Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Second-Grade Teachers' Brain-Based Teaching Strategies For Struggling Readers, Tong Ba Nguyenguyen

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In the era of this 21st Century, there are numerous known and unknown causes of reading impairments which have destructively affected elementary school students. Some causes are linguistic, and others are nonlinguistic. Lack of research on how previous teaching methods and experiences in implementing brain-based teaching (BBT) strategies became critically important, and were the concerns for this study. Developed by Hart's brain-based learning (BBL) theory together with other BBL theorists such as Jensen and Caine, the purpose of this qualitative study was to observe and explore the implementation of BBT strategies from 4 distinct second-grade participant teachers/subjects, located at the …

Effects Of The Authentic Leadership Style On Job Satisfaction In Subordinate Employees, Theodosia Yvette Pope

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Prior studies examined the importance of good leadership skills for those in leadership positions; however, this study addressed a gap in literature regarding how leadership characteristics in supervised employees can impact job satisfaction. The purpose of this quantitative study was to assess the influence of authentic leadership on leader, coworker, task, and general job satisfaction. Authentic leadership emerged from the theory of positive psychology which surmises that self-growth coincides with a focus on the development of others and is based on the premise that individual improvement is gained by focusing on positive personality aspects. Online recruitment using a participant pool …

Public Awareness Of Human Trafficking, Chelsea Annette Farrell

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Public awareness is crucial in the fight against human trafficking, but little academic research looks at the public policy implications of different types of messaging the public may be using in recognizing human trafficking. Using policy feedback theory as the theoretical lens, the purpose of this quantitative study was to compare mean awareness scores for both film and social media to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the scores and their degree of public awareness. Data were collected through an online survey, which included questions related to both film and social media, using a participant pool service. …

Influence Of Privatization Policies On Residential Satisfaction In Military Family Housing, Kirsten R. Hawley

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Little published research has examined the post-implementation outcomes of public private partnerships for housing, specifically the Military Privatized Housing Initiative (MPHI) from the perspective of the end user, the Military Family Housing (MFH) resident. Using Mettler and SoRelle's conceptualization of policy feedback theory as the foundation, the purpose of this repeated cross-sectional study was to assess residential satisfaction pre- and post- implementation of the MPHI. The study also addressed the influence of sociodemographic factors on MFH residents' perceived residential satisfaction. Secondary data were collected using 2 Department of Defense surveys administered pre- and post-implementation. An independent-samples t test was used …

A Comparative Analysis Of Family Therapies On Youth With A Co-Occurring Disorder, Rochelle Henderson-Clark

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

There are approximately 1.3 million youth who have been diagnosed with a co-occurring disorder. The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between the type of therapy (brief strategic family therapy or family functional therapy), demographic factors (age, race, type of drug used), and therapy discharge status (successful or unsuccessful) in male youth with a co-occurring disorder of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and substance use disorder. A correlational research design of a cross-sectional nature was used for this study and secondary data were obtained from a mental health agency located in Hampton Roads Virginia. The theoretical basis for this …

Parenting And Discipline Correlations With Social Supports For Single, African American Mothers, Veronica D. King

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Assistance to young, single, African American mothers requires adaptation to their environmental stressors along with reliance on social support. Further information is necessary for developing and supporting an appropriate model for delivery of that assistance. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine potential correlations between general social support and parenting skills and disciplinary practices amongst low-income, African American single mothers. Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory model supported this study to further develop an accurate perspective of African American families to inform more effective approaches to parenting. The participants for this correlational research design study were 78 mothers who had …

Work-Life Balance Of Women Employed Within State Government, Luisa Cunanan Martinez

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Women in the U.S. workforce have been a focus of scholars since the onset of the 21st century, when work-life balance skewed in favor of the term work-life integration because professional working mothers found that balance was an unachievable ideal in the fast pace of the contemporary world. Accordingly, this research study examined the work-life challenges and career choices of women working in the public sector through the framework of the Kaleidoscope Career Model (KCM). While research has been conducted on women in corporate America, there have been limited studies exploring the work-life challenges and career decisions of women working …

