Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Reducing Health Disparities In African American Communities Through Church And Federal Partnerships, Shelia Lassiter Hill

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified persistent disparities in health care resources as the primary causes of mortality among minority populations. An underexplored resource for affected African American populations is the church, which is not a recognized stakeholder in the implementation of current health care policy. The purpose of this phenomenological case study was to gather perspectives from African American parishioners who lacked sufficient health care insurance on the roles the church could play. Qualitative data management software was used to organize the data …

Government Rule Compliance, Safety, And The Influence Of Regulation On Railroad Trainmen, Carlos Mendoza, Phd

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Operational testing of railroad trainmen on federal government safety rules is a daily occurrence on every railroad in the United States. This constant testing and resulting discipline distracts trainmen from the task at hand, causing a loss of focus which could lead to injury or accidents. Using the social construction framework, this research sought to gain an understanding of trainmen's perception on how operational testing impacts their workplace safety, as well as how they perceive the U.S. federal government influences regulation and discipline. This phenomenological study investigated a segment of railroad employees, the trainmen, because they are operationally tested more …

Relationship Between Eighth Grade Social Science Students, Teacher Diversity And Academic Success, Rachel Elaine Murphy

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Dynamics between student teacher ethnicity and the practices of culturally plural curricula seeks to improve student performance and strives to minimize the achievement gap. This quantitative study explored whether there was a significant difference in the North Carolina Final Exam history-social science test performance between (a) African American and Hispanic students taught by a teacher from a different ethnic makeup and (b) African American and Hispanic students taught by a teacher from a similar ethnic makeup in 8th grade of social science classes. Student's performance is a key factor in evaluating the credibility of a school which is crucial to …

Media Coverage Of Domestic Extremists And The Influence On Police Emotions, Jamie Porter

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The media have influenced domestic extremists who are targeting the police, and this is related to negative emotions among the police. These extremists are targeting police officers based on how events are framed by the media. In this way, the media have influenced domestic extremists' target selection and caused negative emotions among police officers because they are now the targets. The purpose of this qualitative narrative study was to understand the perceptions of police officers about how the media have influenced domestic extremists to target them. The narrative of this qualitative inquiry was guided by a semistructured interview sample consisting …

The Role Of Humility In Promoting Forgiveness Through Expressive Writing, Henrika M. Marshall-Youquoi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Forgiveness is an important characteristic of a healthy relationship. Several factors have been shown to be connected to forgiveness, but other factors may play a significant role in the forgiveness process. Little is known about how humility affects forgiveness in the context of an interpersonal conflict. Expressive writing, when combined with humility, may help counselors and other mental health providers in understanding how to better foster forgiveness among individuals and help them cope with stressful events and relational problems. The primary purpose of this study was to examine whether expressive writing involving humility regarding a minor offense leads to increased …

Coping With The Threat Of Ebola In Monrovia: A Case Study, Augustine M. Sumo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In early 2014, 3 West African states of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone made news headlines when Ebola virus disease (EVD) ravaged the sub-region. The Liberian government was ill-equipped to efficiently contain EVD outbreak due to inadequate training for hospitals and healthcare workers. The government's mandatory cremation policies and the banning of public gatherings significantly contributed to the spread of EVD. EVD infected 10,666 and 4,808 died from the disease in the first 6 months of the epidemic. Using Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this case study research was to examine the social, …

The Mediating Role Of Mental Health In The Relationship Between Discrimination And Risky Behaviors In Lgbt Adults In Latin America, Annie Rabinovitch

Theses and Dissertations

The study explored relationships among discrimination experiences, mental health (i.e., anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms), risky behaviors (i.e., suicidal ideation, illicit substance use), religiosity, and social support in LGBT adults residing in Latin America. First, multiple regression analyses were conducted to identify patterns of connections among discrimination, mental health, suicidal ideation, and illicit substance use in sexual and gender minority adults from Latin American. Harassment/Rejection discrimination, but neither Work/School nor Other discrimination predicted suicidal ideation. None of the three discrimination subscales predicted illicit substance use. Work/School discrimination predicted mental health problems (Anxiety and Depression subscales of HSCL-25 combined), while Harassment/Rejection and …

Clinicians' Perceptions Of Trauma Treatment For People With Intellectual Disabilities, Katherine Elaine Schoech

