Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Aiming High: Foundation Support For State Advocates Brings Universal Children’S Health Coverage Within Reach, Sheila Dunleavy Hoag, Debra J. Lipson, Victoria Peebles

The Foundation Review

To help close the children’s health insurance coverage gap in the United States, in 2011 the Atlantic Philanthropies created the Kids- Well Campaign. KidsWell’s theory of change posits that if advocates could leverage new funding and coverage opportunities created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, they could expand the number of children with health insurance coverage.

This article presents the major results of the KidsWell evaluation, which found substantial progress in achieving KidsWell interim policy changes and coverage outcomes. But advocates still have a full agenda, which means grantees and funders need to redouble efforts to educate the …

Lessons About Evaluating Health-Coverage Advocacy Across Multiple Campaigns And Foundations, Leslie Foster, Mary Harrington, Sheila Hoag, Debra Lipson

The Foundation Review

This article draws on a dozen years’ experience in evaluating major consumerhealth advocacy initiatives to build the knowledge base about advocacy evaluation. The authors explain how their evaluations were strengthened by articulating a detailed theory of change and emphasizing assessment of interim outcomes from many perspectives and methods.

Even with comprehensive data and integrated analysis, however, some ambiguity in the results is inevitable; there is no completely objective way to determine the effectiveness of an advocacy initiative. Moreover, sometimes solid or even exceptional advocacy efforts do not lead to desired policy outcomes. Advocacy initiatives that fail initially may be groundwork …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Through The Looking Glass: Foundation Evaluation And Learning And The Quest For Strategic Learning, Suzanne Kennedy Leahy, Sandra Wegmann, Lexi Nolen

The Foundation Review

Strategic learning, a critical if relatively new lens for philanthropy, is neither simple nor efficient to institutionalize or practice yet — foundations are still figuring out how to do it well. In 2015, the Episcopal Health Foundation launched a project to distill lessons about how leading foundations configure evaluation and learning, and how they allocate related responsibilities in support of strategic learning.

This article addresses different models that foundations use to establish and staff evaluation and learning functions, what other organizational considerations they should take into account in order to prioritize strategic-learning work, and what tools and approaches can be …

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Designing Technical-Assistance Programs: Considerations For Funders And Lessons Learned, Jennifer Lyons, Sheila Dunleavy Hoag, Cara Orfield, Sonya Streeter

The Foundation Review

As foundations continue to provide grantees with technical assistance in addition to financial support, it is important to understand what works well, for whom, and in what circumstances. This reflective practice article aims to help funders who have identified a problem amenable to technical assistance to develop a strong program by providing support to a group of organizations addressing similar problems or by providing customized individual support.

Drawing on insights from evaluations of two technical-assistance programs, this article recommends five key issues for funders to consider when offering such a program: whose priorities will shape the agenda, how group composition …

Book Review: American Generosity: Who Gives And Why By Patricia Snell Herzog & Heather E. Price, Jason Franklin

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Laying The Groundwork For A National Impact Investing Marketplace, Stephanie L. Gripne, Joanne Kelley, Kathy Merchant

The Foundation Review

The practice of impact investing is rapidly gaining momentum, but the level of activity among individual and institutional investors, including philanthropists and foundations, has barely penetrated projections of market potential.

The marketplace that should connect impact investors with investees or social ventures does not function effectively.

Developing cost-effective ways to engage new investors and break down barriers to investment is an essential part of growing the industry.

Developing cost-effective ways to “prime the pump” for social ventures to become investor-ready — through a capacity-building process that includes outreach, education, and technical assistance — is an essential part of growing the …

Traffic Simulation Model For Port Planning And Congestion Prevention, Baoxiang Li, Kar Way Tan, Trong Khiem Tran

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective management of land-side transportation provides the competitive advantage to port terminal operators in improving services and efficient use of limited space in an urban port. We present a hybrid simulation model that combines traffic-flow modeling and discrete-event simulation for land-side port planning and evaluation of traffic conditions for a number of what-if scenarios. We design our model based on a real-world case of a bulk cargo port. The problem is interesting due to complexity of heterogeneous closed-looped internal vehicles and external vehicles traveling in spaces with very limited traffic regulation (no traffic lights, no traffic wardens) and the traffic …

