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) to predict the usefulness of professional development on mathematics reading instruction. We found that teacher collaboration is significantly related to teachers perception of useful professional development on mathematics reading instruction. Although administrative support is expected to provide incentives and opportunities for teachers to grow, this study found that it has no influence in teachers perception of useful professional development in any of the models of the study. With regards to the influence of teacher collaboration and administrative support, our findings showed …

The Effects Of Self-Leadership On The Job Satisfaction And Job Performance Of Online Instructors, John Hall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

AbstractHall, John R. Ed. D. The University of Memphis. July 2019. The Effects of Self-leadership on the Job Satisfaction and Job Performance of Online Instructors. Major Professor: Dr. Wendy Griswold.Innovations in technology and media have led to changes in the way that higher education is experienced. Today, the convenience, accessibility and flexibility of online learning are embraced by students across the globe. In response to these progressive advancements along with increasing competition for enrollment growth and budgetary concerns, many college and university leaders are framing online education as key element of their strategies for the future. Rising demands for online …

Pregnancy And The Voice: Surveying Effects From The Singer's Perspective, Sarah Elizabeth Harper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Hormonal challenges and physical encumbrances tax a womans body during pregnancy. If that woman is a vocalist, these changes will affect her ability to sing. Assumptions exist about what can happen to a womans voice during pregnancy, but these assumptions are based on theoretical predictions of what happens to the voice during pregnancy. This investigation aimed to gain information on what women were told about the effects of pregnancy on the voice in comparison to what they actually experienced. An anonymous mixed-method survey was distributed to 321 professional women singers; results will be discussed.

Effect Of Flipped Classroom Approach On Middle School Students Math Motivation And Math Anxiety In India, Smita Jain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The purpose of this experimental posttest-only study was to determine the effect of the flipped classroom approach (FCA) instructional strategy on motivational orientations of middle school students in math in India. The research questions focused on the effect of FCA on students value component (intrinsic goal orientation, extrinsic goal orientation, task value), expectancy component (self-efficacy and control beliefs), and affective component (test anxiety). These variables were measured using the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ).Two intact sections of eighth-grade students (n=66) from a private K-12 school in India participated in the study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two …

Mama Bear Conversations: A Template Analysis Of Mothers Message Board Discussions Of Hpv Vaccination And Weight Management For Their Pre-Adolescent And Adolescent Children, Kristin Whitten Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The growth of the Internet has allowed users to gather in online spaces to share thought processes and information about any number of topics, and mothers in particular have found value in these communities as they seek to navigate the rough waters of motherhood. The aim of this research is to examine three message board forum threads at Cafemom.com where mothers gather to discuss two specific health care concerns for their pre-adolescent and adolescent children: human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and weight management. In an attempt to understand how mothers gather in these spaces to discuss these important pre-adolescent and adolescent …

Graduate Survey, 2018-2019, Hart Career Center, Illinois Wesleyan University

First Destination Survey

No abstract provided.

Exposure To Health Warning Labels On Waterpipe Tobacco Packages: An Application Of The Modified Extended Parallel Process Model On Quitting Behavior From Three Waves Of The Path Study, Jayaprakash Kumar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The prevalence of waterpipe (WP) smoking has increased steadily in the United States despite growing evidence of its serious health consequences and addictive potential. Although, health warning labels (HWLs) on cigarette packages are effective in preventing initiation and cessation of smoking, the effect of HWLs on WP tobacco packages have seldom been studied. This study modified the extended parallel process model (EPPM) by adding motivation as a mediating construct and applied to examine if it predicts the effect of health warning label on waterpipe tobacco packages on quitting behavior. Data from the three waves of the Population Assessment of Tobacco …

Multifunctional Nanomaterials For Blood Based Cancer Diagnostics, Elyahb Allie Kwizera

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Multifunctional nanomaterials have emerged as unique nanoplatform with excellent physical and physiochemical properties such as their facile surface chemistry, excellent biocompatibility and remarkable optical properties which allow them to be used for early cancer detection, biological separation, medical imaging, disease detection, and disease treatment. However, due to their small sizes, their size distribution, surface chemistry, and their complex morphology, there is a significant challenge in their synthesis and their characterization. Therefore, a thorough understanding of their structure with a detailed physiochemical characterization and their functional properties is highly essential. In this dissertation, we summarize a tremendous progress that has been …