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

People with intellectual disabilities (ID) experience trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in similar ways as individuals in the general population. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore and describe clinicians perceptions of trauma treatment for people with ID. Theories of trauma, PTSD, and stigma were part of the conceptual framework from which interview questions were developed. Purposive and snowball sampling were used to recruit 8 participants in the Denver, Colorado area. Four participants had experience working with people with ID, and 4 participants did not have this experience. Participants sat for semi structured open-ended recorded interviews, which …

A Meta-Analytic Review Of Play Therapy With Emphasis On Outcomes Measures, Scott A. Jensen, Judith N. Biesen, Elizabeth R. Graham

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

A meta-analysis of 100 studies of outcomes of play therapy interventions was conducted to determine overall effect of intervention. Different from the Bratton, Ray, Rhine, and Jones (2005), but more consistent with the Lin and Bratton (2015), findings, there was a significant moderate effect for play therapy interventions across all outcomes (d = .44). When 4 studies with aberrantly large effects were removed, this effect was d = .36. These moderate effects are consistent with other meta-analyses that find lower effect sizes for nonbehavioral interventions. Overall study quality was poor with no studies meeting the criteria of randomized control trials. …

The Anatomy Of Cbpr: A Case Study Of Cbpr Implementation For Health Promotion With The Peer Community, Cory R. Cummings

Theses and Dissertations

This case study is a qualitative examination of a health promotion project conducted in collaboration with members of the mental health peer community. More specifically, it explores the community based participatory research (CBPR) implementation process used to conduct this health promotion project to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at work in the implementation process. While there has been considerable attention to the principles that guide CBPR (Braun et al., 2012; Israel et al., 2008; LaVeaux & Christopher, 2009), there remains important work to be done in bridging these principles to implementation; what processes or mechanisms translate these principles …

Saudi Women's Experiences Of Control And Engagement As Employees In Private Universities, Kimberly Dawn Deatherage

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Saudi women have higher rates of graduation from college than their male counterparts, but are underrepresented as employees in the private higher education sector. Saudi women working in higher education report a lack of involvement in the planning of their work, challenges in balancing family and career, and low wages. Yet, no research has explored how Saudi women in administrative support staff positions in private universities perceive control and how their perceptions of control affect their engagement in the workplace. Therefore, based on locus of control theory, the 2-process model of perceived control, and compensatory control theory, the purpose of …

Ownership And Identities Of The Largest Shareholders And Dividend Policy: Evidence From Vietnam, Trien Vinh Le, Trang Huyen Le

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study investigates the relationship between the level of shareholdings and identities of the largest shareholders, and cash dividend policy. The study is conducted with a sample of 180 firms listed on Vietnam stock exchange markets from 2009 to 2013. The fixed effect model is employed to analyze the balanced panel data. The results show that the higher the level of holdings by the largest shareholders, the lower the dividend payout. Moreover, companies with the State and Foreign investors as the largest shareholders have higher dividend payout ratio than companies with local investors and managers as the largest shareholders. The …

Aggression And Boxing Performance: Testing The Channeling Hypothesis With Multiple Statistical Methodologies, Silas G. Martinez

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

D. G. Winter, John, Stewart, Klohnen, and Duncan (1998) demonstrated the first use of the channeling hypothesis to show how the explicit personality trait of extraversion channeled one’s implicit achievement and affiliation personality to predict important life outcomes. Since then, various implicit and explicit measures of personality have been combined, but moderation analyses have predominantly been the “mechanism of operation” to demonstrate the channeling hypothesis (Bing, LeBreton, Davison, Migetz, & James, 2007, p. 147). The current study had two goals. The first goal was to use implicit and explicit measures of aggression to predict performance of 325 men and women …

Processing Global Properties In Scene Categorization, Hanshu Zhang

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The current research examined the role of global properties in human observers' scene perception. In Experiment 1, comparisons of four global properties ("natural", "manmade", "open", and "closed") were collected online from a wide range of subjective choices. These answers were analyzed in a pairwise comparison model to generate four standardized reference ranking scales describing the extent to which characteristics can describe scene global properties. In Experiment 2, scene images selected from the reference scales were used to test human's performance in processing global properties conjunctively. Cognitive modeling indicated that human observers were more efficient in categorizing scene images as "natural …

Welfare Dependency And Work Ethic: A Quantitative And Qualitative Assessment, Yvonne M. Christopher

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This study examined relationships between work ethic and welfare dependency. The 65-item Multidimensional Work Ethic Profile (MWEP) (Miller, Woehr, & Hudspeth, 2002) and the 28-item MWEP (Meriac, Woehr, Gorman, & Thomas, 2013) with attached socioeconomic surveys were administered to n=338 and n=247 adult subjects, respectively. A negative correlation between the two variables was anticipated, so that as levels of agreement with work ethic increase, reported use of welfare benefits decrease. After running correlation matrices to examine Pearson’s r, hierarchical regressions were conducted, culminating in a model which partially predicts the connection between the variables. Bivariate analyses for the 65-item MWEP …

