Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Wroclaw University Of Technology Knowledge Repository: Project Objectives, Anna Walek

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Knowledge Repository is a project created in the Library and Scientific Information Centre of Wroclaw University of Technology (WrUT). Its main task will be collecting, sharing, and promoting scientific publications of researchers, postgraduates and students of WrUT. It will be also used for bibliometric analysis and reporting research output of WrUT scientific community.Knowledge Repository will closely cooperate with other databases and information services created in WrUT, for example: Research offer, Key equipment, Projects and Inventions.

The repository will also be a solution supporting communication between researchers and a platform for cooperation between science and business, based on the formula of …

The Easy Expensive Way Doesn't Work. Why Not Try The Difficult Cheap Way?, Karl A. Koehler

Purdue Policy Research Institute (PPRI) Policy Briefs

Smokestack chasing and related ad hoc efforts to create techno/commercial clusters are examples of failed economic development activities, because they are generally poorly integrated into the networks of interactions that support a local, state, or national economy. This is a general problem because it is difficult to characterize and understand such complex webs of interactions. Thus, it is the dynamic complexity of combined state innovation systems, related policy systems, and the broader economy that stands between state governors and legislators, their piecemeal enactment of ‘economic development initiatives’, and the economic growth they desire. This brief describes the social, governmental, and …

The Interaction Of Gradient And Categorical Processes Of Long-Distance Vowel-To-Vowel Assimilation In Kazan Tatar, Jenna T. Conklin

Open Access Theses

Vowel harmony and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation are long-distance assimilatory processes wherein certain vowels trigger systematic changes in adjacent vowels; harmony effects phonological change, resulting in phonemic alternation, while coarticulation effects phonetic change. This thesis offers a novel acoustic analysis of the coarticulatory processes present in disharmonic words in Kazan Tatar, a language with left-to-right palatal harmony. While right-to-left palatal coarticulation is found to be widespread, left-to-right palatal coarticulation is virtually nonexistent in Tatar. It is hypothesized that gradient and categorical processes sharing the same triggers, targets, target feature, and direction cannot coexist; the diachronic implication for Tatar is that, once coarticulation …

Consumer Inferences Of Corporate Social Responsibility (Csr) Claims On Packaged Foods, Gaeul Kim

Open Access Theses

With the growing public demands in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of the food industry, CSR claims have begun to appear on food packages, as companies started communicating their CSR initiatives to consumers. Although food packages emerged as an important CSR communication tool, consumers' processing of CSR claims and the effects of these claims on product evaluations still remain unknown. In this regard, the present study carries two important research questions. First, do non-health/nutrition-related CSR claims influence consumers' product evaluations, such as perceived health benefits or tastes? If so, how does the effect of CSR claims differ by type of CSR …

Negotiating Trans Activism In Guatemala City: The Case Of Redmmutrans, Maria Alejandra Wundram Pimentel

Open Access Theses

The purpose of this ethnographic project is to investigate how the activists in REDMMUTRANS, a trans women rights activist group in Guatemala City, understand their individual and collective identity as trans. By analyzing the way REDMMUTRANS navigates and negotiates national and transnational discourses on gender, this thesis takes particular attention to the influence that activist practice has had in individual's adoption of 'trans' as an identity category. By looking at the way REDMMUTRANS's members construct their collective identity, I explore the interactions between the transnational development industry, localized experiences, and activist practice has in constructing what 'trans' means in the …

Exploring Knowledge And Beliefs Of Human Papillomavirus (Hpv) Infection And Hpv Vaccination Among U.S. Chinese International Students, Haijuan Gao

Open Access Dissertations

The Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine provides an effective prevention strategy against HPV infection, cervical cancer, and genital warts. As increasing numbers of Chinese international students (CIS) are living and studying in United States, this specific ethnic group has become the candidate for HPV vaccination promotion. Despite an increased awareness and knowledge of HPV infection and HPV vaccine among U.S. college students, studies focused on CIS as a unique ethnic group regarding HPV vaccine promotion were limited. This project is the first time aimed to examine CIS's awareness, knowledge and beliefs about HPV infection, HPV vaccine, cervical cancer and genital warts. …

Suitability Of Commercial Certification Assessments For Film And Video Editing Courses, Bobby L Chastain

Open Access Dissertations

A study on the microstructure development of as-cast Cu-Mn alloys based around the congruent minimum at 34.6 wt % Mn and 873 °C was performed. Initially, this was to evaluate the alloy as an alternative to wide freezing range Pb and Sn bronzes that are plagued with porosity. The shallow minimum and associated narrow freezing ranges around the congruent point result in a completely cellular (non-dendritic) solidification morphology for a composition range ~3 wt % Mn about the congruent composition (C _c). The degree of cellular solidification was found to depend on the mold material. Increased mold conductivity lead …