Influences Of Parent Physical Activity Support And Physical Activity Modeling On Adolescent Physical Activity Engagement And Weight Status, Cardella Lashay Leak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Childhood obesity rates continue to rise with adolescents (12-19 years old) having the highest prevalence (20.6%) across all age groups. Previous studies have indicated the importance of physical activity (PA) to assist with reducing obesity rates among adolescents. Parents influence their adolescents PA as they are typically adolescents first exposure and gatekeepers to both direct and indirect PA behaviors through their support and modeling of PA. This dissertation used parent-adolescent dyads from the Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health, and Eating (FLASHE) study to examine the associations between parent PA support and PA modeling and adolescent moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) engagement …

Development Of Multilayered Micelles And Hydrogels For Drug/Gene Delivery Systems, Kweiyu Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Kwei-Yu Liu. Ph.D. The University of Memphis. December 2019. Development of Multilayered Micelles and Hydrogels for Drug/Gene Delivery Systems. Major Professor: Tomoko Fujiwara, Ph.D.In recent years, polymeric drug vehicles which respond to external stimuli have attracted extensive attention for delivering their therapeutic payloads at targeted locations and with controlled timing. To realize these smart delivery systems, our strategy is to design polymeric micelles with multilayered morphologies and stimuli-responsive properties as a drug carrier. In this dissertation, the development of two types of drug delivery systems are described. The first approach focuses on a hydrogel system prepared from DNA-loaded three-layered micelles …

An Analysis Of African American Football Players Perception Of Their Non-Athletic Career Readiness Post-Graduation From A Division I Football Bowl Subdivision Institution., Ashlesha Sunil Lokhande

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

AbstractThe NCAAs core values indicate their commitment to the academic success and career development of their student-athletes. They assure the student-athletes academic and career readiness takes precedence over their athletic competitiveness. However, with the increasing commercialization, the relationship between college athletics and higher education is similar to an uneasy marriage, with student-athletes caught in the middle of this strenuous relationship. This is evident because of the lower graduation rate and career maturity levels of African-American student-athletes. This problem is also magnified as African-American student-athletes are graduating at a lower rate than their White counterparts. This trend has to be reversed, …

Physical Disabilities And Theatre: We Discover What It Is To Be Human And What Is Possible For Humans To Be., Jennifer Annette Nettleton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation examines the portrayal of physically disabled characters in dramatic literature over the course of the late nineteenth through the twentieth into the twenty-first century. My core argument is that performance art, sideshows, and theatre are safe means by which people have been able to look fixedly at those who are different. Additionally, this project will address the historical context of certain plays productions and how our evolving understanding of, representations of, and conceptions about those who are different change over time. Theatre allows individuals to be seen and to see; thus, by utilizing the core concepts and ideas …

The Evolving Digital Divide Within Higher Education Institutions: A Quantitative Study, Brent Owens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Technology has become an integral and important aspect of our world. As such, the author of this study aims to research how technology is used by college students, the people who hope to be tomorrows leaders and innovators. Ideally, all college students will complete their degrees with a comprehensive and well-versed understanding in the most basic and widespread technologies. However, strong technology literacy can be hampered by a students background. This notion is often referred to as the digital divide and can cause some people to have a weak technological background. This study will investigate the digital divide at different …

A Mechanism Design For Crowdsourcing Multi-Objective Recommendation System, Eiman Aldahari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Crowdsourcing is an approach whereby requesters call for workers with different capabilities to process a task for monetary reward. The emergence of crowdsourcing has drawn increasing attention in recent years as a revolutionary phenomenon. Although crowdsourcing is still considered a developing approach, early signs expectations are promising. The advantage of crowdsourcing resides in its ability to facilitate access to diverse skilled workers to process the outsourced tasks at reduced time and cost. Moreover, crowdsourcing helps reduce unemployment by offering on-demand employment opportunities. With the vast amount of tasks posted every day, satisfying the workers, requesters, and service providers who are …

A Study Of Saudi Teachers And Students Attitudes Toward The Use Of Esp At A Saudi Military Academy, Sulaiman Rashed Algofaili

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes address the specific professional and technical fields of students learning English and attempt to use appropriate materials and approaches to do so. At the King Abdulaziz Military Academy (KAMA) in Saudi Arabia, ESP classes prepare students for military careers. However, officers who graduate from KAMA notice that their level of English is lower than that required to command non- Arabic speakers, and they struggle in communicating with others in English. The reason behind the students low competence at KAMA is still not clear but could result from the choice of approaches or texts used …

