Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Growing Library Presence And Information Literacy Beyond The One-Shot: The Ninja Project, Nicole R. Webber, Lin Allen

University Libraries Publications

The limitations of one-shot library instruction have birthed innovative techniques by librarians that include the use of embedding and flipped-learning models. The implementation of these techniques requires buy-in from and relationship-building with teaching faculty, and is accompanied by variables that fluctuate widely between disciplines, personalities, and teaching styles. Via collaboration that aimed to emphasize the research process in an Argumentation & Debate course (COMM 211), a liaison librarian and Communication Studies professor developed a playful approach to the research process that also informs the process of moving one-shot library instruction into more engaged models. The original concept, which uses the …

Namibia Has A Strong Foundation For Implementing The Treat All Guidelines And Reaching The Unaids 90-90-90 Targets, Project Soar

HIV and AIDS

In late 2015, the World Health Organization announced new treatment guidelines recommending that anyone who has tested positive for HIV should begin antiretroviral therapy (ART) as soon as possible. In light of this policy, the Government of Namibia included “treat all” in the 2016 National Guidelines for ART, and began nationwide implementation in April 2017. Project SOAR is generating evidence on how the national rollout of the treat all guidelines and decentralization of ART services affect client-level treatment outcomes, quality of ART services, and treatment costs in Namibia. This brief highlights baseline findings that provide a snapshot of ART services …

The Permanence Of The Shanghai Communiqué, David Whitesell

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

Since 1949, the U.S. has had to face a major issue when interacting with China. This issue lies in the contest between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) based in mainland China and the Republic of China (ROC) based on the island of Taiwan for recognition as the legitimate government of China. Since 1979, U.S. policy has been to recognize formally the PRC as the official government of China. This recognition, which ended years of froideur between Beijing and Washington, was possible because of the previous decade of rapprochement, which was marked by the episode of “ping-pong diplomacy” in 1971, …

Packers, Beth Liechti

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

An army officer reminisces about her past love, her military career, and a great pair of cowboy boots.

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit.

The Things We Carry, Sheri Clark

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

A soldier’s wife describes the burdens of silence and heartache.

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit.

Burns, Senge, And The Study Of Leadership, W. Michael Reid, Claudia J. Dold

Tampa Library Faculty and Staff Publications

James MacGregor Burns and Peter Senge have been two of the most influential writers on leadership over the past 40 years. This paper is based, in part, on a survey of articles published in four leading leadership Journals (Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, Journal of Leadership Studies, Leadership, and Open Journal of Leadership) to determine how the concepts of Burns and Senge were used in the articles. Each journal was searched from its first issue through January 1, 2018 for references to Burns and Senge. The authors found frequent references to each of them, but no systematic, adequate summary …

Combat-Related Reproductive Trauma: Implications For Quality Of Life And The Reproductive Narrative, Laura S. Covington

Bryn Mawr College Dissertations and Theses

Little research exists on the experiences of a combat-related injury that impairs fertility. This dissertation is a qualitative exploration of the lived experiences of military members after a genitourinary (GU) injury. It addresses the biological, psychological, and social impact on quality of life during recovery and subsequent attitudes about family development and sexual functioning. Building on both the life course perspective and the reproductive story model, this dissertation reviews literature on military culture, GU injury, and infertility to give a context to further analyze the essences of the phenomenon (Elder & Giele, 2009; Jaffe & Diamond, 2011).

