Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Assessment Of Destination Brand Associations: An Application Of Associative Network Theory And Network Analysis Methods, Xu Chen

All Dissertations

Recent tourism management research has seen increasing discussions of applying branding concepts into destination marketing. However, brand association and its importance in creating strong and unique brands have not been studied adequately. The purpose of this study was to identify the underlying dimensions that people use to describe destination brands and examine the structural relations of the destination's brand association.
Brand association focuses on analyzing the characteristics consumers' knowledge, perceptions and attitudes associated with a brand and how brand associations interact with each other. Research on brand association provides measurement constructs to evaluate branding effectiveness and offers marketing professionals the …

Understanding Casino Visitors' Decision-Making Processes Within The Perspective Of Responsible Gambling: An Application Of The Model Of Goal-Directed Behavior, Hakjun Song

All Dissertations

There has been relatively little theory-based research focusing on casino visitors' behavior. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has been criticized for not considering the effect of past behavior and for not incorporating emotional factors in its theoretical frame. In this regard, the purpose of this study was to examine casino visitors' behavioral intention for casino gambling using the Model of Goal-directed Behavior (MGB) as a new theoretical framework to understand visitors' behavioral intentions to gamble in casinos. This study also aimed to not only compare the Extended MGB (EMGB) with the original MGB, TPB, and Theory of Reasoned Action …

Social Networks In The Tourism Industry: An Investigation Of Charleston, South Carolina, Tianyu Ying

All Dissertations

Over the past decades, increasing attention has been given to the networking in the tourism industry (Lynch, 2000; Pavlovich, 2003). The existing literature mainly focuses on the interrelationships among tourism stakeholders at sector level and the structure of the interorganizational networks in tourism industry. However, little research has been done to examine the possible antecedents and outcomes of the tourism networks and the interrelationships between the network structures at different subject level (i.e., interpersonal and interorganizational) and in different social contexts (i.e., online and offline). The purpose of this study is to address these research gaps by empirically examining the …

'First We Crawled, Then We Walked, Now We Want To Run': An Examination Of The Transition Processes Used By Inclusive Camps, Teresa Tucker

All Dissertations

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the transition processes camps undergo when including campers with disabilities into the organized camp from the perspective of key individuals who championed inclusion. Despite research that supports inclusion and knowledge of best inclusive practices, few camps have implemented the inclusion of individuals with disabilities in a purposeful way. Understanding the components that facilitate a camp's adoption of inclusion and the roles people play to facilitate the inclusion process can provide camp professionals guidelines to ensure all campers have a positive inclusive camp experience. In this phenomenological study, in-depth interviews were conducted …

Migration And Child Educational Production: Aggregated Vs. Disaggregated Resource Modeling, Guo Li

All Dissertations

This paper studies the sensitivity of estimates on various assumptions about aggregation in modeling the school's effect in child educational production. By controlling for the endogeneity of school qualities in the production function, we evaluate the performance of a 'correct' aggregation educational production model versus simple aggregation educational production model in predicting the school resources' effect on academic outcome. Monte Carlo simulations on different modeling specifications shows that simple aggregation of school resources over a geographic area causes serious specification errors, and thus generates biased estimates for the marginal contribution of the school resources to test scores. The two aggregation …

Why The Supreme Court Cares About Elites, Not The American People, Lawrence Baum, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

Supreme Court Justices care more about the views of academics, journalists, and other elites than they do about public opinion. This is true of nearly all Justices and is especially true of swing Justices, who often cast the critical votes in the Court’s most visible decisions. In this Article, we will explain why we think this is so and, in so doing, challenge both the dominant political science models of judicial behavior and the significant work of Barry Friedman, Jeffrey Rosen, and others who link Supreme Court decision making to public opinion.