Saudi Esl/Efl Learners Metacognitive Online Reading Strategies In Arabic And English, Hamad Mohammed Alluhaydan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Historically, Saudi readers have demonstrated poor metacognitive reading skills and literacy practices. This study investigates what online metacognitive reading strategies ESL and EFL Saudi learners believed they used more frequently in Arabic and English. It also shows perceived differences between Saudi male and female ESL/EFL learners in their strategy use while reading online texts. The lack of practice reading in Arabic or English affects comprehension skills; less than 25% of participants felt they could answer reading comprehension questions in class. Male and female participants did not differ in their use of global, support, and problem-solving metacognitive online reading strategies when …

Humor Styles And Self-Esteem As Mediators Of The Relationship Between Personality And Life Satisfaction, Emily Ruth Averitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Life satisfaction is a key component of hedonic or subjective well-being as well as a pivotal predictor of other health-related indices. One of the strongest predictors of life satisfaction is personality, including neuroticism (a strong inverse predictor) and extraversion. The current research examined two constructs that potentially mediate the relationship between the predictor variable of personality and the outcome variable of life satisfaction: humor styles and self-esteem. Path analysis procedures were utilized to examine a primary model, in which it was hypothesized that specific humor styles would partially mediate the relationship between extraversion and neuroticism and the outcome of life …

Southeast U.S. Severe Thunderstorm Climatology And 1932 Tornado Outbreak, Bradley Wayne Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

There is a poor understanding of severe thunderstorm variability over the Southeast U.S. due to the lack of a reliable, homogeneous, long-term observational records. A potential avenue to address severe thunderstorm variability involves computing environmental indices derived from reanalysis datasets and use those as proxies for severe thunderstorm days. Unfortunately, reanalysis datasets have known issues with inhomogeneity that are not related to climatology. Thus, this research first sought to reconstruct a climatology of severe thunderstorm days back to 1925 from the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) dataset, while developing methods that potentially minimize non-climatic inhomogeneities. Severe thunderstorm day proxies were reconstructed …

Behind The Cape: The Black Superwoman, Colorism, And Professional Identity Development, Sara Lee Ann Benson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The purpose of this Black feminist narrative inquiry study is to explore how Colorism informs the Black Superwoman persona and how that relationship influences the professional identity development of Black women. The Black Superwoman persona is the idea that black women take on all major responsibilities inside and outside of their home with minimum support. Five African American women between the ages of forty and sixty-five who held higher degrees and who lived in urban areas within the Mid-South tri-state region were interviewed. Through a narrative analysis of the data, this dissertation identified five themes across the participants: (1) perceptions …

Don't Touch Me Like That: Masculinity, Touch, And The Role Of Affect In Media Representations Of Animal Attacks, Carolyn Grace Block

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation analyzes masculinity and touch in three highly publicized cases where men intentionally interacted with wild animals and were harmed in the process. I focus predominately on the first week of media coverage following Steve The Crocodile Hunter Irwin who was killed by a massive stingray while filming for a television series off the Great Barrier Reef, Roy Horn of the famed Las Vegas magician duo Siegfried and Roy who was mauled by one of his performing tigers in front of a live audience, and Antoine Yates, an African American man bitten by the pet tiger he kept in …

Individual Online Routines: External Guardianship, Personal Guardianship, And The Influence Of Breaches, Ruby E. Booth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Computer crime increases in frequency and cost each year. Of all computer crimes, data breaches are the costliest to organizations. In addition to the harm data breaches cause to organizations, these breaches often involve the exposure of individuals personal data, placing the affected individuals at greater risk of computer crimes such as credit card fraud, tax fraud, and identity theft. Despite the breadth and severity of consequences for individuals, existing IS literature lacks coverage of how users respond to data breaches. Routine Activity Theory provides the studys theoretical frame. Routine Activity Theory states that crime occurs when the routine activities …