Nurturing Transitions: Housewife Organizations In (Colonial) Indonesia, 1900-1972, Liberty P. Sproat

Open Access Dissertations

From 1900-1972, housewife organizations in the Netherlands Indies and Indonesia assisted the population of the archipelago in adapting to the political upheaval that attended Indonesia's national liberation from the Netherlands. Under the Ethical Policy (1900-1942), the Association of Housewives sought to "uplift" indigenous society in the Netherlands Indies through teaching women household management skills including proper sanitation, hygiene, and food preservation methods. Through educational and social welfare initiatives, Dutch housewives maintained the Netherlands' control over the territory while promoting Dutch development efforts. At the same time, the Indonesian women's movement aligned with the Indonesian nationalist movement, as exemplified in the …

The Impact Of Early Life Adversity On Later Life Health, Abigail R Howard

Open Access Dissertations

The preponderance of the literature on early life adversity suggests that adversity has negative effects on later life health; however, an emerging body of literature suggests that early life adversity may develop a sense of resilience in individuals. Drawing from life course perspective, the present research seeks to address this by asking how 16 early life adversities affect individuals' health over a 20 year period in adulthood. Further, the present research seeks to understand how individuals' perceptions of their health over the next few years may actually impact their health seven years later. In general, the more adversity a person …

Documento Conceptual Sobre Redes De Excelencia Para La Investigación Y La Educación, Suresh V. Garimella, David B. Janes, Anne Slaughter Andrew

PPRI Digital Library

“Redes de Excelencia” focalizadas permitirán que las instituciones en América Latina desarrollen ecosistemas de investigación y educación de un modo mucho más rápido que si siguieran procesos "orgánicos" o locales. Una vez implementados, estos ecosistemas no solo permitirán profundas transformaciones que lleven a economías basadas en el conocimiento, sino que también desempeñarán roles claves en las redes necesarias para los sistemas de innovación regionales.

Para acelerar el desarrollo de ecosistemas de investigación y educación en toda América, los autores proponen establecer “Redes de Excelencia” en las áreas claves. Cada Red de Excelencia será multiinstitucional, multisectorial (universidad, empresa, gobierno, ONG) y …

Employee Wellness Coaching As An Interpersonal Communication Intervention: Exploring Intervention Effects On Healthcare Costs, Risks, And Behaviors, Heather Noel Fedesco

Open Access Dissertations

In order to address the rise in healthcare expenditures, employers are turning to wellness programs as a means to potentially curtail costs. One newly implemented program is wellness coaching, which takes a communicative and holistic approach to helping others make improvements to their health. Wellness coaching is a behavioral health intervention whereby coaches work with clients to help them attain wellness-promoting goals in order to change lifestyle-related behaviors across a range of areas. Given the limited amount of research on wellness coaching, this project had four main purposes in order to fill gaps in the literature: to (1) identify whether …

A Probabilistic Model Of Benefit-Cost Analysis For Highway Construction Projects, Yue He

Open Access Theses

Deterministic method occupies the predominant position in economic analysis. However, by using a single value to estimate the project value, deterministic method would hide the risk under it. Analysts may make incorrect judgments by looking at a value without knowing the likelihood of its occurrence and the consequences of its occurrence. A probabilistic model was developed in this study to address this problem. It was found in this study that the traffic flows on Indiana highways follow logistic distributions rather than normal distributions as generally believed. The application of the probabilistic model was illustrated through a case study. The results …

Understanding Representations Of Impulsivity In Dimensional Models Of Personality Pathology, Sarah Ann Griffin

Open Access Theses

Impulsivity is an individual difference that impacts many aspects of an individual's functioning; however, there as of yet has been no consensus on a single definition of impulsivity across the various fields that study it and its related outcomes. In fact, research at this point predominantly supports the idea that "impulsivity" is actually a multi-faceted construct comprised of multiple lower-order traits, but there is little agreement on what those lower-order facets should be. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the conceptualization of complex trait impulsivity within two new omnibus measures of maladaptive personality in terms of both …

The Theory Of Imaginative Resistance: Narrative Conflict & Contested Realities In The Right To Die Versus Disability Studies Perspectives On Medical Euthanasia, Jessica Fawley

Open Access Theses

In this thesis, I introduce a philosophic concept termed "imaginative resistance," a concept which targets the unimaginability of narratives, which I argue offers new insights into polarized communication. I discuss the philosophic debate on imaginative resistance to date, and piece out central puzzles and approaches. I show that imaginative resistance can be applied to broader types of communication than those currently being discussed by philosophers, and indicate that polarized debates are especially likely places to uncover imaginative resistance. I discuss, and respond to, a recent article by Susan M. Behuniak (2011) in which she analyzes a subsection of the contemporary …