This study is …

Social Media Adoption Among Small-Market Mississippi Newspapers, William Dejournett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study attempts to examine the attitudes, application and results of Mississippi newspapers’ and others’ use of social media. The goals are to determine the worth of social media to Mississippi newspapers, and to try to identify if there is any anecdotal or other information linking the use of social media to increased readership (print or electronic) and ad sales. Additional goals are to identify if there are any innovative or creative ways newspapers are utilizing social media so that these methods may be employed by other newspapers. The diffusion of innovations theory is an important aspect of this study, …

Rape Myths And Hookup Culture: An Exploratory Study Of U.S. College Students' Perceptions, Timothy T. Reling, Michael S. Barton, Sarah Anna Becker, Matthew A. Valasik

Faculty Publications

The present study provides the first known systematic examination of the association of hookup culture endorsement and rape myth acceptance. Multivariate regression analysis was conducted to test the primary hypothesis that hookup culture endorsement would be the primary predictor of rape myth acceptance levels among a sample of 422 U.S. college students. Findings indicated the existence of a complex relationship in which rape myth acceptance increases or decreases based upon the form of hookup culture endorsement examined. Beliefs that hookups are harmless and elevate social status increased rape myth acceptance, whereas beliefs that hookups express sexual freedom decreased rape myth …

Understanding Americans’ Abortion Attitudes: The Role Of The Local Religious Context, Amy Adamczyk, Margrét Valdimarsdóttir,

Publications and Research

Although abortion became legal over 40 years ago, Americans remain staunchly divided over its acceptability. Personal religious beliefs and behaviors have emerged as some of the most important factors shaping disapproval. Despite religion's importance, very little attention has been given to how the local religious context may shape views and abortion access. Using data from the General Social Survey (N = 6922) that has geographical identifiers, we examine the role of the local religious context for shaping attitudes and the presence of a county abortion clinic. We find that as the level of county religious engagement rises, religious and secular …

Taiwan – Community-Building, Civil Society, And Civic Activism: Promises And Predicaments, Anru Lee

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Improved Student Outcomes In Biological Psychology Courses Through Scaffolded Reading And Writing Assignments., Jillian Grose-Fifer, Christopher Davis-Ferreira

Publications and Research

The American Psychological Association expects graduating psychology majors to be able to read and summarize complex ideas accurately, and to communicate effectively as writers. However, undergraduates often have little explicit instruction and practice in reading and summarizing academic articles, or in psychology-specific writing practices. Consequently, students’ skills as academic readers and writers often fail to meet expectations. In our large public university, writing problems were prevalent in our biological psychology classes. When asked to read and summarize primary sources, students reported that the articles were very difficult to understand, papers commonly included plagiarism, and many students withdrew from the classes. …

Engineering Study Abroad As Strategic Exploration, Emily P. Frank, Amanda B. Macdonald

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

One Staff, Two Branches: The Queens Borough Public Library And New York City's Fiscal Crisis Of The 1970s, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Publications and Research

During the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, New York City imposed deep budget cuts on the three library systems: the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Queens Borough Public Library. As the city cut budgets, the public demanded that libraries be kept open, and elected officials struggled to do both. The Queens Library’s staff was reduced from over 1,100 to barely 700, with branches open only two or three days a week, with one staff serving both. New buildings remained vacant because the library lacked funds to operate them. When the library proposed closing some branches, …

Linguistic Characteristics Of Censorable Language On Sinaweibo, Kei Yin Ng, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng, Christopher Leberknight

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper investigates censorship from a linguistic perspective. We collect a corpus of censored and uncensored posts on a number of topics, build a classifier that predicts censorship decisions independent of discussion topics. Our investigation reveals that the strongest linguistic indicator of censored content of our corpus is its readability.

Open Educational Resources: Why Libraries Are Incentivizing Open Content Creation, Curation, And Adaptation, Stacy Katz

Publications and Research

The movement toward Open Educational Resources is challenging and changing the paradigm of academic libraries. Libraries are leading and innovating in the movement for the creation and adaptation of openly licensed content, whereby the creator can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute content. There are large-scale library or librarian-led projects that are broadening library services, such as SUNY Affordable Learning Solutions, the Achieving the Dream OER degrees, Affordable Learning Georgia, as well as smaller campus initiatives. These projects shift the library’s role in education and increase measurable retention rates, such as engagement, student satisfaction, grade performance, and successful completion of …

Student Responses To An Animated Character In Information Literacy Instruction, Jennifer Poggiali

Publications and Research

Purpose: This paper reports on a grant-funded project to create a hand-drawn, custom-made animated character named Jasmyn. Drawing on animation theory, the paper uses qualitative research to investigate student responses to the medium of animation, the character’s design, and three presentation strategies.