‘Tweetboard’ – A Case Study Of Developing A Micro-Blogging Platform For Higher Education, Shao Cheh Joyce Hsu, Gan, Benjamin, Jin Lee, Shu Hui Sheryl Lim, Xie Yan Jeremy Lim, Thomas Menkhoff, Si Xian Sherman Tan, Charles Jason Woodard, Qiu Cheng Yap

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports experiences made at an Asian university in developing a social media platform based on Twitter in the context of a final year capstone project where information systems management students get an opportunity to solve ‘a real-world problem for a real client’. In this case study, the challenge was provided by a faculty member’s request for an interactive social media application which engages less outspoken students in class via a social medium they are familiar with: Twitter. We reconstruct the project’s evolution; describe the main features of the application called ‘TweetBoard’ and share lessons learned in developing a …

From Footprint To Evidence: An Exploratory Study Of Mining Social Data For Credit Scoring, Guangming Guo, Feida Zhu, Enhong Chen, Qi Liu, Le Wu, Chu Guan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the booming popularity of online social networks like Twitter and Weibo, online user footprints are accumulating rapidly on the social web. Simultaneously, the question of how to leverage the large-scale user-generated social media data for personal credit scoring comes into the sight of both researchers and practitioners. It has also become a topic of great importance and growing interest in the P2P lending industry. However, compared with traditional financial data, heterogeneous social data presents both opportunities and challenges for personal credit scoring. In this article, we seek a deep understanding of how to learn users’ credit labels from social …

Domain Identification For Intention Posts On Online Social Media, Thai Le Luong, Quoc Tuan Truong, Hai-Trieu Dang, Xuan Hieu Phan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Today, more and more Internet users are willing to share their feeling, activities, and even their intention about what they plan to do on online social media. We can easily see posts like "I plan to buy an apartment this year", or "We are looking for a tour for 3 people to Nha Trang" on online forums or social networks. Recognizing those user intents on online social media is really useful for targeted advertising. However fully understanding user intents is a complicated and challenging process which includes three major stages: user intent filtering, intent domain identification, and intent parsing and …

Letter Teaching In Parent–Child Conversations, Molly Farry-Thorn

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Societies engage in cross-generational transfers of information, enabling cultural transmission of skills such as tool use and language (Tomasello, 2001). Reading and spelling are two of the most important cultural tools that are transferred to children in modern societies. This transfer begins with informal experiences in the home and continues with formal teaching at school. One skill that is critical to a child’s success during the first years of reading and spelling instruction is decoding, which is the ability to sound out written words. Decoding ability depends, in part, on a child’s knowledge of letters (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000). …

Flavored Electronic Cigarette Use And Smoking Among Youth., Hongying Dai, Jianqiang Hao

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Flavored electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) are not prohibited in the United States, and e-cigarette flavors proliferate on the market. This study sought to examine flavored e-cigarette use and its association with smoking among youth.

METHODS: Estimates of flavored e-cigarette use from the 2014 National Youth Tobacco Survey were investigated. A logistic regression model was used to assess whether flavored e-cigarette use was associated with (1) intention to initiate cigarette use among never-smoking youth (n = 16 471), (2) intention to quit tobacco use among current-smoking youth (n = 1338), and (3) perception of tobacco's danger among all respondents …

Meta-Emotions In Daily Life: Associations With Emotional Awareness And Depression, Natasha Haradhvala

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Meta-emotions are emotions that occur in response to other emotions (e.g., guilt about anger). Although preliminary evidence indicates that depression is associated with a greater likelihood of meta-emotions, much remains unknown about meta-emotions, including how regularly they are experienced and whether emotional awareness constructs (including attention to and clarity of emotion) influence their occurrence. In the present study, we aim to establish norms for meta-emotions in everyday life, determine whether increased emotional awareness is associated with a greater likelihood of meta-emotions, and examine whether negative emotions about negative emotions (negative-negative meta-emotional experiences) are associated with depressive severity. We recruited an …

Examining Criterion A: Dsm-5 Level Of Personality Functioning As Assessed Through Life Story Interviews, Patrick Cruitt