Exploring The Time-Based Resource-Sharing Model Of Working Memory Through Computational Modeling, Joseph Glavan

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Working memory is the fundamental component of cognition that allows us to temporarily maintain information needed for concurrent processing. An existing theory from the literature, the time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) model, posits that working memory is a serial, rapidly switching, attentional refreshing mechanism. While others have sought previously to formalize the TBRS model into a computational process model, I go further, using ACT-R to model the influence of working memory on an entire task from end to end. I leverage ACT-R's existing base-level learning mechanism, typically used to model recency and frequency effects in long-term memory, to enact the attentional refreshing …

Multi-Gain Control: Balancing Demands For Speed And Precision, Lucas Warner Lemasters

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Woodworth's Two-Component Theory (1899) partitioned speeded limb movements into two distinct phases: (1) a central ballistic open-loop mechanism and (2) a closed-loop feedback component. The present study investigated the implementation of multi-gain control configurations that utilized separate gain values for each movement phase. A target acquisition task using Fitts' Law (1954) was performed within a virtual environment using three control devices with three gain settings: mono-gain, dual-gain and continuous gain. The gain settings differed by the amount of gain values available to the participant. It was found that dual-gain and continuous gain configurations yielded lower movement times and higher information-processing …

Sampling Expertise: Incorporating Goal Establishment And Goal Enactment Into Theories Of Expertise To Improve Measures Of Performance, Frank Eric Robinson

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Task-specific performance measures informed by incomplete theories of expertise do not capture the full range of domain-relevant behaviors, threatening content validity. Surgery is a particularly good example of a domain that has neglected cognitive accounts of performance in favor of task-specific measures of technical skill and experience-based definitions of expertise. Likewise, cognitive accounts of performance tend to neglect skilled performance, including the interaction between automaticity and cognitive control. The present study merges cognition and psychometrics in the context of a surgical task. I analyzed archival surgical performance data from a study of surgical training, including video of human cadaver procedures, …

The Role Of Peripheral Vision In Configural Spatial Knowledge Acquisition, Lisa J. Douglas

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This study investigated the importance of the peripheral visual field for acquiring configural spatial knowledge, especially knowledge about structural components like doorways, corners, and walls, but also information about objects. Although peripheral vision helps us orient our bodies in space, navigate successfully through an environment, and physically interact with objects in near physical space (Kesner & Creem-Regehr, 2012; Burgess, Jeffrey, & O’Keefe, 1999), previous research has not investigated the role of the peripheral visual field for the acquisition of spatial knowledge during navigation. All participants in this experiment viewed a virtual navigation tour through a four-room environment with objects located …

Mao Zedong And Xi Jinping: A Trait Analysis, Dan Douglas

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This study uses Margaret Hermann’s Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) to compare Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping and see if they have the same style. Through a content analysis of a leader’s speeches, researchers can gain insight into a leader’s motivation for obtaining office and power. In the course of this research, 167 speeches by Mao, and 79 Speeches by Xi were inputted into the content analysis program Profiler+ (Hermann, 2003). The analysis showed that Mao and Xi have some similarities in their LTA results, but the differences in their scores indicate different approaches to leadership. An analysis of the context …

Assessing The Conditions For Post-Cold War Conflict Interventions, Daniel Wesley Clark

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This research seeks to understand the reasons regarding why states intervene in conflicts? This study utilizes all European states who are a member of NATO and seeks to understand their reason for intervening in 14 post-cold war conflicts. Specifically, this study seeks to address whether the involvement of the United States, their NATO membership, and the humanitarian extent of the crisis play a role in their intervention decision. To answer these questions, this study uses an ordered probit statistical study to tests the hypothesis. The results show that the United States involvement in a conflict, and the European states membership …

Mao Zedong And Xi Jinping: A Trait Analysis, Dan Douglas

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This study uses Margaret Hermann's Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) to compare Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping and see if they have the same style. Through a content analysis of a leader's speeches, researchers can gain insight into a leader's motivation for obtaining office and power. In the course of this research, 167 speeches by Mao, and 79 Speeches by Xi were inputted into the content analysis program Profiler+ (Hermann, 2003). The analysis showed that Mao and Xi have some similarities in their LTA results, but the differences in their scores indicate different approaches to leadership. An analysis of the context …

