Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring The Relationship Between Telework Intensity And The Voluntary Or Involuntary Nature Of Physical Work Arrangements Related To Work-Related Rumination, Savannah R. Schwartz

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Work-related rumination occurs when an individual thinks about work during non-work hours. Following the emergence of COVID-19, more employers adopt flexible models of physical working arrangements for their employees that extend beyond traditional on-site (working from a designated business office location) models, such as hybrid (working part of the time from home and part of the time at a designated business office location) and fully remote (working from home all of the time) models. The present non-experimental quantitative, cross-sectional survey study explored the relationship between telework intensity (i.e., the amount of time one spends working remotely), as well as the …

A Qualitative Content Analysis Of The Rhetorical Situation In Aviation Communication, Paris Ernesto-Jason Brown

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Using qualitative content analysis to organize the thematic elements of Bitzer’s (1968) rhetorical situations, the researcher provides actionable insights into reducing errors and improving aviation communication. The problem lies in the gap between aviation communication and rhetorical situations to determine if this theory impacts pilot errors and affects flight safety. Strategies in this area must be improved to ensure effective communication among pilots and between them, control towers, and other contributors in the aviation industry. This dissertation aims to apply rhetorical situations to enhance communication strategies and improve flight safety by analyzing NTSB reports, while using the software, MAXQDA, to …

Positive Behaviors And Traits In Clinical Supervision: A Qualitative Study, Katelyn Jakubovic

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This qualitative study explored the individual lived experiences of mental health counselors undergoing clinical supervision, focusing on their perceptions of the supervisory relationship, supervisory process, and outcomes by identifying specific traits and behaviors across various domains. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the sample of 20 participants across professional developmental stages and practice settings. Narrative and thematic analysis of the data revealed a nuanced portrayal of the supervisory relationship. Overall, participants characterized their supervision experiences as being predominantly positive and growth-facilitating. Participants identified key supportive factors, such as communication, resources, and scheduling flexibility. Analyses also uncovered significant areas for improvement, …

Predicting Middle School Students’ Attitude Towards Mathematics By Race And Biological Sex After Participating In Open Up Resources Mathematics Curriculum: A Quantitative Study, Sharonna Laquenette Howell

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this quantitative predictive correlational design study was to examine how well race/ethnicity and biological sex predict students’ attitudes toward mathematics among middle school students following participation in the Open Up Resources mathematics curriculum. By conducting this study, the researchers filled a gap in the literature by determining whether the use of the Open Up Resources mathematics curriculum, race, and biological sex predicted students' attitudes toward mathematics. Research on the impact of K-12 Open Education Resources curricula on students’ attitudes toward mathematics was lacking. Participants in this study included middle school students in a North Carolina school district. …

A Phenomenological Study On The Experiences Of Educators As Mentors For Homeless And Highly Mobile Students In A Rural Community, Tracy Dawn Mcpheron

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study is to explore how educators perceive an implemented mentoring program in which they will serve as mentors of homeless and highly mobile students in a rural school district. The mentoring program will include educators working as mentors to students coded as homeless through the McKinney-Vento Act for Homeless Education. The educators participating in the mentoring program will be the participants in this study. The participants will include middle school (6th-8th grade) through high school (12th grade), teachers, counselors, librarians, the district’s homeless liaison, and the federal programs coordinator for an East Tennessee school …

Health Behaviors Of First-Generation College Students Affected By Acculturation, Angel Camacho Castro

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative narrative ethnographic study was to understand how acculturation affects health behaviors and wellness of first-generation college students at a state university on the West Coast of the United States. The theory guiding this study was social constructivism theory, proposed by Lev Vygotsky, who claimed behaviors are constructed by social interactions around social settings. This research focused on how students navigated the changes in inherited cultural values of health behaviors and wellness practices affected by mainstream and college cultures. The dissertation investigated challenges first-generation college students faced in an environment that often conflicted with family values …

Leading Like Christ: A Phenomenological Study Of The Biblical Shepherd Motif In Christian Parachurch Executive Leadership, Alex Sefton

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of Christian nonprofit parachurch organization executive leaders in southeastern Indiana (i.e., Decatur County and its adjacent counties). For the purpose of this study, executive leaders was defined as those who hold a top-level leadership position at an organization, and Christian nonprofit parachurch organization was defined as an organization designated under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) that advances biblical principles and social welfare. Shepherd-like leadership was generally defined as a leadership style that demonstrates relational care, personal guidance, and protection of well-being, as seen in Psalm …