"Schitworde": Analysis Of Linguistic Taboo In The History Of The Semantic Field Of Excrement, Julisa R. Edwards

Open Access Theses

Currently, scholarship in the field of linguistic taboo concentrates on the history of cursing, the usage of cursing in society, methodologies for collecting data on cursing, and the history and use of particular terms. However to date, there has been no examination of the semantic shifts of taboo terms, nor has there been any analyses of the history of the semantic fields of which these terms have membership, and so this study serves as a model for analyzing taboo terms according to etymological and semantic field history. This analysis reveals the interplay between language, culture, and taboo terminology because it …

Password Strength Analysis: User Coping Mechanisms In Password Selection, Brian Thomas Curnett

Open Access Theses

The security that passwords provide could be seriously flawed due to the way people cope with having to memorize and recall their passwords. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standard that is used to measure the password strength, known as entropy, is designed for a single use and does not consider that users may choose to keep parts of their password across password changes. This study shows that a portion of users keep some information from previous passwords across changes. These habits which will be called coping mechanisms that over time serve to erode the protection provided by …

Irc Channel Data Analysis Using Apache Solr, Nikhil Reddy Boreddy

Open Access Theses

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was one of the first real-time communication protocols over the internet. It was not designed with any form of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting features. This made IRC channels a place to conduct transactions in complete anonymity. On the other hand with the advent of Big Data we are now able to process large quantities of data in a very short period of time. This research presents a method to use Apache Solr, a text indexing server built on top of Lucene to index and search large quantities of IRC data collected over months from public IRC …

Marital Conflict And Child-Mother Attachment Relationships, Laura Y. Anaya

Open Access Theses

The present study explored the relations between marital conflict and child-mother attachment relationships. A nonclinical sample of 86 non-Hispanic Caucasian mother-child dyads participated in the study when children were approximately 3.5 years old (M = 3.73). Maternal sensitivity and children's attachment security were observed across three visits: one visit was in the home, and two visits were in the park. Mothers completed a series of questionnaires measuring a global index of marital discord, spousal verbal aggression, spousal physical aggression, and childrearing disagreements. The relations between the aspects of marital conflict on maternal sensitivity and children's attachment security with their …

Digital Forensics And Community Supervision: Making A Case For Field Based Digital Forensics Training, Christopher Michael Flory

Open Access Theses

In this paper I will review the literature concerning investigator digital forensics models and how they apply to field investigators. A brief history of community supervision and how offenders are supervised will be established. I will also cover the difference between community supervision standards and police standards concerning searches, evidence, standards of proof, and the difference between parole boards and courts. Currently, the burden for digital forensics for community supervision officers is placed on local or state law enforcement offices, with personnel trained in forensics, but may not place a high priority on outside cases. Forensic field training for community …

Seeing People, Seeing Things: Individual Differences In Selective Attention, Miranda May Mcintyre

Open Access Theses

Individuals differ in the extent to which they attend to their physical and social environments, but little empirical work has measured these differences at a cognitive level. To address this gap, two studies explored the association between attentional processes and Person and Thing Orientations. The first study measured visual selective attention toward person- and thing-related image components. In the second study, participants provided written responses about a set of images; linguistic analyses were conducted to assess attentional bias toward interest-congruent content. The results from both studies support motivated attention as a process through which interests in physical and social environments …

Sentence Final Particles In Shanghainese: Navigating The Left Periphery, Ethan C. Myers

Open Access Theses

The purpose of the present study was to provide a modern syntactic analysis of Shanghainese, the regional language spoken in Shanghai, China. While Shanghainese has received significantly less exposure in the published literature compared to other regional counterparts, there is much that the language can contribute to the overall study of human language. In spite of the fact that Shanghainese has been experiencing a decline in first language learners in recent generations, this thesis aims to increase its exposure in the academic discourse and enforce the legitimacy of its standing as a distinct, living language and as a valuable piece …

Less Than Human: Dehumanization Underlies Prejudice Toward People With Developmental Disabilities, Laura Ruth Murry Parker

Open Access Theses

The present research examined the nature of prejudice toward people with developmental disabilities, its underlying root in dehumanization and implication for opposition to social policies, and the efficacy of two strategies for reducing this bias. In Study 1 and Study 2, dehumanization significantly predicted both greater prejudice and greater opposition to social policies benefiting people with Autism and Down Syndrome. Furthermore, prejudice significantly mediated the effect of dehumanization on social policy support. Dehumanization predicted greater prejudice, which led to less support for social policies. Building on the consistent association between dehumanization and prejudice in the first two studies, Study 3 …

How Effective Is Group Feedback In Encouraging Occupants Of An Office Building To Reduce Energy Consumption?, Ushik D. Shah

