Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Does The Use Of Technology In The Classroom Increase Students' Overall Academic Performance?, Jessica Mariah Brown

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

Technological advances and a decrease in the cost of technology have resulted in nearly 93 percent of public schools classrooms in the United States having access to the Internet, and a considerable increase in educational programs that incorporate technology into the curriculum (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 2005). Due to the prevalence of technology in the classroom, the effectiveness of such programs has become a prevailing research topic amongst social scientists. This thesis reviews past research and provides an analysis of relevant studies conducted within the last ten years. Using Daft and Lengel's media richness theory as a basis, this …

The Components Of A Healthy Culture: Umpqua Bank, Joanna Nasser Mansour

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

When analyzing an organization's success, taking a cultural approach allows the dissection of key components necessary to determine and produce such findings. Culture brings more to the table than just the values and ways an employee is expected to conduct their daily job duties. Umpqua Bank, an Oregon-based bank, was the organization chosen for this study because the employees take great pride in its unique retail bank culture. Geertz's Cultural Approach (1973) and Edgar Schein's (1991) idea of Three Levels of Culture: core beliefs and assumptions; values and behavioral norms and artifacts were utilized, along with other communication theories used …

Nonverbal Communication In Small Group Leadership: Using Nonverbal Competence To Increase Group Cohesiveness, Angela Tice

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

Cohesiveness is an important component of small groups and contributes to the overall effectiveness of the group. The purpose of this study was to research leaders' nonverbal cues and the potential effect they have on group cohesiveness. Grounded in Burgoon's expectancy violations theory, Pearce and Cronen's coordinated management of meaning theory, and Mead's symbolic interactionism theory, this study examines the leader's ability to demonstrate their competence in nonverbal communication, and as a result increasing the group's cohesiveness. The data for this exploratory study came from two different surveys, non-participant observations, and participant interviews. This study revealed that positive nonverbal communication …

Mobile Communication Devices And Government-Public Engagement, Lloyd Brown

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

Americans have seemingly gone mobile. With a mobile communication device - cell phone, smartphone, iPad or other tablet devices - people can send and receive information anytime and anywhere. Meanwhile, government organizations primarily at the federal government level have been encouraged to participate in and engage with the public through the internet. This project uses a media ecology frame to look at whether the increasing mobility of communication made possible through the acceptance and proliferation of wireless technology devices such as smartphones, tablet and laptop computers and e-readers is affecting the relationship between state department of transportation agencies and the …

Bridging The Gap Between Interpersonal Communication Skill Differences In Employees: An Interpersonal Communication Training Curriculum, Denise Marie Crowell

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

The workforce is a social environment where particular skills are essential in order for employees to perform well, have a competitive edge and succeed in their careers. Interpersonal communication is one of the skills needed in every type of workplace setting. The ability to actively and empathetically listen, adapt communication style according to others and situations, confirm others in communication, resolve conflict, manage tone in writing and effectively communicate in a group are all crucial skills for employees that require exceptional interpersonal communication. However, constructivism theory suggests that due to variances in cognition, not everyone is able to communicate interpersonally …

Youth Mentoring: A Guide For Mentors With Practical Application Of Communication Principles To Facilitate Interpersonal Relationships And Youth Development, Erin Camille Wilson

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

As individuals, we believe we have the unique ability to choose our paths and carve out our destiny in America. As we sculpt our path, through a variety of decisions, our relationships often serve as a governing force developing our person along our journey. Due to their influential nature, this project explores the power of mentor mentee relationships as it relates to youth development. Grounded in the theory of transcendence, the social penetration theory and the uncertainty reduction theory, this project investigates youth mentoring and its positive influence on three basic parameters: social and emotional effect, cognitive effect, and identity …

Negotiating Online Identities In Social Media: A Study Of University Students, Christine Elise Benage