Accessibility To Health Care Services For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders, Leanne Elizabeth Scalli

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The study was an investigation into health care accessibility for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) following the transition to a private Medicaid system in the state of Florida. Pilot studies of managed Medicaid programs focused on costs and did not address how changes to the system impacted access to health care services. There were limited studies designed to understand how a change in the system, such as a privatization, would affect vulnerable populations such as young children with ASD. Additional concerns existed for children that were historically underserved by the health care system such as African American and Latino …

A Phenomenological Exploration Of Parent Experiences That Influence Positive Adoption Outcomes, Deena Shelton

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Children who age out of foster care face adjustments and mental health issues at higher rates than their peers, but those who are adopted have the opportunity to heal from previous trauma and experience better outcomes. To create healthy family systems for adopted children, adoptive parents need support and guidance as they personally adjust and help their children adjust to a new family system. Previous research has focused on child identifiers rather than on the broader family system in efforts to understand adoption success and failure. In this transcendental phenomenological study, adoptive parents provided their lived experiences of support during …

Effects Of Religious Returnees' Observance Of Family Purity Laws On Marital Satisfaction Scores, Tamar Eva Shtrambrand

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Baal teshuvas are traditionally observant Orthodox Jewish individuals who were previously not religiously observant and chose to become observant at a later juncture in their lives. This population is at risk of psychosocial dysfunction, particularly in the area of marriage, but little or no research has been conducted with this population. The purpose of this study was to study how 1 factor, the laws of family purity, an ancient set of Jewish laws governing sexual behavior between husbands and wives, may have an effect on marital satisfaction among baal teshuvas. Areas of marital satisfaction were measured by the Revised Dyadic …

Police Stress: An Analysis Of The Impact On Child Sexual Exploitation Investigators, Damon Landon Simmons

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The psychological and physiological effects of work-related stress on law enforcement causes high morbidity and mortality rates and rates of alcoholism, substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide higher than the national average. The purpose of this explanatory sequential mixed-methods study was to examine whether work-related stress experienced by child sexual exploitation (CSE) and child sexual abuse (CSA) investigators differ from that of other duty assigned subgroups. I used Karasek's job demands-control model as the theoretical framework for this study. I conducted the study within a medium sized law enforcement agency in eastern Washington State. The sample in the quantitative study …

Employer Attitudes And Beliefs About Hiring Post Incarcerated Offenders In Mississippi, Ora Starks

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Employer Attitudes and Beliefs About Hiring Post-Incarcerated Offenders in Mississippi

by

Ora Starks

MS, Criminal Justice, 1999

BS, Criminal Justice,1994

Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Human Services Program

Criminal Justice Specialization

Walden University

May 2018

Predictors Of Gambling-Related Problems In Adult Internet Gamblers, Barbaradee Foote

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The use of the Internet to gamble has become increasingly prevalent in recent years.

Although researchers have suggested that adult Internet gamblers are at high risk for

developing a gambling disorder, few studies, overall, have been conducted on the effects

of Internet gambling. Furthermore, conflicting research exists regarding what moderates

gambling-related problems. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if

age, gender, and emotions prior to the gambling experience are related predictors of

Internet problem gambling severity. A retrospective design was used. The pathways

model was used to support the belief that emotions felt before an Internet gambling …

The Relationship Among Demographics And Risk Attitude In Predicting Health Plan Enrollment, Stephen Gage

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Age, salary, family status, and health status are reported to be linked to high deductible health plan (HDHP) enrollment for pre-Affordable Care Act (ACA) health plans. There has been little research on HDHP enrollment post-ACA. This study quantitatively examined the demographic variables and attitude toward risk that contribute to enrollment in a HDHP that conforms to the ACA minimum essential coverage standards. Risk taking was measured by the Domain Specific Risk Taking Scale. Other independent variables were participant age, annual salary, employee status, enrollment tier, and gender. There were 144 participants recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform who participated …

