Digital Commons Network^™

Elected Sheriffs’ Election Process And How It Affects Their Behavior, Brian James Ardoin

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Scholars have widely examined how electoral pressures influence the behavior of judges and prosecutors; however, less attention has been given to how elections affect law enforcement leaders. This quantitative study examined whether sheriff election cycles in Louisiana were associated with changes in law enforcement behavior. Louisiana parish sheriffs occupy a unique role as both elected officials and chief law enforcement executives, which may create incentives that influence enforcement priorities. Using secondary arrest data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting program, this study analyzed parish-level arrest patterns from 2009 through 2019 to determine whether deputies’ arrest behavior differed …

Exploring Marital Resilience Through The Lived Experiences And Perception Of Spousal Support During Events Of Shared Stressors, Prince-James Smith

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Marital resilience during shared stressors remains insufficiently understood, particularly when both spouses are simultaneously affected by the same external stressor and must adapt together over time. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore marital resilience through the lived experiences and perceptions of spousal support during shared stressors among individuals who had been legally married for 10 years or more, with specific attention to how participants described the shift from solo coping to dyadic coping over time. Bowlby’s attachment theory provided the theoretical foundation, and Senge’s learning organization theory served as the conceptual framework. Participants included 18 legally …

Performance-Based Budgeting Implementation Strategies For Improving Financial Performance, Waleed Ibrahim Alsyaegh

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The lack of effective strategies for allocating organizational financial resources can lead to adverse business outcomes. Business managers are concerned about the ineffective allocation of financial resources, as it can impede financial performance and sustainability.Grounded in stakeholder theory, the purpose of this qualitative single-case study was to explore the performance-based budgeting strategies that business managers use to sustain financial profitability. The participants were 10 business managers who oversee subsidiaries that successfully implemented performance-based budgeting.Data were collected through semistructured interviews and the review of organization documents. Through thematic analysis, four themes were identified: (a) traditional versus contemporary budgeting; (b) importance of …

Exploring Leadership Strategies And Personnel Integration Practices During The Post- Merger Phase Influence The Success Of Mergers And Acquisitions, Rebekah Dumas

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have been widely used as a growth strategy; however, many organizations fail to achieve their desired outcomes. This ongoing risk is a major concern for business leaders because ineffective post-merger personnel integration can disrupt workforce stability, reduce productivity, and hinder organizational performance. Grounded in transformational leadership theory, the purpose of this qualitative pragmatic inquiry project was to explore the strategies business leaders used to integrate personnel during post-merger transitions. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with eight business leaders from global corporations who had successfully executed mergers and acquisitions, along with a review of publicly available …

Recall Of Varied Stimuli, Zachary Tyler Cain

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Understanding Motivation And Student Engagement In Campus Mental Health Services, Vishwa Shukla

Student Publications and Presentations

Universities across the United States invest significant resources into student mental health services, yet many Generation Z students do not fully engage with the support available to them. Students consistently report high levels of stress and psychological distress, yet many students do not take the step of using available services. Existing research suggests that motivation may play a critical role in whether students engage at all. Drawing from self-determination theory, this presentation explores how autonomous motivation, the sense that seeking help is a personally meaningful and self-directed choice, may influence whether students choose to seek support in the first place. …

Interoperability For Human-Ai Teaming And Decision-Making In Extreme Contexts, Amber King

Psychology Student Publications

• Emergency response agencies are consistently challenged with communication breakdowns that limit coordination, where these interoperability failures contributed to the tragic loss of lives [11, 13].
• Human-AI teaming encompasses complexities, including shared knowledge, trust, interdependence, and effective communication that are essential for improvement of performance & decision-making, while poor integration of AI can create overreliance that hinders coordination [4, 7, 9, 10, 14]. 
• The current study aims to investigate how AI reliability & explainability affect decision accuracy and perceived team interoperability, while questioning how trust in AI can impact an individual’s decision.

We’Re Playing Basketball, Lana Ammash

Psychology Student Publications

African American (AA) youth face a host of sociological challenges that impact their marginalized status, especially during their formative years of racial/ethnic identity development that compromise self-esteem (Cross et al., 1991). As a result, racial socialization strategies are employed within Black communities to offset these negative consequences by bolstering ego strength and Black pride.

Therefore, a local afterschool program in an AA community, provides enrichment programs for success, academic achievement, and positive self-esteem using Afrocentric models. This includes programs focused on building ego strength and self-esteem through sports’ programs, such as basketball, as sports can promote social and emotional growth, …

Rapid Evidence Assessment: Eyewitness Testimony Of Anomalous Events, Tanna-Leigh Wesson

Psychology Student Publications

1. Memory is best when events and information either fit existing schema, or clearly violate known schema, while memory is weaker for events that are unrelated to any schema (Greveetal.,2019).