Open Access Theses

Lighting contributes to a high percentage of the total energy use in office buildings. The lack of financial incentive often dissuades office workers from trying to save electricity at their work place. This thesis aims at reducing the total power consumed by an office building by using persuasive technologies on the occupants to promote environmentally conscious and energy saving behavior. ^ A three week field study was conducted by providing occupants of an office building feedback about their energy consumption along with messages to encourage them to save energy. Feedback was provided via television screens and flyers placed strategically at …

Accessing Information And Social Capital On Facebook: A Theoretical And Empirical Investigation Of An Accelerated Knowledge Gap Model, Emily A. Sidnam

Open Access Theses

The goal of this thesis is to develop and begin to test a modified knowledge gap model that builds upon the assumptions of the knowledge gap hypothesis, incorporates findings of recent digital divide research and accounts for the unique affordances of new media. This thesis draws upon information behavior and social capital theory and builds off past findings on knowledge and usage gaps in order to develop and explain a knowledge gap model for a new media setting. The traditional knowledge gap hypothesis explains that people of a high socioeconomic status (SES) gain more knowledge from exposure to media messages …

Investigation Of Industry Perceptions Of Building Information Modeling (Bim)-Based Estimating Practices In The U.S. And China, Zhihang Yi

Open Access Theses

While the Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology has been seen as next revolutionary technology for the Architectural, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management (AEC/FM) fields, the AEC/FM industry does not implement BIM technology on the cost estimating practices as widely as expected. The efficiency improvement on cost estimating with BIM could be accomplished through automating quantity take-offs, closely collaborating design with the estimating professionals and so on. This research explores the advantages and barriers of imbedding BIM technology into the estimating practices which enables the industry deepen their understandings on BIM-based cost estimation method. This study also compares the industry perceptions …

English Vocabulary Teaching In Chinese Junior High Schools, Jinghong Zhang

Open Access Theses

Vocabulary learning is an important and indispensable part of the English language learning process. In this paper, the author tried to examine the vocabulary teaching practice in Chinese junior high schools. A questionnaire was used to investigate the problem from the perspectives of in-service teachers. Besides, the National English Curriculum (MOE, 2011) served as another important source of data in this study. The data revealed that progress has been made in English vocabulary teaching in Chinese junior high schools. Teachers are utilizing a wider range of educational resources and vocabulary teaching strategies during their instruction. The methods to assess vocabulary …

Information Seeking And Concern For Mental Well-Being, Cynthia K. Lindley

Open Access Theses

Mental health concerns among college students are quite prevalent, but the help-seeking practices of this population are hindered by a variety of barriers. Help-seeking for mental health concerns in its earliest (and most common) form is ultimately information-seeking, which has been identified as a process with specific predictors that has the potential to lend structure to the myriad help-seeking barriers and facilitators. In an effort to apply and extend the Theory of Motivated Information Management (TMIM; Afifi & Weiner, 2004), the current study asked college students experiencing concerns for their mental well-being to report details of their circumstances. The results …

The Effect Of Cultural Competence On The Acquisition Of French T/V Pronouns, Stacey C. Latimer

Open Access Theses

The appropriate use of Tu/Vous French pronouns in everyday situations proves to be an ongoing challenge not only for native speakers but also for learners of the language. The complexity of the use of these pronouns goes beyond grammatical conjugation as it necessitates a consideration of the sociolinguistic and pragmatic situation with which one is presented. As a result, students with less exposure to T/V pronoun usage in the French culture will consequently have more difficulty in understanding the proper use of these pronouns. ^ Although some studies have looked at students' use of T/V pronouns in online interactions (Belz …

Attitudes Toward A Cancer Coalition: Implications For Coalition Health Communication, Chervin Lam Shih Kian

Open Access Theses

A cancer coalition is a communication hub for cancer patients that may help address cancer by promoting health and mitigating health issues. Attitudes toward a cancer coalition may be important in determining whether or not patients participate or utilize a coalition. However, little is known about the attitudes of cancer patients toward a cancer coalition, its services, and toward participation. This study addresses this gap by investigating these attitudes. The results encourage the development of a cancer coalition in states that do not yet have a coalition. Effective coalition health communication was found to be a pivotal service that cancer …

Elementary Preservice Teachers' Beliefs About Teacher Effectiveness, Mauricio A Herron Gloria

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore elementary preservice teachers' beliefs about effective classroom instruction and the characteristics and behaviors of effective teachers, and to examine how these beliefs may vary across teacher education. Participants were 24 students enrolled in a teacher education program at a large mid-west university in the United States. Data were collected using an intensive interview protocol consisting of semi-structured questions, and analyzed using grounded theory strategies (Charmaz, 2006, 2012). Using a constructive/interpretive framework (Lincoln & Guba, 2013), the analysis of the data indicated that participants' beliefs about teacher effectiveness dwell around 12 overreaching categories; …