Crime And The Business Cycle In Mississippi, Taylor Thrasher

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the relationship between crime and the business cycle in Mississippi. Working with a theoretical model of the individual's decision to commit a crime, I show that an increase in legal income decreases an individual's propensity to commit crime. I then use regressions to estimate the long-run and short-run income elasticities of violent crime, burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft. The long-run empirical model shows how income growth effects crime growth, and the short-run empirical model shows how income variability effects crime variability. In the long run, I find that as income increases (decreases), both burglary and larceny decrease …

Coping With Sickle Cell Disease Using Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Helen Alexander

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

This project focused on identifying the best evidence available on the use of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for pediatric patients and families with sickle cell disease (SCD) to improve their coping skills with pain management. This resulted from an identified gap in nursing practice regarding psychosocial support for this subset of hospitalized pediatric patients. The practice-focused question was whether there was evidence in the literature on the use of CBT techniques to improve parental coping skills with children who have chronic and life-threatening illness that could be utilized with sickle cell disease. The theory of stress and coping guided the …

Too Long And Too Boring: The Effects Of Survey Length And Interest On Careless Responding, Cheyna Katherine Brower

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Careless responding (CR), also called insufficient effort responding (IER), occurs when survey participants respond to items without regard to item content. The presence of careless responding threatens the validity of inferences made from self-report data (Huang et al., 2012; Huang et al., 2015). This study examines the effects of two proposed causes of careless responding (Mead & Craig, 2012): questionnaire length and participant disinterest. Specifically, I hypothesized that (a) questionnaire length is positively related to careless responding, (b) participant interest is negatively related to careless responding, and (c) questionnaire length has a weaker relationship with careless responding among participants who …

Chinese Satellite Diplomacy: China's Strategic Weapon For Soft And Hard Power Gains, Nicholas Jackman

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China signed its first turn-key communication satellite contract with Nigeria in 2004. The contract stipulated that China would design, build, integrate, launch, and complete in-orbit checkout for the Nigcomsat-1 communication satellite and then transfer control over to Nigeria. By 2018, China had contracted and launched another six communication satellites for various foreign customers. The customers, who are foreign governments, are geographically dispersed throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The satellite sales have occurred during China's unprecedented economic growth, a time in which China has been granted additional foreign policy options as its power increases relative to others. This thesis …

Japan's Article 9 And Japanese Public Opinion: Implications For Japanese Defense Policy And Security In The Asia Pacific, Julie Jo Tollefson

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The Asia Pacific power structure is facing numerous challenges. Scholarship demonstrates Japan has encountered arduous obstacles as it balances Chinese and North Korean activity. As Japan attempts to expand its military capabilities, polling data shows that defense policy has conflicted with Japan's citizens and neighboring countries. The focal point of these contentions is Article 9 of the Japanese constitution which restrains the Japanese military to self-defense purposes. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has vowed to revise Article 9 by 2020. However, revising Article 9 is no simple task. Research demonstrates that for decades Japanese public opinion has been opposed to the …

With Liberty And Justice For All: An Examination Of The United States' Compliance With Rule Of Law As It Relates To Domestic And International Terrorism, Jonathan William Maze

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This study examines what factors contribute to United States' compliance with rule of law in response to terrorism. A qualitative analysis utilizing a comparative case study approach to examine the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations' response to domestic and international terrorism. This study tests what impact the location of terrorist attacks, nationality of terrorist actors, and presidential ideology have upon rule of law compliance. Results from this study illustrate the causal relationship between rule of law compliance and presidential ideology, while taking into account the impact of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.

