Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Determinants Of Academic Performance Of African American Males, Marvin K. Hall

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

In this research on the academic performance of African American males I used data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study: Base Year 1988 to examine the factors that effect academic performance of one small group, the African American male. Independent variables that were used were SES, self-efficacy, self-esteem, two cultural variables, marital status of parents, and discipline. After controlling for SES two variables were related to GPA. The higher the self-efficacy of African American males the higher their GPA and the more discipline problems they had the lower their GPA. Results of this research identify the need to address cultural …

What Is Positive Disclosure And To Whom Do We Disclose? The Role Of Topics, Gender And Type Of Relationship In Positive Self-Disclosure, Elizabeth Landers Ford

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

This study examined what topics (including experiences, feelings, and thoughts) people define as positive self-disclosure. The study also looked at reasons people generate for self-disclosing versus not disclosing something positive. Male and female students spontaneously described a past experience or feeling they perceive to be personal and positive. They then indicated whether or not they disclosed about these experiences or feelings to their father, mother, same-sex friend, and a past or present significant other/spouse. These descriptions were coded into one of eight categories: Religion, Family Development, Friendship, Sex, Romance, Self-Confidence, Achievement, and Helping Behavior, plus a Miscellaneous category. There were …

Social Class And Art Therapy, Heather B. Ring

EVMS School of Health Professions Theses & Dissertations

Research regarding social class and its effects is limited in mental health services, including art therapy. The purpose of this study was to increase awareness about social class differences and their effects on therapeutic services by exploring how social class impacts adolescents’ attitudes and approach toward artmaking as a form of expression and communication. Two artmaking workshops were conducted with two groups of adolescents from contrasting socioeconomic settings. A sample of 14 volunteers participated. It was hypothesized that adolescents from both groups would use art as an effective and desirable means of personal communication and expression.

Results are based on …

Color And Depression In The Diagnostic Drawing Series, Cara Emily Levitt

EVMS School of Health Professions Theses & Dissertations

One of the most interesting and widely held assumptions by clinicians who used projective drawings was that the absence of color may indicate depression. The research about color’s relationship to depression was ambiguous, limited and dated. In this study it was hypothesized that the absence or presence of color in the Feeling Drawing of the Diagnostic Drawing Series [DDS] will have a positive correlation with a diagnosis of Major Depression. To test this hypothesis the colors both in the DDS archives Major Depression group and comparison group were counted and then statistically analyze to determine if specified colors were present …

Heuristic Research Study: Implications For Art Therapy In Smoking Cessation, Sarah Roberts

EVMS School of Health Professions Theses & Dissertations

This study explored the implications for the use of art therapy in smoking cessation, using a heuristic research design. The participant is a 22-year-old female smoker currently enrolled in the graduate art therapy program at Eastern Virginia Medical School. The data in this study consisted of spontaneous art expressions, audio-recordings, and visual and written journal entries throughout smoking cessation. Audio-voice recordings were made during art making and were followed by reflective writings about the art-making experience. Over an 8-week time period the researcher refrained from smoking and relapsed on three occasions. Each period of smoking cessation and relapse was considered …

Child Psychological Abuse Sexual Attitudes And Sexual Satisfaction: An Examination Of Disclosure Gender And Perpetrator Relationship Differences, Natasha Coy

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The current project examined the associations between childhood psychological abuse, disclosure, and perpetrator relationship on sexual attitudes and satisfaction among adults. A total of 274 female graduate and undergraduate psychology students from Old Dominion University were recruited. Participants anonymously filled out the survey online. It was hypothesized that there would be a positive relationship between childhood psychological abuse and sexual communion and permissiveness. In terms of perpetrator relationship, it was hypothesized that as the objective relationship between the individual and perpetrator became closer, sexual attitudes and satisfaction would be more negatively affected. It was also hypothesized that one's subjective relationship …

Differential Police Treatment Of Domestic And Nondomestic Assaults, Gina Michelle Sajko

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The current study examines the effects of type of assault and victim gender on police response. Victim accounts of domestic and nondomestic assaults in the San Diego region were examined. This study found that domestic assaults were significantly less likely to result in arrest than nondomestic assaults. Female victims of domestic assaults were more likely to receive police referrals to outside agencies. Assaults with victim injury were more likely to result in arrest for domestic assaults, and within the sample as a whole. The gender of the victim had no effect on arrest.