Review Of Economics, Culture And Social Theory, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Relationships Between Facial Emotion Perception And Psychosis Proneness: Persons With Schizophrenia And Controls, Dustin Chapman

Psychology and Counseling Theses

It is well documented that individuals with schizophrenia demonstrate deficits in emotion processing. Though study is established in this area, the same can not yet be said for controls or at risk groups like those with a family history of schizophrenia, those with a genetic predisposition, or those high in schizotypy who are at higher risk for schizophrenia. In the proposed study I attempted to elucidate the relationships between schizotypal symptoms and facial emotion perception. The study of schizotypy and emotion perception may provide insight into the etiology of schizophrenia through better understanding of the symptom constellations and deficits that …

Are Relational Messages Fair? An Examination Of The Relationships Among Classroom Justice And Relational Teaching Messages, Laura Young

College of Communication Theses and Dissertations

Classroom justice has become a growing concern among instructional communication researchers. When students perceive their instructors are not concerned about justice, they report a host of negative outcomes; however, previous research also suggests that students and instructors have differing perceptions of justice. Further, many instructional communication scholars view the teaching process as having a large relational component. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine what relationships exist among relational teaching messages (rapport, confirmation and affinity-seeking) and classroom justice (distributive, procedural and interactional) and to find whether these relationships are positive or negative. Results indicated that all three relational …

Beef, Mutton, Pork, And A Taste Of Turtle: Zooarchaeology And Nineteenth-Century African American Foodways At The Boston-Higginbotham House, Nantucket, Massachusetts, Michael Andrew Way

Graduate Masters Theses

In 1774, nearly ten years before slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, an emancipated African American weaver named Seneca Boston purchased a tract of land in the Newtown section of Nantucket, Massachusetts. It is here that over the next thirty years Seneca Boston and his Wampanoag wife, Thankful Micah, would build a house, now known as the Boston-Higginbotham House, and raise six children. The Boston-Higginbotham House was home to the descendents of Seneca Boston and Thankful Micah for over one hundred years. Throughout the 19th century a vibrant and active African American community was developing in Newtown, and several generations of …

A Macrobotanical Analysis Of Native American Maize Agriculture At The Smith's Point Site, Kelly A. Ferguson

Graduate Masters Theses

The Smith's Point site was a seasonally inhabited Native American encampment in Yarmouth, Massachusetts occupied from the Middle Woodland through the early Colonial periods. Excavations at the site in the early 1990s yielded the remains of a multi-component site including both an agricultural field and an adjacent living area. The macrobotanical remains from the agricultural and living area features were examined for this thesis project in order to investigate subsistence practices at the site. The findings show that Native Americans actively shaped these ecological niches for purposes such as maintaining and improving their subsistence base. These landscape management activities included …

The Perceived Impacts Of The 14-Year (1989-2003) Civil War On Higher Education In Liberia: An Analysis Of The Case For The University Of Liberia And Cuttington University, Manjerngie Cecelia Ndebe

Dissertations

Civil wars affect the social systems of a nation, including higher education. The purpose of this study was to do an in-depth concurrent mixed method analysis of the perceived impacts of the 14-year (1989–2003) civil war on higher education institutions in Liberia during the civil war years and from the end of the civil war in 2003 to the point of data collection in 2007. The literature is replete with expert opinions on the impacts of the Liberian civil war, but only limited evidence for quantitative and qualitative studies on war impacts in general exists.

No study on the context …

(Wp 2010-05) Exchange-Rate Pass Through, Openness, And The Sacrifice Ratio, Joseph P. Daniels, David D. Vanhoose

Economics Working Papers

Considerable recent work has reached mixed conclusions about whether and how globalization affects the inflation-output trade-off and suggests that the ultimate effect of openness on the output-inflation relationship is influenced by a variety of factors. In this paper, we consider the impact of exchange-rate pass through and how pass through conditions the effect of openness on the sacrifice ratio. We develop a simple theoretical model showing how both the extent of pass through and openness can interact to influence the output-inflation relationship. Next we empirically explore the nature of these two variables and their interaction. Results indicate that greater pass …

(Wp 2010-07) Examining Megachurch Growth: Free Riding, Fit, And Faith, Marc Von Der Ruhr, Joseph P. Daniels

Economics Working Papers

Megachurches are thriving in religious markets at a time when Americans are asserting their ability as consumers of religious products to engage in religious switching. The apparent success of megachurches, which often provide a low cost and low commitment path by which religious refugees may join the church, seems to challenge Iannocconne’s theory that high commitment churches will thrive while low commitment churches will atrophy. This paper employs a signaling model to illustrate the strategy and organizational forms megachurches employ to indicate a match between what the church produces and the religious refugee wishes to consume in an effort to …