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

Identity and identity construction are constantly changing areas of study, especially as they relate to communication studies. Online communication is an increasingly common mode of communication, and social media is one of the fastest growing forms of online communication. In social media, individuals create pages that seemingly represent themselves. This representation contains both initial and ongoing negotiation of identity. This study explores how college students, as an active demographic in social media networking, negotiate and manage their online identities. The theory primarily used to study this mode of communication is Computer-mediated Communication theory, which encompasses other theories including social presence …

Photo Manipulation In The Media, Stephanie Coffaney

Graphic Communication

In today’s society there are photos everywhere; they are in magazines, advertisements, newspapers, and books because photos make the text or the story stand out. Some may not know it, but most of these photos have been edited and retouched. This research paper attempted to determine the majority opinion of what types of photo editing was above the tolerable limit, as well as the public awareness of media manipulation. The different levels of photo editing included changing the contrast, removal of blemishes and dust, addition/removal of objects, and addition/removal of main subjects. The results revealed that most people are aware …

City Of Industry: An Historical Precedent And Its Concrete Effects, Christina A. Hernandez

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

No abstract provided.

Participant Satisfaction With The Mission Continues Fellowship Program For Post 9/11 Disabled Veterans, Monica M. Matthieu, Michael J. Pereira, Ian D. Smith

Center for Social Development Research

Participant Satisfaction With the Mission Continues Fellowship Program for Post 9/11 Disabled Veterans

Stepping Out Of The Disney Princess Castle Into The New Girl World With The Disney Divas: A Content Analysis Of Hannah Montana And Wizards Of Waverly Place, Hanna Munoz

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Lsuhsc Facilities Biweekly Update: December 2011, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates: 2011

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates from December 2 and 16, 2011.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Change Detection Memory In Rhesus Monkeys And Humans, Lauren C. Elmore

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is the storage of visual information over a brief time period (usually a few seconds or less). Over the past decade, the most popular task for studying VSTM in humans has been the change detection task. In this task, subjects must remember several visual items per trial in order to identify a change following a brief delay interval. Results from change detection tasks have shown that VSTM is limited; humans are only able to accurately hold a few visual items in mind over a brief delay. However, there has been much debate in regard to the …

Lsuhsc Facilities Daily Updates: December 2011, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Daily Updates: 2011

LSUHSC Facilities Daily Updates from December 2011.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

The Prospector, December 1, 2011, Utep Student Publications

The Prospector

Headline: Good Luck Graduating Miners

An Analysis Of Managerial Retention Decisions Using Major League Baseball, William Ward

All Theses

Major League Baseball managers are often blamed for the poor performance of a baseball team. In the past two years alone, there have been eight midseason managerial firings and six postseason managerial firings. While this number may seem high, these numbers have actually been consistent with probabilities of managerial retention since 1930, when baseball was still in the early stages of its development as a professional sport. In the following study, I examine the factors that are taken into account during these managerial firing decisions and what conditions are present when changes do take place. Using Major League Baseball managerial …

Salud Y Saludos: The E-News Of The College Of Health Sciences, College Of Health Sciences

College of Health Sciences

Monthly e-newsletter of the College of Health Sciences.

Building Preliminary Guideline For Earthquake Evacuation, Guang Miao

All Theses

Disaster frequency appears to be increasing. The impact of those disasters has increased substantially in terms of mortality and economic losses. Evacuation, as an inevitable part of disaster management systems, plays a critical role in disaster mitigation. The efficiency of all-hazard disaster evacuation could be increased by making appropriate decisions on policies and practices for planning, preparedness and response, and taking certain traffic operations, management and control. Common principles for large disaster evacuation have been established, mostly based on the experience of hurricane events. However, earthquakes have a series of special characteristics, which are different from other disasters, such as …

Gangs And Race: A Look At New Jersey Police Perspectives On African American And Hispanic Gangs, Jeanette Medina