Citizen's Satisfaction With The Police, Kim Barshanet Baskerville

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this research project is to examine three competing models of citizen satisfaction with the police: 1) citizen characteristics, 2) citizen experience with the police, and 3) citizen quality of life issues. Data were taken from Criminal Victimization and Perceptions of Community Safety in 12 Cities, 1998. The relationship between citizen satisfaction and the three models were tested by examining different types of contact between police and citizens, race, age, gender, and quality of life, which was measured by satisfaction with neighborhood and satisfaction with city. In addition, an item labeled disorder, which takes into consideration acts of …

Comparing Domestic Assaults In Military And Non-Military Populations: A Test Of Social Learning Theory, Crystal S. Carey

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This study examined factors relating to the severity of domestic assaults in military and non-military populations by examining a sample of 599 clients admitted to battered women's shelters over a 22-month period. This study addressed the following question: What differences, if any, exist between the severity of domestic assaults committed by military and non-military offenders, and what explains those differences?

The following factors as they may relate to severity of domestic assault are measured: batterer race, batterer income, victim income, batterer military status, and weapon involvement. Analyses reveal no significant differences in injury severity between assaults perpetrated by military and …

Cnning And Showdown: Iraq: News, New Media, And Popular Culture, G. Kim Blank

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Kim Blank's CNNing and Showdown Iraq, too, provides an innovative model for the interaction and mutual transfusion of case study and the work of theorizing. Although the backdrop to Blank's essay is CNN's cultural significance and the programming it ran under the SHOWDOWN: Iraq banner, it repeatedly returns to the busy intersection of media, technology, popular culture, and mass culture. Characterized by its author as restless, the piece strategically employs a non-linear discursive strategy deliberately mimicking the practices of channel surfing and the constant interruption of the commercial break. It re-contextualizes, in other words, the critical perspective by re-inventing it …

Reading In The Future: Literacy And The Time Of The Internet, David R. Cole

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

David R. Cole's Reading in the Future: Literacy and the Time of the Internet locates the literacies of the internet -- itself read as the end game of western technology or the Machina Mundi, the Great Chain of the World that has a centre that is everywhere and a circumference that is nowhere -- in a contradictory space. But Cole also self-consciously locates his own writing at a moment in time when the initial technological hype of the internet is subsiding in the face of the boredom of informational overload and the internet is emerging as both an unlimited …

Who Owns The Medium Owns The Message? The Ambiguity Of The Right To Communicate In The Age Of Convergence, Aliaa Ibrahim Dakroury

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In her essay on The Ambiguity of the Right to Communicate in the Age of Convergence, Aliaa Dakroury frames the issue mediation in terms of media ownership and control. The question asked in the title -- Who Owns the Medium Owns the Message? -- in its rhetorical rather than literal form, indicates the skepticism with which Dakroury approaches too narrow a vision of determination. In the terms of his case study, this means questioning the apparent incommensurability of the economic convergence of multi-national media conglomerates and the right to communicate. To do so, Dakroury offers substantial analyses of both the …

On Bill V. Mullen's Afro-Orientalism, Graham Barnfield

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For two decades Edward Said's Orientalism has occupied a significant place in how we think through the cultural relations between what we now call ‘North’ and ‘South’. Conceived in the 1970s, Said’s model mounted a challenge to readers in the west, suggesting they should unlearn what they know of the east. Despite its influence, one weakness of this approach was the underlying suggestion that orientalism was a one-way street, constituting a fixed set of perceptions or timeless discourses. In and without the Orientalist imagination, what is to be done with those in ‘the Occident’ who find themselves treated …

Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology Of Poopreport.Com, Marisol Cortez

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In engaging with the culture of filth, Marisol Cortez's Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of PoopReport.com questions contemporary cultural criticism's emphasis on shit's textual ambivalence. In order to avoid relapsing into either the Bakhtinian celebration of the grotesque or the too narrowly conceived Kristevan category of the abject, Cortez argues, and to find a way out of this theoretical dualism, one must rethink the very categories of filth and waste through an ecocritical reading of the scatological -- the meeting of brown and green -- performed at the confluence of ecology, cultural studies, and Marxist political economy. This perspective …

Media Discourse: Social Semiotics And The Study Of Multimodal Discourse. An Interview With Theo Van Leeuwen, Theo Van Leeuwen, Judith Reitstaetter, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

This interview article is intended to provide both an overview of the contribution Theo van Leeuwen has made to the field of semiotics and approach his work from an unconventional angle. The first aspect of our aim is covered in the form of an introduction comprised of a short biographical note, a list of recent publications and short reviews of van Leeuwen’s major works. The second aspect of what we hope to accomplish is tackled in the form of the interview itself. In this, we have tried to balance general questions – e.g. about the epistemological …

Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, And Cultures Of The Screen, Christine Scodari, Becky Mulvaney