Benefits Of Traffic Reprofiling For Delay Sensitive Networking, Jiaming Qiu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Deterministic networking systems, such as Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and Deterministic Networking (DetNet), require strict end-to-end delay guarantees while efficiently utilizing limited network resources. Conventional approaches typically focus on fixed traffic profiles, which can lead to suboptimal resource utilization in scheduling or admission control problems. This dissertation investigates traffic reprofiling—the proactive reshaping of traffic arrival patterns—as a complementary mechanism for improving both resource efficiency and delay performance under strict service guarantees. The dissertation consists of three parts. The first part studies bandwidth minimization under hard delay constraints for Service Curve Earliest Deadline First (SCED) schedulers. We show that traffic reprofiling can …

Assessing Hyperlocal And Local Air Quality Through Passive Samplers And Low-Cost Monitors, Yan He

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Air pollution is a major environmental health concern and has been associated with respiratory disease, cardiovascular morbidity, metabolic disorders, premature mortality, and additional adverse health outcomes. Air pollution often exhibits substantial variability at fine spatial scales, yet conventional regulatory monitoring networks are too sparse to resolve neighborhood-level exposure gradients that may exist in many urban and rural communities. Hyperlocal differences in pollutant concentrations—driven by local emission sources, land use characteristics, atmospheric chemistry, and meteorological conditions—can lead to systematic differences in long-term exposure among populations living only short distances apart. Improving exposure characterization therefore requires dense monitoring strategies and spatial modeling …

Revisiting Visualization Literacy: What Standardized Assessments Reveal And Conceal Across Instruments, Cultures, And Ai Systems, Saugat Pandey

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Data visualizations are now a primary medium for public communication, scientific reasoning, and decision-making. By transforming complex data into accessible graphical forms, visualizations are widely assumed to make information comprehensible to broad audiences. Yet the ability to accurately read, interpret, and critically evaluate a visualization, what researchers call visualization literacy, is neither uniform nor universal. It is a learned, multidimensional skill shaped by prior exposure, educational opportunity, and context. While the field has developed standardized instruments to measure visualization literacy, these tools were built under narrow assumptions: participants are typically paid, English-speaking, and recruited from Western online panels. When any …

Smart Kitchen: Towards Real-Time Ai Systems For Cognitive Support In Daily Activities, Ruiqi Wang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The rapid growth of the aging population and the rising prevalence of Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) highlight the need for continuous, unobtrusive assessment of functional cognition during everyday activities. Vision-based smart home systems offer a promising pathway for monitoring behavior and supporting independent living. However, enabling real-time cognitive assistance remains challenging. It requires not only accurately interpreting complex human behaviors to detect cognitive errors, but also supporting real-time deployment on resource-constrained edge devices and under dynamic wireless network conditions. This dissertation presents Smart Kitchen, an AI-driven system for real-time cognitive error detection through the monitoring of daily cooking activities. Under …

Individualized Models For Perception And Cognition, Dominic Marticorena

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation develops individualized models of perceptual and cognitive behavior, inferring latent capacities from limited data with sufficient efficiency, precision, and generality for person-level prediction. In perception, a nonparametric Bayesian framework for adaptive psychophysics is extended from audition to vision, producing an estimator that recovers dense individualized contrast sensitivity profiles through variational inference, a generalized kernel, and information-guided stimulus selection. A multitask extension enables simultaneous estimation of multiple psychometric fields by exploiting shared latent structure. Transferring this inferential logic to cognition, where relevant dimensions must be supplied by task design rather than physics, requires new measurement infrastructure. A Minecraft-based platform …

Inference-Time Scaling For Robust And Adaptive Computational Imaging, Yuyang Hu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Computational imaging has transformed fields such as medical imaging, computational photography, and remote sensing by combining physical measurement models with advanced image reconstruction algorithms. Two major paradigms have driven significant progress: model-based deep learning (MBDL), which integrates learned priors with physics-based data consistency, and generative models, especially diffusion models, which capture complex image distributions and enable posterior sampling for uncertainty quantification. Despite their success, most existing methods still operate under static inference: they rely on fixed pretrained priors, predetermined sampling procedures, and a fixed forward model during reconstruction. This rigidity limits their robustness in the presence of distribution shift, complex …