2. Anomalous events are not reproducible and cannot be examined through traditional experimental scientific methods, meaning that it is studied through sighting reports. Therefore, eyewitnesses have an important role in reporting information (Mavrakis,2023).

3. Collecting accurate information is important for perceiving and understanding national security threats, such as drone warfare (CPNI,2022).

4. Currently, the method of collecting information and data from witnesses has been insufficient and prone to error (daSilva,2022). …

Aces And Trust In Courts, Michael A. Wesley Jr.

Psychology Student Publications

Trust in the American court system is a foundational pillar of the legal system, based on the public's belief that authorities will make fair and just decisions.1 Therefore, understanding what factors degrade the public’s faith in the system is crucial. Most research on this topic examines the amount of trust placed in the police or the government.2, 3, 4However, there are no articles that investigate the relationship between trauma and trust in American courts. This is an issue because, as previously mentioned, individuals who have any number of ACEs are more likely to encounter the criminal justice system, including courts.5Understanding …

Age, Income, And The Discounting Of Delayed And Probabilistic Rewards: The Roles Of Financial Resources And Attribute Salience, Haoran Wan

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Many everyday decisions involve outcomes that are both delayed and probabilistic. Although previous research has reported inconsistent age-related effects on discounting, few studies have taken into account the multi-attribute nature of real-world choices or the moderating role of financial resources. Accordingly, the present research examined the interactive effects of age, income, and multi-attribute contexts to test how resource constraints and task dimensionality moderate attribute salience. Across two studies (total N = 600), stratified samples of younger (35-45) and older (62-72) adults with lower (<$60,000) and higher (>$100,000) annual household incomes completed standard and multi-attribute adjusting-amount discounting tasks. In Study 1 (Delay Discounting), …

Implementing Population Health Management (Phm) Across An Integrated Care System In England, Using Action Learning Sets And An Embedded, Formative Process Evaluation., Julian Elston, Sheena Asthana, Felix Gradinger

Peninsula Medical School

AbstractIntroduction: Population Health Management (PHM) is a UK priority for Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), aiming to deliver proactive, preventative, person-centred care using integrated health and care datasets. However, evidence on implementation in primary care remains limited.Methods: This comparative case study used embedded researchers, ethnography, interviews, and observations to formatively evaluate a 24-month PHM programme across 31 Primary Care Networks in one ICS. Data were thematically analysed using Excel and NVivo, with findings fed back to participants to guide programme delivery.Results: Around 200 stakeholders participated in Action Learning Sets, fostering cross-sector collaboration within four localities. Few innovations, developed using integrated datasets, …

Genetic Algorithms With Psychological Tension Analysis For Music (Gaptam), Andrew Bowman

Theses

This work investigates a structurally grounded approach to algorithmic music composition using a stochastic Context Free Grammar (CFG) evolved through a genetic algorithm. While existing systems such as live-coding environments, DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations), and statistical models generate musical material, they typically lack explicit hierarchical organization, despite evidence that listeners perceive music sequentially and structurally. In this framework, derivation trees generated from an CFG serve as compositional candidates, which are evolved using subtree-based crossover and mutation. Fitness evaluation combines prior melodic heuristics with tension-based insights from music cognition research, introducing musically informed structure into the evolutionary process. A genetic system …

Critical Perspectives On Refugee And Migrant Integration In Education: Grassroots Narratives From Multiregional Settings, Karen Paul

International Journal of Human Rights Education

In Critical Perspectives on Refugee and Migrant Integration in Education: Grassroots Narratives from Multiregional Settings, edited by Marcus Otto and Tania Saeed (2025), integration is not treated as a neutral educational goal but as a contested, politically loaded term shaped by displacement, migration, and social division. Developed within the Peace and Human Rights Education series, through the Georg Arnhold Program, the volume brings scholars and practitioners into dialogue. The contributors include university-based researchers, educator-scholars, and practice-based professionals working in education and related fields. Together, they explore how education operates simultaneously as a space of possibility and exclusion. Rather than …

Black Panther Woman: The Political And Spiritual Life Of Ericka Huggins, Stacey C. Ault, Susan Roberta Katz

International Journal of Human Rights Education

As human rights educators from different generations and racial identities, we wanted to read and review Black Panther Woman about Ericka Huggins for different but equally powerful personal reasons. For Stacey, her best friend, Dr. Linda Garrett, was a Black Panther scholar, making her, as a Black  woman, interested in learning more about Ericka as a mother, comrade, and activist. For Susan, Ericka’s case in the 1970s profoundly impacted her political consciousness as a White college student and motivated her commitment to social justice activism. For all readers of the International Journal of Human Rights Education, we strongly recommend this …