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Christine Scodari's and Becky Mulvaney's Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, and Cultures of the Screen investigates the 2003 romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give, written and directed by Nancy Meyers as exceptional in its featuring a fifty-something woman as leading actress. Beginning with an analysis of the filmic text itself, the authors do not confine themselves to it, but go on to critically engage with its reception in both the press and academia. While the focus is thus shifted from the film to the meta- and para-texts produced in the course of its reception and promotion, the underlying questions asked …

Hiv/Aids And Condom Usage: Factors That Contribute To African American Women's Vulnerability To Hiv Infection, Monica P. Washington

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

HIV/AIDS poses an enormous health threat to African Americans, specifically African American women. According to the Center for Disease Control "1 in 160 African American women are believed to be infected with HIV (Center for Disease Control 1999:1). In 2000, although African American women only represented 12% of the female population, they accounted for 64% of HIV cases reported among women (The White House 2000; National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases 2004).

This study examined HIV/AIDS and African American women and attempted to answer the question: Why are African American women not consistently using condoms to protect themselves against …

Factors Influencing The Decision To Disclose After Sexual Assault, Courtney A. Hanley

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Virginians Aligned Against Sexual Assault (VAASA, 2004) report that I in 4 women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Despite the prevalence of the crime, most women do not report acts of sexual assault to the police, making sexual assault, and rape in particular, one of the most underreported crimes (Backman, 1998). Research on has focused primarily on third-party reactions to sexual assault and victim culpability, but rarely seeks data directly from the victim in order to understand the psychological process of disclosing, or delaying disclosure, after an assault. Participants, 44 sexual assault victims seeking counseling at a non-profit rape …

The Relationship Of Adult Romantic Attachment, Body Image, And Gender Role Identity To Female Sexual Functioning And Sexual Assertiveness, Kathryn Nuckols Shaw

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Given that as many as a third of the world's women are affected by problems with sexual functioning, scientific research on the roots and correlates of sexual difficulties is crucial. The purpose of the present study was to examine specific psychological factors that may be associated with sexual functioning and sexual assertiveness in women. The variables examined were adult romantic attachment, body image, body image in a sexual context, and traditional ideas about gender interactions.

Participants were 215 female students in various psychology classes at Old Dominion University. All were heterosexual and had been sexually active within the past year. …

Quantifying Vulnerability To Critical Infrastructure, Barry Charles Ezell

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Military and civilian leaders have the responsibility to protect our Nation's critical infrastructure, communities, and symbols of American power from terrorists, home and abroad, as well as from natural disasters. To this end, assessments are conducted to reduce vulnerability. The literature offers multiple definitions of vulnerability and measurement has not been adequately addressed. Thus, the purpose of this research has been to develop and deploy a systems-based model that quantifies vulnerability to critical infrastructure. This research defines critical infrastructure vulnerability as a measure of the susceptibility of critical infrastructure to threat scenarios. Vulnerability is a function of (1) threat scenario, …

The Effects Of Parcels And Latent Variable Scores On The Detection Of Interactions In Structural Equation Modeling, Thomas D. Fletcher

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Numerous theories in the behavioral and organizational sciences involve the regression of an outcome variable on component terms and their product to evaluate interaction effects. There are numerous statistical difficulties with this multiple regression approach. The most serious is measurement error, requiring the use of structural equation modeling. Jöreskog and Yang (1996) described a nonlinear structural equation modeling procedure that incorporates mean structures in the covariance analysis. They demonstrated that only one indicator for the product term is necessary for model identification. Unfortunately, the Jöreskog-Yang procedure leads to biased estimates of the product coefficient. In this dissertation, I propose that …

The Link Between Corporal Punishment And Teen Pregnancy, Jennifer M. Hagberg

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This study explored the relationship between corporal punishment and teen pregnancy among women participating in the 2000 survey round of the NLSY Child and Young Adult Surveys. Zero order correlations were used to examine the bivariate relationship between the corporal punishment and teen pregnancy. OLS regression was used to determine if a direct relationship exists between corporal punishment and teen pregnancy after controlling for a host of variables. It was hypothesized that the more frequently a respondent received corporal punishment, the more likely she was to have reported a pregnancy during adolescence, and that this relationship would manifest itself primarily …

An Editorial Introduction To Reconstructing Media, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Media [pl. of medium, from the Latin noun medium, meaning ‘the middle’ or ‘the public eye’]. Although no longer one of the top buzzwords in the humanities or cultural criticism, if you prefer, ‘the media’ are still around, in the sense of both an ever more elusive and ramified empirical reality and as a conceptual field marked by the theoretical debates of several decades. Whether dealing with synchronic analysis or historical change, a specific medium or the media in general, a singular text, a group of texts or genre, studies relying on – or should we say, …