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Several studies have examined the Level of Personality Functioning Scale (LPFS) from the DSM-5 as rated using diagnostic interviews conducted by trained clinicians (Few et al., 2013; Zimmermann et al., 2014). These studies have demonstrated the reliability and validity of the LPFS, but suffer from a common limitation, namely, that diagnostic interviews probe specifically for information pertaining to functioning. This probing may inflate reliability and introduce confounds into the assessment of functioning. The purpose of the current analyses is to examine the reliability and validity of personality functioning ratings obtained in the absence of information pertaining to personality disorder criteria. …

Sexual Determination From Frontal Sinus Analysis In A Subadult Population Using Archival Radiographic Records, Erica Crosta

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The goal of this study is to use the improved imaging capability of cone-beam computerized tomography (CBCT) to investigate the development and sexual dimorphism of the frontal sinus and surrounding supraorbital region in the subadult population of urban Southern Nevada. CBCT radiographs were obtained from the UNLV School of Dental Medicine archival dental records. Five hundred and fifty six of these radiographs were reviewed for the study. Two hundred and sixteen patients (92 males, 124 females) between the ages of 7 and 20 years were included based on inclusion/exclusion criteria. Samples were categorized into 3 subadult age groups for analysis: …

Corporatized Higher Education: A Quantitative Study Examining Faculty Motivation Using Self-Determination Theory, Aaron Dale Brown

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The intent of this research is to offer a quantitative analysis of self-determined faculty motivation within the current corporate model of higher education across public and private research universities. With such a heightened integration of accountability structures, external reward systems, and the ongoing drive for more money and institutional prestige, this study examines faculty attitudes towards their work and the institution using Deci and Ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory (SDT).

Under the corporatized model of higher education, a gap is found in the literature that explores the role of SDT’s three innate needs (i.e., autonomy, competency, and relatedness) and their effect …

A Business Intelligence Framework For Network-Level Traffic Safety Analyses, Naveen Kumar Veeramisti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Currently, there are both methodological and practical barriers that together preclude a substantial use of theoretically sound approaches, such as the ones recommended by the Highway Safety Manual (HSM), for traffic safety management. Although the state-of-the-art provides theoretically sound approaches such as the Empirical Bayes method, there are still various important capabilities missing. Methodological barriers include among others (i) lack of a theoretically sound approach for corridor-level network screening, (ii) lack of a comprehensive approach for estimation of Safety Performance Functions based on a simultaneous consideration of both crash patterns and associated explanatory variables, and (iii) lack of theoretically sound …

Practicing Emotionally Biased Retrieval Affects Mood And Establishes Biased Recall A Week Later, Janna N. Vrijsen, Paula T. Hertel, Eni Sabine Becker

Psychology Faculty Research

Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) can yield clinically relevant results. Only few studies have directly manipulated memory bias, which is prominent in depression. In a new approach to CBM, we sought to simulate or oppose ruminative processes by training the retrieval of negative or positive words. Participants studied positive and negative word pairs (Swahili cues with Dutch translations). In the positive and negative conditions, each of the three study trials was followed by a cued-recall test of training-congruent translations; a no-practice condition merely studied the pairs. Recall of the translations was tested after the training and after 1 week. Both recall …

Sex Differences In The Relationship Between Planum Temporale Asymmetry And Corpus Callosum Morphology In Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes): A Combined Mri And Dti Analysis, William D. Hopkins, A. M. Hopkins, M. Misiura, E. M. Latash, M. C. Mareno, S. J. Schapiro, Kimberley A. Phillips

Psychology Faculty Research

Increases brain size has been hypothesized to be inversely associated with the expression of behavioral and brain asymmetries within and between species. We tested this hypothesis by analyzing the relation between asymmetries in the planum temporale (PT) and different measures of the corpus callosum (CC) including surface area, streamline count as measured from diffusion tensor imaging, fractional anisotropy values and the ratio in the number of fibers to surface area in a sample of chimpanzees. We found that chimpanzees with larger PT asymmetries in absolute terms had smaller CC surface areas, fewer streamlines and a smaller ratio of fibers to …

Predicting Aggression In Late Adolescent Romantic Relationships: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study, Christina Caiozzo, Jessica Houston, John H. Grych