Asian Race/Ethnicity As A Risk Factor For Bile Duct Injury During Cholecystectomy., Stephanie R. Downing, Ghazala Datoo, Tolulope A. Oyetunji, Terrence Fullum, David C. Chang, Nita Ahuja

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

Iatrogenic bile duct injury (BDI) is an uncommon but serious complication of cholecystectomy, with identified risk factors of acute cholecystitis, male sex, older age, and aberrant biliary anatomy. The Nationwide Inpatient Sample (1998-2006) was queried for cholecystectomy performed on hospital day 0 or 1. Bile duct injury repair procedure codes were used as a surrogate for BDI. We identified 377,424 patients who underwent cholecystectomy, with 1124 BDIs (0.3%). On multivariate logistic regression analysis, Asian race/ethnicity was a significant risk factor for BDI (odds ratio [OR], 2.26; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.59-3.23; P < .001). This persisted for laparoscopic (OR, 2.62; 95% CI, 1.28-5.39; P = .009) and open (2.21; 1.59-3.07; P < .001) cholecystectomies. No other race/ethnicity was identified as a risk factor for BDI. We report a new finding that Asian race/ethnicity is a significant risk factor for BDI in laparoscopic and open cholecystectomies.

August Roundtable: Human Rights And Foreign Policy Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“A humane nation is a safer nation” by Tom Porteous. The Guardian. July 7, 2010.

Researcher Engagement With Web Archives: Challenges And Opportunities For Investment, Arthur Thomas, Eric T. Meyer, Meghan Dougherty, Charles Van Den Heuvel, Christine Madsen, Sally Wyatt

School of Communication: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Information Outlook, July/August 2010, Special Libraries Association

Information Outlook, 2010

Volume 14, Issue 5

Pakistan And Indian Economies Compared, Ishrat Husain Dr

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

Pakistan and India both achieved independence in 1947. At that time there was a great deal of skepticism about Pakistan's economic future. India was much advanced on all indicators of economic sustenance, resource endowment, potential output and growth.

Neuropsychological And Emotion Processing Abnormalities In Bipolar Disorder I And Ii, Carol Randall

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Bipolar disorder illness is marked by emotional lability and mood disturbance, as well as various neuropsychological deficits, and the neuroanatomical correlates of many of these deficits are beginning to be identified. Numerous studies have implicated specific cortical and sub-cortical abnormalities in areas associated with executive function, memory, motor function, and the processing of emotion. Although a large body of research has been devoted to the investigation of cognitive and emotion-processing deficits in bipolar disorder, relatively few studies have been devoted to the investigation of how these deficits differ among bipolar disorder subtypes. This is surprising in light of known symptomatological …

The Influence Of Perspective And Gender On The Processing Of Narratives, Jeremy A. Houska

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The overarching aim of this research was to examine potential boundary conditions to situation model construction (Experiment 1) and narrative-based persuasion (Experiment 3). Variables such as narrative perspective (i.e., 2nd or 3rd person) and matched characteristics with the reader (i.e., participant-protagonist gender match) were first examined using situation model updating (Experiment 1) and behavioral measures (Experiment 3) as dependent measures. It was expected that situation model updating would be more likely for narratives written in the 2nd person perspective and with a participant-protagonist gender match. It was uncertain, however, for health promotion narratives, whether these manipulations would increase the likelihood …

Exploring The Phenomena Of Inner Experience With Descriptive Experience Sampling, Janell M. Mihelic

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study provides a survey of the phenomena of normal, everyday inner experience using the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method. Results demonstrated that five types of inner experience (sensory awareness, feeling, unsymbolized thinking, inner seeing, and inner speech) occurred in approximately one-quarter of sampled moments and that there were significant individual differences regarding the frequency with which subjects experienced these phenomena. Three new dimensions (richness of inner experience, the number of experiences present, and the overall valence of the experience) along which inner experience could be characterized were identified and used reliably to characterize moments of experience. Finally, although there …