Design/methodology/approach: The researchers held three student focus groups to investigate the following research questions: 1. Will students endorse animation as a medium for library instructional videos on the grounds of its entertaining, subversive, or playful qualities? 2. Is Jasmyn designed and8 written in a way that engages students and compels them to respond to her as a character? …

Understanding Crude Oil Import Demand Behaviour In Africa: The Ghana Case, George Marbuah

Journal of African Trade

As in many African countries, crude oil importation is a major drain on the economy of Ghana. We estimate short-run and long-run import demand models for crude oil using data over the period 1980–2012. Results show that demand for crude oil is price inelastic in the short-run but elastic in the long-run. Other important drivers of crude oil import are the real effective exchange rate, domestic oil production and population growth. Income is found to be the strongest driver of crude oil demand. Policy implications of our results are presented.

Aid For Trade And Africa’S Trade Performance: Evidence From Bilateral Trade Flows With China And Oecd Countries☆, Adugna Lemi

Journal of African Trade

The optimism surrounding aid for trade (AfT) led scholars and practitioners to probe its link with trade performance of aid-recipient countries in Africa. In the absence of formal evaluation guidelines, most previous studies, using aggregate data, have looked into the impacts of AfT on exports and imports and found results consistent with the stated objectives of AfT. The present study investigates the nature of the link for the case of African countries using disaggregated AfT data from China and OECD member countries. The results show that flows of OECD aid to all sectors and to economic infrastructure have increased both …

Oil Prices And African Stock Markets Co-Movement: A Time And Frequency Analysis, Grakolet Arnold Zamereith Gourène, Pierre Mendy

Journal of African Trade

This paper examines the co-movement between OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil prices and the six largest African stock markets. We used wavelet coherence to analyze the evolution of this relationship both in time and by frequency. Our results show that the co-movement between African stock markets and oil prices is relatively low, with the exception of emerging stock markets such as South Africa and Egypt. For most of the African stock markets, the co-movement takes place over large time scales and both during and after the U.S. financial crisis. At small scales, African stock markets could represent a …

How Well Does Observable Trade Data Measure Trade Friction Costs? Evidence From Member Countries Within The Economic Community Of West African States (Ecowas), Festus Ebo Turkson

Journal of African Trade

This paper is an empirical application of the micro-founded measure of trade costs by Head and Mayer (2004) and Novy (2013). The derived micro-founded measure, consistent with the Ricardian and heterogeneous firm's models of trade, captures all trade costs components that hitherto have been impossible to include in the gravity framework because of severe data limitations and the impracticability of measuring some of the trade cost components. Based on bilateral trade and production data from the Trade, Production, and Protection database by Nicita and Olarreaga (2007) over the period 1980–2003, the micro-founded estimate of relative bilateral trade cost measure computed …

Vendorgraphs - Data Visualization, Samuel Park

Masters Theses

Creating a data visualization solution for automotive dealers to enhance sales performance. As many auto dealers use over 20 vendors per store, it is very difficult to keep track of vendor performance. Therefore, auto dealers need a tool that explains vendor performance through visual charts and graphs. VendorGraphs will meet this need.

Foreign Direct Investment, Productivity And The Technology Gap In African Economies, Christopher Malikane, Prosper Chitambara

Journal of African Trade

This paper investigates the impact of foreign direct investment on total factor productivity conditional on relative backwardness in a panel of 45 African countries over the period 1980–2012. We use two measures of relative backwardness, namely: the distance from technological frontier and the income gap. We apply the fixed-effects and two-step system GMM methods. We find a generally positive but weak effect of FDI on productivity growth. Meanwhile, the results do not support the convergence theory of Findlay (1978) and Wang and Blomstrom (1992), that relative backwardness would result in higher productivity growth via the adoption of foreign technologies.