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

This study sought to prospectively predict aggression in the romantic relationships of 1180 college students from the United States (807 females; 373 males) over the course of two months with a set of intrapersonal risk and protective factors, including personality characteristics that rarely have been examined in this population. After accounting for prior dating aggression, perpetration of verbal aggression was predicted uniquely by aggressive attitudes, emotion regulation, and for females, narcissism. Perpetration of physical aggression was predicted by aggressive attitudes, but only at low levels of emotion regulation, and the interaction of callous-unemotional traits, emotion regulation, and gender: males with …

Advances In Research With Lgbtq Youth In Schools, Nicholas C. Heck, Paul V. Poteat, Carol S. Goodenow

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

Over the past decade, there has been an increase in scholarship devoted to the topic of sexual and gender minority youth in schools (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning; LGBTQ). In this special section, we highlight this group of LGBTQ youth, a group that needs as many allies as possible, a group that lacks the social standing, the financial capital necessary, and the rights afforded to adults to directly influence the political climate in ways that affect their lives. Collectively, these seven data-driven articles are reflective of the innovation that is occurring in our field as we continue …

University Fundraising Through Special Events: An Application Of The Theory Of Planned Behavior, Megan Elizabeth Hobbs

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to apply the Revised Theory of Planned Behavior and EVENTQUAL models to explore (1) event qualities that significantly impact guests’ satisfaction with a university event that they attend, (2) significant factors influencing university loyalty as a result of an event, and (3) willingness to make a charitable donation to a university as a result of attending an event. An online survey was sent to attendees of an annual Cal Poly auction event between 2002 and 2016 that directly benefits Cal Poly students. The data were used to test a series of hypotheses to determine …

A Replication And Extension Of The Peers® For Young Adults Social Skills Intervention: Examining Effects On Social Skills And Social Anxiety In Young Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Alana J. Mcvey, Bridget Dolan, Kirsten S. Willar, Sheryl Pleiss, Jeffrey S. Karst, Christina L. Casnar, Christina Caiozzo, Elisabeth M. Vogt, Nakia S. Gordon, Amy V. Van Hecke

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

Young adults with ASD experience difficulties with social skills, empathy, loneliness, and social anxiety. One intervention, PEERS® for Young Adults, shows promise in addressing these challenges. The present study replicated and extended the original study by recruiting a larger sample (N = 56), employing a gold standard ASD assessment tool, and examining changes in social anxiety utilizing a randomized controlled trial design. Results indicated improvements in social responsiveness (SSIS-RS SS, p = .006 and CPB, p = .005; SRS, p = .004), PEERS® knowledge (TYASSK, p = .001), empathy (EQ, p = .044), direct interactions (QSQ-YA, p = …

The Narrative Performances Of Teenage Girls: Participation, Identity, And Authority As The Foundation For Power, Chere M. Smith

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which teenage girls use narrative performance to negotiate participation, social and gender identity, and individual authority in order to establish ratified and equal statuses of power within their social peer group. Although previous work on narrative discourse has shown that narratives can act as the catalyst for the complex co/construction of identity especially in social situations of talk, little work has been done to focus on the way teenagers, particularly girls, use this discourse to their benefit as they fulfill social and gender goals in social and conversational settings. Furthermore, while multimodal, narrative performance …

Social And Cultural Integration Process Among Syrian Refugees In The United States, Sheren Iskandar Shihadeh

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the cultural and social integration process among Syrian refugees in the United States, and to what extent the direct and indirect challenges have played a role in the process of their social and cultural integration. The challenges include, but are not limited to, cultural conflicts, religious values, stereotypes, and English language proficiency. In order to investigate my research questions, interviews as a research methodology were used as a theoretical framework for this project to collect and analyze data. I conducted semi-structured interviews with ten Syrian refugees who currently live in the United …

Crossing Borders: Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations Influence On Interstate Gang Structure, Stacey Michelle Goldberg

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Not only has gang membership been expanding, but the formation of cooperative ties with Mexican drug trafficking organizations (MDTOs) has been increasing as well. Collaborative relationships with MDTOs appear to be the driving force behind the continuing gang expansion and its subsequent effects. Using social network analysis, this study examines the linkage between MDTOs and American-based gang activity and the potential influence that MDTOs may have in U.S. drug market through their associations with American street gangs. Findings show the MDTOs to be extensively linked to each other by their affiliations with U.S. gangs, and a high level of connectivity …