Fractured Identities: Siblings And Doubles In Video Games, Laurie N. Taylor

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In her essay on “Fractured Identities: Siblings and Doubles in Video Games” Laurie Taylor explores how certain norms of video game design – originally derived from technological constraints of code space and processing speed – continue as the narrative parameters of many if not most contemporary video games. Synthesizing approaches from literary studies and narratology, Taylor offers an innovative angle on the fractured identities of doubles and siblings as the narrative correspondence to now largely obsolete technological constraints. Game-play, related to but nevertheless distinct from the literary type of narrative, as Taylor insists, is a key factor in determining what …

The Role Of Inferential Accuracy In Performance Rating Accuracy: A Field Study Of Teacher Performance Appraisal, Cynthia L. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations in Urban Services - Urban Management

This study first assessed the accuracy of performance appraisal ratings of high school teachers in comparison to the achievement of their students as measured by Virginia's Standard of Learning (SOL) tests. The overall performance rating scores of 145 teachers were compared to the pass rates of their students on SOL end-of-course tests. The rating sub-scores in each of four domains of performance were also compared to the SOL pass rates.

The study then tested the influence of Inferential Accuracy, a model proposed by Jackson (1972), on rating accuracy overall and of individual raters in the study. Inferential Accuracy is comprised …

Grand Strategy Analysis: A Proto-Theoretical Approach, Patrick Magee

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

International relations scholarship begins and ends with assumptions—about human nature; about human interaction; about starting points, relative information, and outcomes. Such assumptions are necessary to further the intellectual coherence and development of scholarly work. However, they restrict the applicability of scholarly research to those situations that parallel the work's underlying assumptions.

This work argues the body of international relations scholarship as a whole would benefit from the development of a pre-theory state, absent any assumptions about international relations, from which observers can identify those works of scholarship that are most effective in explaining perceptive states and the strategic decisions taken …

Socioeconomic Attainments Of Africans Versus African-Americans In The United States, Azeb Berhane

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

Using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) of the 2000 U.S. census, the socioeconomic attainments of African immigrants was compared to African Americans in the United States. This comparison was made within the context of assimilation perspective, human capital perspective, and the family investment model. Consistent with previous research findings, the current study found that African immigrants have higher educational attainments than African-Americans in the United States. However, when breaking down the African group by country of birth, African-Americans were found to have higher educational attainments than a few African countries. Generally, the results reveal that African …

An Examination Into The Effects Of Social Positioning And Capitalist Immersion On Gendered Attitudes Towards Homosexuality In The United States, Fiona J. Blee

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

Previous research on attitudes towards homosexuality has concentrated on characteristics of individuals, and neglected the capitalist structure of society that provides the contextual setting for the creation and maintenance of cultural attitudes.

This thesis uses responses collected in the general social survey of the United States between 1993 and 1998, to provide a more comprehensive explanation of differences in attitudes towards homosexuality, through an analysis of social position and the capitalist agenda. The analysis revealed significant relationships between sex, age, race, income, beliefs regarding the domestication of women, and attitudes towards homosexuality.

The analysis showed that respondents categorized as black …

Downward Comparison As An Intervention To Lower Self-Reported Risk-Taking Behaviors, John P. Barile

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

This research investigated the utility of using first-person editorial-style stories as a means to lower the occurrence of self-reported risk-taking behaviors such as drunk driving and red-light running in undergraduate college students. This study assessed the frequency of risk-taking behaviors of college students before and after a three-week online intervention. Students were randomized into one of three conditions. Two risk taking treatment groups read and rated stories about a college student that had suffered a severe consequence from either drunk driving or red-light running. A third group received non-driving college stories that involved no health risk. The stories were presented …

Using Signal Detection Theory To Examine The Effects Of Workload And Likelihood Displays On Human Responses To Alarms, Ernesto A. Bustamante

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of workload and likelihood displays on human responses to alarms through the use of Signal Detection Theory (SDT). Thirty students performed compensatory tracking, resource management, and system monitoring tasks. They interacted with a Binary Alarm System (BAS) or a Likelihood Alarm System (LAS) during varying workload levels. Overall Response Rate (ORR), False Alarm Response Rate (FARR), True Alarm Response Rate (TARR), Sensitivity (d'), and Bias (c), were used as alarm response measures. Root Mean Squared Tracking Error (RMSTE) and Root Mean Squared Resource Management Error (RMSRMF) reflected primary-task performance. Proportion …