Predicting Goal Progress And Burnout Using Goal Hierarchies, Truman J. Gore

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The current study examined the relationships between aspects of goal hierarchies (i.e., goal importance, goal progress, goal relatedness, goal number, goal achievement) and specifically their effects on the important outcomes of goal progress and burnout. Although goal pursuit is an important area of study in psychology, aspects of goal hierarchies are understudied, especially in relation to perceived progress and outcomes of wellbeing. The current research provided evidence that goal progress is negatively related to burnout, that the relatedness between goals of the same hierarchical level and across levels influences our perceptions of the importance of these goals, and that explicit …

Governed By Guerrillas: When Armed Insurgents Become Political Leaders, Megan Patsch

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When an internal conflict ends, many states are faced with a choice of whether or not the insurgents they were fighting against should become political figures they govern beside. Increasingly, peace settlements involve the proposed evolution of guerrilla groups into political parties, yet little is known about rebel groups' long-term effectiveness in governing (Vines and Oruitemeka, 2008). However, the recurrent interest in converting guerrillas to politicians calls for a clear understanding of the chances of success. What makes a guerilla group more or less successful in governance? I hypothesized that a state with formerly armed insurgents would produce fewer pieces …

The Effect Of Action Video Game Play On The Distribution And Resolution Of Visuospatial Attention, Andrew Thomas Fent

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Previous research has found that Video Game Players, or VGPs, perform better on a variety of attention tasks (i.e. attentional blink, useful field of view, flanker compatibility, etc.) as compared to Non-Video Game Players, or NVGPs. We examined the extent of this previously observed VGP attentional advantage on a target identification task. Most VGP studies have examined the VGP advantage on tasks that primarily require detection but not identification. Identification is an important process beyond detection for encoding and later retrieving information. VGPs and NVGPs were tested on briefly flashed strings of digits subtending less than 10 degrees of visual …

Post Arab Spring Examination Of American Foreign Aid: Libya And Egypt, Andrew Robert Dickerson

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Every year, the United States uses foreign aid as a foreign policy tool. The Arab Spring gave the United States an opportunity to achieve a historically difficult task in the Middle East: promoting and establishing democracy across the Middle East. This study examines United States foreign aid, primarily military and economic aid, and the success it has on the ruling governing bodies in Libya and Egypt. Does American foreign aid lead to stability of the recipient government? The majority of published works regarding foreign aid effectiveness utilize a large-n case study over several decades without thoroughly examining each case. The …

Role Of Self-Efficacy And Anxiety In Resilience Effects On Performance And Well-Being, Kathleen Renee Wylds

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The current study examined the role of motivational and affective factors in resilience effects on the outcomes performance and well-being. Prior research has examined the direct relationships between resilience and outcomes but not the variables through which resilience has beneficial effects on outcomes. The current study examined a path model that addresses the underlying mechanisms (e.g., motivational and affective variables) that explain the beneficial effects of resilience on performance and well-being. Results provided support for a revised path model and evidence of a motivational pathway, an affective pathway, and a more complex pathway that explain how resilience has beneficial effects …

Work And Women's Empowerment: An Examination Of South Asia, Kathryn Elise Chaney

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"What contributes to the differences in women's economic empowerment" To investigate this problem, a large N statistical analysis set up this comparative case study of Bangladesh and India that evaluates the relationship between women's access to employment in the formal labor market and women's access to ownership of accounts in banks and other financial institutions. The large N statistical analysis results illustrate a global pattern that the percentage of women working in the formal labor market is associated with a greater percentage of women having accounts in banks or other financial institutions. Neither Bangladesh nor India fit this pattern, and …

Behavioral Activation For Smoking Cessation And Mood Management Following A Cardiac Event: Results Of A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial, Andrew M. Busch, Erin M. Tooley, Shira Dunsiger

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

Background: Smoking cessation following hospitalization for Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) significantly reduces subsequent mortality. Depressed mood is a major barrier to cessation post-ACS. Although existing counseling treatments address smoking and depression independently in ACS patients, no integrated treatment addresses both. We developed an integrated treatment combining gold standard cessation counseling with behavioral activation-based mood management; Behavioral Activation Treatment for Cardiac Smokers (BAT-CS). The purpose of this pilot randomized controlled trial was to test feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of BAT-CS vs. Standard of Care (SC).

Methods: Participants were recruited during hospitalization for ACS and were randomly assigned to BAT-CS or …

Ice Breaker - Human Bingo, Jill Strauss

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.