An Autism-Centered Analysis Of The Aesthetics And Narrative Of Gene Wolfe’S Book Of The New Sun, Sebastian Peterson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Much of the recent work published within the literary neurodiversity studies field focuses on how certain writing techniques can be viewed as representing the experience of being autistic by influencing the reader so that they experience distinctly autistic patterns of cognition. Likewise, the Book of the New Sun series employs many such techniques within the narrative and prose. This is in addition to the fact that the plot contains elements that mirror the relationship and conflict between those with autism and neuronormative hegemony (that being the ways in which societies oppress, mistreat, and belittle those not deemed “neurotypical”). The goal …

2026-04-29 Crisis Care Center Coming To Capitol Hill, Kean Mathis

The Spectator Online

No abstract provided.

2026-04-29 Redhawks Turn Teal For Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Tristan Scott

The Spectator Online

No abstract provided.

The George-Anne Daily, Georgia Southern University

George-Anne Media Group: Newsletters & Magazines

No abstract provided.

Spartan Daily, April 29, 2026, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2026

Volume 166, Issue 39

Soft Systems For Community-Based Hcv Management In Indonesian Oil Palm Plantations, Neny Indriyana, Suyud Warno Utomo, Tri Edhi Budhi Soesilo, Linda Darmajanti

Journal of Environmental Science and Sustainable Development

Certification mandates under the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) have made measurable strides in promoting sustainability standards, yet governance challenges in High Conservation Value (HCV) 4, 5, and 6 management remain insufficiently addressed within Indonesian plantation contexts.  Drawing on adaptive governance theory and the social-ecological systems framework, this study argues that such gaps are structurally linked to the marginalisation of community agency within corporate-dominated decision-making. This study proposes and empirically evaluates an integrated governance framework that positions community engagement as a functional contributor to conservation outcomes within plantation landscapes of West Kalimantan, under …

Entrepreneurial Communication In Religious Nonprofit Organizations: Sustaining Mission Continuity With Volunteers, Respati Wulandari

Journal of Management for Global Sustainability

Entrepreneurial communication has been predominantly examined within corporate contexts, with limited empirical investigation in faith-based nonprofit governance. This article examines how the Entrepreneurial Communication Paradigm (ECP) operates within a volunteer-dependent religious nonprofit organization and how it contributes to governance sustainability. Although ECP has mainly been developed within corporate and strategic communication frameworks, there is a paucity of study examining its relevance in the governance of faith-based nonprofits. This study utilizes longitudinal qualitative data from in-depth interviews with the National Director and 24 Diocesan Directors of the Pontifical Mission Societies of Indonesia (PMSI) to examine the influence of communication practices on …

Uuvs Using Sound Detection, Daniel Ginsburg, Ethan Carpio, Preston Jacob, Casey Cooper

Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Projects

The contents of this report contain the details of the 2025-2026 school year regarding team 14’s capstone project about building an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) using sound detection. At the beginning of this project it was decided that the project goals would be updated. In previous years the students had to use sound to follow a path and drop a payload along that path in the pool. Now this has been changed so that the team now knows the path and drop location beforehand. This removes the need for sonar and sound detection. This makes the project easier and more …

A Causal-Comparative Study Of Critical Thinking Skills In Community College And University Stem Students, Jason H. Tucker

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to examine the relationship between STEM students’ classification (freshmen, sophomore, junior, and senior) and their overall critical thinking scores among community colleges and universities in north central Ohio. This study is important because critical thinking has been shown to improve success in collegiate STEM programs and the future careers of their students. In addition, there has been growing interest in examining potential critical thinking differences between STEM students enrolled in two-year community colleges and four-year universities. The sample is composed of 231 community college and university students enrolled in STEM programs. Data …

Fostering Innovative Leadership: A Case Study Of Academic Leaders’ Role In Integrating Ai Technologies In Higher Education, Dorian Ryleigh Harris

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this case study was to understand the role of higher education leadership in the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for faculty and administrative decision-making at higher education institutions in the United States of America. The theory guiding this study was the transformational leadership theory as it provides a framework for examining how institutional leaders influence the adoption, implementation, and ethical considerations of AI in higher education. The central research question guiding this study was: How do higher education leaders navigate the integration of AI technologies within their institutions? This study employed a qualitative case study design, …

No Place To Stand: Gender, Discipline, And The Contradictions Of Military Womanhood, 1945–1975, Angela Bouma

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

From 1945 to 1975, American servicewomen stood inside an institution that depended on their labor while restricting their place within it. The post World War II military relied on women to sustain administrative, technical, and medical operations across a widening Cold War landscape, yet guarded the authority and recognition attached to combat and command. Women kept global communications running, delivered medical care in field hospitals, and carried out intelligence work that shaped military decisions. However, legal and cultural boundaries limited the reach of such contributions.