Jenyffer Nascimento’S Epic Poetry Of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: A Poesia Épica De Empoderamento Da Mulher Negra, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, …

Depressive Symptoms Are Associated With Cognitive Function In The Elderly With Type 2 Diabetes, Elizabeth Guerrero-Berroa, Ramit Ravona-Springer, James Schmeidler, Anthony Heymann, Laili Soleimani, Mary Sano, Derek Leroith, Rachel Preiss, Ruth Zukran, Jeremy M. Silverman, Michal Schnaider Beeri

Publications and Research

Background: Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a metabolic condition associated with poor clinical and cognitive outcomes including vascular disease, depressive symptoms, cognitive impairment, and dementia. In the general elderly population, depression has been consistently identified as a risk factor for cognitive impairment/decline. However, the association between depression and cognitive function in T2D has been understudied.

Objective: We investigated the association between depression and cognitive function in a large sample of cognitively normal elderly with T2D.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we examined 738 participants, aged 65–88 years old, enrolled in the Israel Diabetes and Cognitive Decline study. For each …

“The Problem With The Haitians Is Their Language”: Language As Color-Blind Racism, Ruthie Wienk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project explores the mechanisms of exclusion and oppression of a Haitian population in a rural community in South West Florida. The analytical approach taken is an analysis of the social field and habitus as dispositions and embodied culture. Language has been identified as a tool to marginalize the population in the general social order. Through this process, language operates as a form of color-blind racism which justifies the exclusion of the Haitian community but is insufficient in explaining their overall social outcomes. Qualitative data were collected for this project in the form of unstructured interviews, focus groups, photographs of …

Urban Gardens And Nutrition In Sioux Falls, Sd, Austin Brynjulson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the global population recently surpassing seven and a half billion, questions about feeding the population have emerged. In the past, increased demand for food was addressed through increasing intensification of land use and increasing the area of land under cultivation. Despite these efforts, food insecurity has increased for much of the population over this period, where, according to the USDA, in the U.S. 49.1 million people were food insecure in 2013. Food insecurity in this regard is the lack of access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food at all times. While the complex global food system may be difficult …

#Rest In Digital Peace: Examining Attachment Dimensions' Relationship To Grief Messages On Facebook, Kendall Uhrich

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Grief is a natural reaction to loss that can include behaviors and thoughts that are emotional, physical, and spiritual (DeSpelder & Strickland, 2015). With the rise of social media, grief is now performed in a different and more public manner. The current literature has established the connection between how one grieves and their attachment dimension of either attachment anxiety or attachment avoidance (Bowlby, 1980; Schenck, Eberle, & Rings, 2016; Waskowic & Chartier, 2003; Worden, 1983). Attachment dimensions have also been correlated with social media usage, primarily the use of Facebook (Hart, Nalling, Bizer, & Collins, 2015; Lin, 2015). Findings from …

Determinants Of Tipping Behavior: Evidence From Us Restaurants, Nusrat Jahan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to analyze people’s tipping behavior to assess the factors that determine both the likelihood of leaving a tip and tip size in US restaurants. A total 2,334 away from home eating events are considered in this study based on the nationally representative National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) dataset. Two different tipping scenarios are considered for full-service restaurants to examine differences in customers’ behavior under two different situations. Considering that households’ tipping decisions and tip sizes are functions of the demand for personal interest (D"#, ) and the demand for social interest (D&#), different socio-demographic, …

A Study Of African Savanna Vegetation Structure, Patterning, And Change, Christoffer R. Axelsson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

African savannas cover roughly half of the continent, are home to a great diversity of wildlife, and provide ecosystem services to large populations. Savannas showcase a great diversity in vegetation structure, resulting from variation in climatic, edaphic, topographic, and biological factors. Fires play a large role as savannas are the most frequently burned ecosystems on Earth. To study how savanna vegetation structure shifts with environmental factors, it is necessary to gather site data covering the full gradient of climatic and edaphic conditions. Several earlier studies have used coarse resolution satellite remote sensing data to study variation in woody cover. These …