Cloud Storage And Online Bin Packing, Swathi Venigella

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Cloud storage is the service provided by some corporations (such as Mozy and Carbonite) to store and backup computer files. We study the problem of allocating memory of servers in a data center based on online requests for storage. Over-the-net data backup has become increasingly easy and cheap due to cloud storage. Given an online sequence of storage requests and a cost associated with serving the request by allocating space on a certain server one seeks to select the minimum number of servers as to minimize total cost. We use two different algorithms and propose a third algorithm; we show …

Do They Work? Developmental Courses In Mathematics And English At Sitting Bull College, D'Arlyn A. Bauer

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to assess the characteristics and impact of developmental courses on students enrolled in developmental mathematics and English courses at a small mid-Western tribal college. This was a quantitative, descriptive study of the courses and the students over a six year timeframe.

All students who enrolled in developmental mathematics and English courses at Sitting Bull College during the summer of 2003 through the spring of 2009 were included in this study. There were 289 students in the Foundations Math and English courses in this timeframe.

Females made up 60% of the students studied who had …

Perceived Levels Of Empowerment In Parish Nursing, Jean C. Bokinskie

Theses and Dissertations

Parish nursing is a community-based subspecialty practice of nursing. The parish nurse (PN) melds spiritual care with nursing practice to wholistically address the needs of parishioners and faith communities. PNs work with other health care providers and organizations, as well as lay and professional church leaders to successfully develop, organize, and lead health promoting and spiritually healing activities. Empowerment of PNs is necessary to achieve positive outcomes of PN directed initiatives. Empowerment occurs through supportive and nurturing environments, as well as access to resources, information and power. However, multiple professional demands, interpersonal conflicts, and lack of adequate resources have created …

Berne, Indiana Swiss German: Lessons Learned From A Small-Scale Documentation Project, Gretta Yoder Owen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a case study of a small-scale language documentation project carried out in Berne, Indiana. The goal of this project was to capture, through audio recording, samples of the Swiss German language that could be presented to the Berne community and preserved for future use. As much as possible, this project was carried out according to best practices for language documentation, so that the data will be accessible to the academic community for further research after there are no more living speakers of the Berne, Indiana Swiss dialect.

The history of the Swiss Mennonites who settled the Berne, …

The 71f Advantage: Applying Army Research Psychology For Health And Performance Gains, Paul T. Bartone, Ross H. Pastel, Mark A. Vaitkus

Books

This book grew out of paper presentations and discussions at the Army Research Psychology Biennial Conference held April 24–25, 2008, in Bethesda, Maryland. It provides a snapshot of groundbreaking research currently being done by Army research psychologists around the globe. The book illuminates the many contributions of Army research psychologists to supporting Soldiers and their families, as well as enhancing their performance and wellbeing.

The National Context For Transparency-Based Global Environment Governance, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Transparency-based global environmental governance, like all global governance, necessarily plays out in national contexts. Its efficacy is shaped not only by global politics but also by the norms and capacities prevailing within countries. Over the past two decades, there has been an extraordinary upheaval in transparency views and practices in numerous countries, rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian. This multi-faceted development has been driven by such varied factors as democratization, privatization, and changing views about appropriate regulatory practices. These changes provide the crucial context for understanding the transparency transformation that is currently unfolding within global environmental governance, as well as …

To Build A Nation From The Bottom Up, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

After 45 years of economic achievement, genuine political participation has to be the next stage

Verbal And Visual Learning And Memory Deficits As Trait Markers For Psychosis In Bipolar Disorder, Griffin P. Sutton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The presence of neurocognitive deficits in the affective and psychotic psychiatric disorders (i.e., bipolar disorder with psychotic features, bipolar disorder without psychotic features, and schizophrenia) has been well documented, with such these deficits having been found to overlap across these diagnostic categories to a degree. Along with other types of evidence reported, these findings suggest that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia may not be isolated disorders as suggested by the current diagnostic criteria outlined in the DSM-IV (APA, 1994), but rather may be related disorders on a spectrum marked by bipolar disorder without psychosis on one end and by schizophrenia on …