The 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act formalized this tension. Regular status came with ceilings …

The Lived Experiences Of Generation X With Social Media Use And Body Image Perception: A Phenomenological Study, Consuela Coburn

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Social media use grows worldwide daily with several available applications having both positive and negative values. Several studies found negative effects on mental health and body dissatisfaction in adolescents and young adults. Existing literature predominantly focuses on young female participants, resulting in a gap in understanding the effects of social media use across other age cohorts. This phenomenological qualitative study explored the lived experiences of Generation X adults regarding social media use and the perceived effects on body image. Additionally, this study identified themes that emerged based on the semi-structured interviews of Generation X adults. NVivo 15, a computer assistance …

Associate Degree Program Administrator Perceptions Of Clinical Dishonesty, Cynthia Moore Swineford

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions of associate degree nursing program administrators regarding faculty reporting of dishonest clinical behaviors by pre-licensure nursing students. Aristotle’s theory of virtue ethics guided this examination of how administrators interpret ethical responsibility, leadership influence, and professional accountability related to clinical dishonesty. The central research question asked, “What are the perceptions of associate degree program administrators regarding faculty reporting of dishonest student behaviors in clinical settings?” The sample included 11 associate degree nursing program administrators from programmatically accredited nursing programs in three mid-Atlantic states. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, …

Barriers And Bridges To Mental Health: A Quantitative Study Of Religious Commitment, Mental Health Stigma, And Help-Seeking Attitudes In The Black Community, Catisha Tillman

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Mental health is a silent killer in the Black community. The Black community prefers to seek mental health support from their pastors, friends, families, and church members rather than from a professional counselor. This mistrust is seated in a deeply rooted history of transgenerational trauma towards the medical and mental health care system. Stemming from the enslavement of the Black community to the present day, with systemic racism, disparities in mental health care, limited educational resources, and socioeconomic disadvantages. The following research examined how religious commitment affects mental health stigma, help-seeking attitudes, church-based relational support, and perceived barriers to mental …

Bridging The Gap: Leadership Support For Military Veterans Who Transition To Civilian Employment, Kimberly S. Buchanan

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

A gap in leadership support hinders military veteran employees from effectively leveraging their skill sets during their transition from military service to civilian employment, leading to decreased performance, low job satisfaction, and reduced retention of Veteran talent. This flexible qualitative single-case study explored why gaps in leadership support exist for military veteran employees, the extent to which these gaps hinder the utilization of their skill sets, and how leaders can address them. The study included semistructured interviews with 18 military veteran participants, representative of the U.S. Military and diverse in backgrounds. Data analysis involved coding, theme development, and review of …

Developing A Digital Platform For The Christian Leadership School At True Vine Baptist Church, Tonia Thompson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This Dissertation-in-Praxis (DiP) project examined the development and implementation of the True Vine Christian Leadership School (TVCLS) at True Vine Baptist Church. Rapid congregational growth revealed a need to connect members to sustained discipleship beyond worship attendance. In response, TVCLS was developed as a digital ministry solution to bridge the gap between initial engagement and long-term spiritual development while advancing the Great Commission. The purpose of the project was to provide biblical and theological instruction, promote outreach and fellowship, and cultivate a congregation with a deeper connection to Christ. The program utilized the Christian education framework established by the Sunday …

Student Misbehavior And The Lived Experiences Of School Administrators And Teachers: Legal Challenges And Policy Implementation In A Georgia School District: A Phenomenological Inquiry, Mary C. Cox

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand the lived experiences of school administrators and teachers in managing student misbehavior along with the legal challenges and policy implications in a Georgia school district. The theory guiding this study was Bandura’s social cognitive theory, as it provided a framework for examining how school administrators and teachers’ self-efficacy influences their perception, interpretation, and response to student misbehavior in the classroom. This theoretical lens was integral to exploring the dynamic interaction between personal beliefs, environmental factors, and behavioral outcomes. The central research question for this study was: What are the lived experiences …