Development And Application Of 3d Printed Detectors For Environmental Analysis, Robyn Ann Snow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation describes the development of a novel 3D printed fluorescence detector and a 3D printed chemiluminescence detector. The 3D printed fluorescence detector is used as a component of the haloacetic acid rapid-response (HAA-RR), a commercial system for the analysis of haloacetic acids (HAAs) in drinking water. The 3D printed chemiluminescence detector was used in the development of a free-available chlorine (FAC) analyzer and a lead (II) analyzer.The 3D printed fluorescence detector was developed for the specific application of the nicotinamide chemistry used in the HAA-RR. The detector is simple, rugged and inexpensive. The detector was compared to a commercially …

New Organizational Challenges In A Digital World: Securing Cloud Computing Usage And Reacting To Asset-Sharing Platform Disruptions, Sungjin Yoo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Information technology (IT) and IT-enabled business models are transforming the business ecosystem and posing new challenges for existing companies. This two-essay dissertation examines two such challenges: cloud security and the disruption of asset-sharing business models.The first essay examines how an organizations usage of cloud storage affects its likelihood of accidental breaches. The quasi-experiment in the U.S. healthcare sector reveals that organizations with higher levels of digitalization (i.e., Electronic Health Records levels) or those with more IT applications running on their internal data center are less likely to experience accidental breaches after using public cloud storage. We argue that digitalization and …

Bulletin Of Yale University School Of Nursing 2019-2020, Yale School Of Nursing

Yale School of Nursing Bulletins and Catalogues

Series 115, Number 15

September 5, 2019

Medical Condition Or Childcare Choice? Breastfeeding And Lactation Discrimination After Young V. Ups, Madeleine Gyory

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Women returning to work after giving birth, and who wish to breastfeed their child often need modest adjustments to their job or workplace that allow them to pump breast milk at work, such as break time and a clean, private room. But what if an employer denies this request or fires a woman for asking? The federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act ("PDA") prohibits employers from discriminating against workers based on their pregnancy, childbirth, or "related medical conditions." Under the PDA, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Young v. UPS, employers must grant pregnant workers accommodations only if they grant similar …

Where Do We Go From Here? A Semi-Autobiographical Performance Exploration Into The Therapeutic Benefits Of Theatre, Emma Elliott

Scripps Senior Theses

My intention in this performance is to create a therapeutic theatrical process for myself and engage the audience with intense emotional vulnerability regarding the combination and validation of the nobody and performative self. I utilized both my vocal and acting training to work through emotional trauma that I have experienced and created a musical performance to demonstrate my journey of therapy and emotional reconciliation within myself and my family. I focused my research on using autobiographical performances to solidify and validate the identity of the performer to an audience. In doing so, this allows the performers to become the …

La Modernité Tunisienne Dévoilée : Une Étude Autour De La Femme Célibataire, Madison Wagner

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explains recent accounts of discrimination and cutbacks in reproductive health spaces in Tunisia. Complicating dominant analyses, which attribute these events to the post-revolution political atmosphere which has allowed the proliferation of islamic extremism, I interpret these instances as a manifestation of a deeply rooted stigma against sexually active single women. I trace this stigma’s inception to the contradictory way that Habib Bourguiba conceptualized modernity after independence, and the responsibility he assigned to Tunisian women to embody that modernity. This responsibility remains salient today, and is putting Tunisian women in an increasingly untenable and vulnerable position.

After independence, Bourguiba …

Conjurer La Révolution : Sorciers, Païens Et Justice Sociale Dans La France Contemporaine, Alexandra Rivera

Scripps Senior Theses

Witches and pagans have long faced historical persecution from the Catholic church and other patriarchal systems of power. In the eyes of mainstream society, they have been reduced to fragments of ancient history and entertaining media stereotypes. Real practitioners of witchcraft and paganism have remained fairly marginalized and trapped in the shadows, but this is starting to change. Witches and pagans have begun to involve themselves in large-scale political movements, combining spiritual power with direct action. While this phenomenon has a longer track record in the United States, in France it is extremely new. France is a country that has …

Individual Bodies, Informed Consent, And Self-Determination: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Vaccine Refusal Movement, Gretta Richardson

Scripps Senior Theses

This project sought to explore the narratives and rhetorical themes that permeate the anti-vaccination movement. Mass media has portrayed vaccine refusal groups as stupid, as conspiracy theorists, and as radically selfish. However, the data I analyzed from vaccine refusal nonprofits and advocacy groups supports that although these themes may appear to be radical, in reality, each is congruent with already present societal frameworks, particularly neoliberal social discourse and a preoccupation with the individualistic and self-determined health care rather than utilitarian or collective action.