All Theses

In the United States the presence of gangs and gang activity is a common occurrence in lower socio-economic communities; however, local law enforcement agencies often have little information about the racial and ethnic composition of gang activity in their areas. As a result, gangs are often categorized without respect to important demographic differences between them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the New Jersey State Police Gang Survey 2007, which is a statewide assessment of gang composition and activity. I use the data from this survey along with conflict theory to analyze differences between African American and Hispanic …

Abortion, Income, Wantedness: Evidence From The American Community Survey, Francisco Arceo

All Theses

This paper serves two purposes: (1) to find the effect of the legalization of abortion on future wages and (2) to test Donohue-Levitt's 'Wantedness Hypothesis' (i.e., that relatively more wanted children have superior economic outcomes). Non-parametric evidence suggests that the legalization of abortion increased the annual salary and wage and salary income for people born before 1973 in a state with legal abortion. The OLS specifications suggest that once state surveyed and state of birth effects are included into the models the effect is negative. Once macroeconomic and other unobservable effects are controlled for, I find no evidence of an …

The Accuracy Of Drivers' Perceptions Of The Effects Of Headlight Glare On Their Ability To Recognize Pedestrians At Night, Stephanie Whetsel

All Theses

Recently, researchers have begun to assess the extent to which drivers believe their ability to see is degraded by headlight glare. Research has suggested that drivers may overestimate the extent to which glare from headlamps degrades their ability to see letters. This project extended this research by quantifying the accuracy with which drivers judge that glare interferes with their ability to see pedestrians at night. On average, participants overestimated the distance at which drivers would see a pedestrian by a factor of more than three. Headlight glare disrupted participants' ability to recognize the pedestrian wearing both non-retroreflective and reflective clothing …

An Extension Of Social Facilitation Theory To The Decision-Making Domain, Allison Wallace

All Theses

Social facilitation has traditionally been defined as the influence of the presence of others on an individual's task performance. Social presence has been shown to either facilitate or impair performance based on various moderating variables, including the more recent investigation of individual differences, but researchers have yet to extend social facilitation theory to the domain of decision-making. This study evaluates the effect of social presence on individual decision-making, using the personality traits of extraversion, neuroticism, self-esteem, social anxiety, and trait anxiety as potential moderating variables of this effect. We found that affiliative individuals, marked by high extraversion and high self-esteem, …

“That’S What Friends Do”: Informal Caregiving For Chronically Ill Midlife And Older Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual Adults, Anna M. Muraco, Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen

Sociology Faculty Works

This study examines the relationships between friends; a caregiver who provides care to a care recipient, who is a lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) adult over age 50 in need of assistance due to chronic physical or mental health conditions. Using a sample of 18 care pairs (n = 36), this work examines qualitative interview data. Findings from the study include: (a) both the care recipient and the caregiver receive benefits from the friendship; (b) caregiving alters and challenges the friendship; and (c) friends assume differential levels of commitment and responsibility in providing care. Studying this population of LGB …

Investment Treaty Disputes: Ideological Fault Lines And An Evolving Zeitgeist, Locknie Hsu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The zeitgeist of the 21st century in the field of investment treaty arbitrations comprises a rise in the number of such arbitrations and accompanying observations on the unwieldy jurisprudential effects of such a rise. The international investment arbitration community is alive with discussion over these effects, which discussion includes an examination of the value of prior awards as precedents.' The existing regime based on treaty interpretation clearly provides no formal system of precedent and the 'players' (read: arbitrators) change from dispute to dispute as investment arbitration tribunals do not fall within a single, neat judicial hierarchical system. With the number …

International Capital Flows With Limited Commitment And Incomplete Markets, Jürgen Von Hagen, Haiping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Recent literature has proposed two alternative types of financial frictions, i.e., limited commitment and incomplete markets, to explain the patterns of international capital flows between developed and developing countries observed in the past two decades. This paper integrates both types of frictions into a two-country overlapping-generations framework to facilitate a direct comparison of their effects. In our model, limited commitment distorts the investment made by agents with different productivity, which creates a wedge between the interest rates on equity capital vs. credit capital; while incomplete markets distort the investment among projects with different riskiness, which creates a wedge between the …