Danza Azteca As A Form Of Resistance To White Settler Colonialism, Miguel Martínez

International Journal of Human Rights Education

White settler colonialism is a systematic process by which Europeans and their descendants migrate to and settle in a new land with the explicit expectation of taking over the land, regardless of any Indigenous peoples that may live on the land (Speed, 2017; Wolfe, 2006). The Indigenous people who reside there can be exploited for labor, removed, exterminated or some combination of the three. In the process of settling the land, the settlers rename places, transform land use, create a new sense of cultural identity, and work to eliminate any remnants of what had existed prior to their arrival. Indigenous …

The Rights Of The Child: The Actual Situation In German Schools, David Rott, Daniel Bertels

International Journal of Human Rights Education

There is consensus on the importance of respecting children’s rights, particularly within the school environment. Children’s rights are implemented differently across countries. This article examines the current status of children’s rights in the German school system. However, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is often only partially implemented in everyday schooling and educational work in Germany. This overview describes the integration of children’s rights into the German school system and their consideration in the domains of protection, promotion, and participation. Studies in the respective areas and school-based implementation options are presented. The article offers recommendations …

Crimmigration Pedagogy In An Age Of State Violence: Reclaiming Human Rights Education In Public Health And Social Work, Juan Carlos Ruiz Malagon, Belinda Marie Hernandez-Arriaga, Alonso R. Reyna Rivarola

International Journal of Human Rights Education

This essay calls for a transformative shift in public health and social work education to confront the racialized violence embedded in U.S. immigration enforcement, especially intensified during the second Trump administration (2025 -2029). Policies and enforcement events like the reinstated Remain in Mexico program and the widespread ICE raids in Los Angeles are part of a troubling rise of "crimmigration," which blends immigration and criminal law. This merging has normalized cruelty, heightened legal insecurity, and fostered fear within immigrant communities, leading to a sharp increase in mass detentions and deportations. Despite the sociopolitical reality, many public health and social work …

From Bars To Bytes: Ai, Digital Dignity, And The Fight For Incarcerated Youth’S Futures, Karima M. Almazroui

International Journal of Human Rights Education

Over 1.4 million youth enter detention annually, confronting what scholars term a digital death sentence, exclusion from the literacies and infrastructures that underpin education, employment, and civic participation. This empirically grounded mixed-methods study investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) in carceral education either reinforces surveillance or enables rehabilitation, demonstrating that outcomes depend less on algorithmic sophistication than on the ethical, pedagogical, and governance contexts in which AI is deployed.

Drawing on comparative data from the United States, Japan, Norway, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the research integrates cross-national policy analysis, 78 semi-structured interviews, quantitative outcome measures, and participatory action research …

Human Rights Education, Racism And Early Childhood Education In Brazil: A Systematic Review, Ana Tereza Ramos De Jesus Ferreira, Juliene Madureira Ferreira

International Journal of Human Rights Education

Brazil was the last country in South America to put an end to the 388-year slave trade. To justify the trade of people from Africa, a series of actions were taken to dehumanize the Black  population, namely racism. Thus, the culture, religion, clothes, and phenotypical characteristics of Black people were considered inferior to those of the White race, and this continues to impact the lives of the Black population, which suffers from social inequality, low-quality education, and low-paid jobs up to this day. Therefore, this review aims to investigate Brazilian literature on activities in early childhood education (ECE) to fight …

‘Sprung From The Land Itself’: Rooted Human Rights Education As Critical Global Citizenship Praxis, Monisha Bajaj, David A. Tow

International Journal of Human Rights Education

This article discusses the field of Human Rights Education (HRE) and its intersections with the field of Global Citizenship Education (GCE), both now more than 60 years into their existence as discourse and practice communities. We trace the emergence of transformative, critical, and decolonial forms of HRE and offer a new conceptual framework for Rooted HRE. Rooted HRE offers a transformative approach to fostering critical global citizenship (CGC) by embedding global frameworks within the immediacy of local struggles. It draws on critical perspectives of global citizenship (Andreotti, 2011; Gaudelli, 2016), Transformative Human Rights Education (THRED) (Bajaj et al., 2016), and …

Volume 10, Monisha Bajaj, Jazzmin C. Gota, David A. Tow

International Journal of Human Rights Education

No abstract provided.