A Simple And Robust Method Of Inference For Spatial Lag Dependence, Zhenlin Yang, Yan Shen

Research Collection School Of Economics

A simple and reliable method of inference for the spatial parameter in spatial autoregressive models is introduced, based on a statistic obtained by centering and rescaling the numerator of the concentrated Gaussian score function. The resulted tests and confidence intervals are robust against the distributional misspecifications and are insensitive to the spatial layouts and the error standard deviation. In contrast, the standard methods based on Gaussian score and information matrix may lead to inconsistent inference when errors are non normal, and can be quite sensitive to the spatial layouts and the error standard deviation even when errors are normally distributed. …

Score Tests For Inverse Gaussian Mixtures, A. F. Desmond, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The mixed inverse Gaussian given by Whitmore (Scand. J. Statist., 13, 1986, 211–220) provides a convenient way for testing the goodness-of-fit of a pure inverse Gaussian distribution. The test is a one-sided score test with the null hypothesis being the pure inverse Gaussian (i.e. the mixing parameter is zero) and the alternative a mixture. We devise a simple score test and study its finite sample properties. Monte Carlo results show that it compares favourably with the smooth test of Ducharme (Test, 10, 2001, 271-290). In practical applications, when the pure inverse Gaussian distribution is rejected, one is interested in making …

Uniform Asymptotic Normality In Stationary And Unit Root Autoregression, Chirok Han, Peter C. B. Phillips, Donggyu Sul

Research Collection School Of Economics

While differencing transformations can eliminate nonstationarity, they typically reduce signal strength and correspondingly reduce rates of convergence in unit root autoregressions. The present paper shows that aggregating moment conditions that are formulated in differences provides an orderly mechanism for preserving information and signal strength in autoregressions with some very desirable properties. In first order autoregression, a partially aggregated estimator based on moment conditions in differences is shown to have a limiting normal distribution that holds uniformly in the autoregressive coefficient rho, including stationary and unit root cases. The rate of convergence is root n when vertical bar rho vertical bar < 1 and the limit distribution is the same as the Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), but when rho = 1 the rate of convergence to the normal distribution is within a slowly varying factor of n. A fully aggregated estimator (FAE) is shown to have the same limit behavior in the stationary case and to have nonstandard limit distributions in unit root and near integrated cases, which reduce both the bias and the variance of the MLE. This result shows that it is possible to improve on the asymptotic behavior of the MLE without using an artificial shrinkage technique or otherwise accelerating convergence at unity at the cost of performance in the neighborhood of unity. Confidence intervals constructed from the FAE using local asymptotic theory around unity also lead to improvements over the MLE.

Nebraska's Traditional Cultural Properties In The Section 106 Process, Karen A. Steinauer

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

Archeologists engaged in cultural resource management and compliance are charged with measuring “historic” properties against legal standards for purposes of federal protection. This thesis focuses on one kind of property, the Traditional Cultural Property (TCP), within the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) Section 106 process, where sometimes in practice the terms TCP and sacred site are used interchangeably. This thesis strives to bring precision to TCPs, provide a concise reference, and, through inspection and analysis of four case studies of Nebraska properties, critique the present process for identifying and evaluating TCPs.

The Nature Of Context-Sensitive Solutions, Stakeholder Involvement And Critical Issues In The Urban Context, Marta Panero, Jan Botha

Mineta Transportation Institute

Over the last several decades many transportation and planning agencies have experienced conflicting demands emerging from the need to develop projects in an expeditious manner while at the same time involving stakeholders in the decision-making process, which sometimes is perceived as slowing project delivery and/or increasing costs. Given this tension between apparently conflicting demands, it is important to understand how the stakeholder involvement is being carried out and what best practices may be recommended. This study examines the issue in the context of a relatively new policy framework – Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) – which supports the early integration of …