Pengaruh Kultur Terhadap Pengawasan Keuangan Negara, H. Bohari

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

Abstract

Making Fun Of The Leader Of The Free World: South Park And Its Critique Of Donald Trump, Kenneth H. Mcmillen

Linfield University Student Symposium: A Celebration of Scholarship and Creative Achievement

South Park is one of the cornerstones of American television. It also is a show that doesn’t shy away from controversy or social commentary. In its runtime it has taken aim at celebrities, world leaders, movements, and entire groups of people. The latest of its targets is President Donald Trump, who has been one of the central subjects of the shows two 2025 seasons. To examine how these episodes manage to critique trump so thoroughly without alienating his supporters, I ask the following research question: How does South Park use parody to make critiques about Donald Trump’s ego?  I …

Effects Of A Context-Based Intervention On Sidelining Teacher Bias Towards Students With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Marisa Kortright

GS4 Student Scholars Symposium

This study aims to investigate the impact of an empathetic intervention on pre-service teachers to minimize bias against students diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Behaviors typically associated with ADHD, such as inattention and hyperactivity, correspond to two primary categories that teachers identify as disruptive in the classroom (Sun & Shek, 2012). Numerous studies have demonstrated evidence of discrimination in the classroom against students diagnosed with ADHD (Cortnett-Ruiz & Hendricks, 1993; Metzger & Hamilton, 2021). Moreover, teachers frequently report feeling unprepared to support these students and experience increased stress levels (Green et al., 2002; Kirchhoff, 2023). Context-based interventions have successfully sidelined …

Assessing Decision Making Under Risk And Dynamic Task Environments In Humans, Dylan J. Cato

GS4 Student Scholars Symposium

This research evaluates the theoretical foundations of recent embodied and enacted decision- making models(Baker., et al  2022) , specifically investigating whether "urgency" serves as a domain-general mechanism for reward-rate maximization. Across three experiments using a reward-performance contingency, we compare traditional decision-making frameworks with urgency-based theories to determine how participants navigate task demands and whether optimality assumptions hold (Reynaud, et al 2020). A primary focus involves testing whether motor excitability increases directly with evidence, or if "higher-level" deliberation occurs in parallel with se Using the Generalized Drift-Diffusion Model (GDDM) framework via PyDDM  (Shinn, et al 2020), we will …

The Impact Of Social Emotional Learning Interventions On Students, Kaiya J. Nelson

Research & Creative Achievement Day

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has become increasingly prevalent in schools, with 83% of schools nationwide implementing SEL curricula or programs as of 2024, compared to 46% in 2018. In Minnesota, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) framework identifies five core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making—as foundational to student development. SEL supports students in managing emotions, building relationships, and making responsible choices, while fostering a positive and inclusive school climate. Despite growing adoption, challenges such as limited instructional time, the need for culturally responsive practices, adequate mental health staffing, and strong family …

Does Improved Reaction Time Correlate With Improvements In Sport Performance? A 10-Week Smart Reaction Training Intervention In Division Ii Collegiate Football Athletes, Caleb M. Forst, Christopher C. Mayer

Research & Creative Achievement Day

Introduction: Neurocognitive reaction time plays a critical role in football performance by influencing perceptual processing speed, decision-making, and motor execution. Slower reaction time has been associated with increased injury risk and reduced neuromuscular control, yet limited longitudinal research exists within Division II collegiate football populations. This study examined whether a 10-week smart reaction training program improves reaction time and whether these improvements are associated with performance outcomes, measured by the number of accurate hits. Methods: Thirty-one athletes from the Winona State Football team began the intervention and were divided into position groups (QB, WR, DL, OL); 19 completed the study. …

Gender Of Perpetrator And Political Affiliation In Relation To Violence Myth Acceptance, Kylie S. Buck, Paige Christianson, Kaiden Barnes, Kyra Nelson

Research & Creative Achievement Day

Increasing political polarization has left political parties at an impasse regarding having bipartisan conversation about pressing social issues including rape and domestic violence. The present study examined how different demographic factors influence perceptions of interpersonal violence. It was hypothesized that identification by political status, abuse type, and perpetrator would yield different results. Using an online survey, participants (N = 223, 81% female, 88% white, 48% republican, 35.4% freshman) were randomly assigned to 1 of 8 scenarios describing differing instances of interpersonal violence. Results from a three way between groups ANOVA indicated that republicans view domestic violence and rape as a …

Exploring Reaction Times In D1 Female Volleyball Players, Lydia Seymour

GS4 Student Scholars Symposium

The purpose of this study was to examine reaction time in a group of Division I female volleyball athletes. Data was collected over a consecutive four-week timespan using the Dynavision D2 training system. The Dynavision D2 training system consists of a mounted board with a series of light-up buttons and a screen in the middle, also referred to as the t-scope. In this study, buttons would light up, at random, for one second at a time. Athletes were tasked to press each button as fast as possible before the next button would light up. In addition, the t-scope screen presented …