Comparison Of Cyber Network Defense Visual Displays, Christen Elizabeth Lopez Sushereba

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This work describes an Ecological Interface Design (EID) comparison of five displays (Alphanumeric, 2D and 3D Aggregate, Radial, and Treemap) on accuracy and latency performance for simple cyber network data analysis tasks. Twenty students from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Wright State University participated for compensation. Questions (n = 12) ranged from global to specific aspects of the data and required two types of responses: numerical estimates and binary visual judgments. EID principles of attunement and specificity (Bennett & Flach, 2011) guided the interpretation of results. Participants answered faster when the display's visual forms (vertical extent, area, or …

Red Skies: The Impact Of Environmental Protests In The People's Republic Of China, 2004-2016, Porter Lyons

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How do increases in environmental protests in China impact increases in the implementation of environmental policies? Environmental protests in China are gaining traction. By examining these protests, this study analyzes forty-one protests and their impact on government enforcement of environmental regulations. Stratifying this study according to five areas (Beijing, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangsu, and Sichuan), patterns began to emerge according to each area. Employing a framework William Gamson introduced (2009), this study analyzes the outcomes of environmental contention, including the use of co-optation and preemptive measures. It finds that the success or failure of a protest has much to do with …

Symbol Grounding In Social Media Communications, Andrew J. Hampton

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Social media data promise to inform the disaster response community, but effective mining remains elusive. To assist in the analysis of community reports on disaster from social media, I draw on an integrated model of psycholinguistic theory to investigate the patterns by which language use changes as a function of environmental influence. Using social media corpora from several disasters and non-disasters, I examine variations in patterns of lexical choice between domain independent paired antonyms with respect to an Internet-specific base rate to determine generic sentinels of breach of canonicity. I examine social media content with respect to disaster proximity and …

Development Of A Psychoeducational Parenting Group For Mothers Addicted To Opioids With Infants With Neonatal Abstinance Syndrome, Kaitlyn Marie Eichinger

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Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome occurs when an infant is exposed to opioids in utero and has many associated health concerns post-partum. In the US in 2012, approximately 22,000 infants were born with NAS. Mothers of these infants have a unique set of needs that affect their ability to adequately care for their infants as they transition home with their infant after giving birth. However, few programs specifically address the needs of this population. The program described in this dissertation is based upon a thorough review of the literature and seeks to fill the gap in the available programming for women with …

A Study Of Dementia Assessment Practices In Ohio Prisons, Elizabeth Kate Turner

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Dementia is a chronic disorder of the mental processes generated by brain injury or disease, and is characterized by gradual, irreversible loss of memory, judgment, functional abilities, health, and identity. While dementia can occur in individuals that would not be considered "aging" it primarily occurs in people over 60 (Christodoulou, 2012). Dementia recognition and assessment in prison is currently an overlooked issue in the United States. There are few examples of research regarding best practices for addressing dementia in corrections, including the standard protocols, policies, and procedures for screening and managing the needs of inmates with dementia. This qualitative study …

Exploring The Influence Of Meditation Experience On Stress Responses And Empathy: The Mediating Role Of Self-Expansion, Jennifer N. Baumgartner

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The purpose of the present research was to examine the influence of meditation experience on biopsychosocial responses to stress, empathy, and sense of self. An expanded sense of self was examined as a pathway through which meditation experience influences appraisals, affect, and empathy. It was expected that meditation experience would predict greater challenge stressor appraisals in response to an acute psychosocial stressor and associated affective, behavioral, and psychophysiological stress outcomes. In addition, it was expected that greater meditation experience would predict higher trait empathy and empathic accuracy. Participants (N = 110) included experienced meditators from a variety of practices and …

Semantic And Structural Influences On Spatial Knowledge Acquisition, Robert B. May

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Spatial memory for the layout of large-scale environments, configural spatial memory, has typically been construed as being very structured, using something like a metric coordinate system and using environmental objects to define that coordinate system. Inside of buildings, rectangular rooms have walls at right angles that have been considered to fulfill this role. However, the influence of non-spatial factors and considerations of relatively unstructured environments have not received much attention. Semantic organization was found to improve configural spatial memory for landmark objects in rooms with walls and it was independent of the structural relations among landmark objects (Colle & Reid, …

A Therapeutic Storybook For Adjustment And Acculturation In Middle Eastern Refugee Children, Christina E. Zawalski

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The current global sociopolitical climate has resulted in the influx of refugees to the United States from all over the world. Those coming from the Middle East represent a large portion of refugees in the U.S., and children within this group make up a large percentage. The refugee process is characterized by stressful experiences in the premigration, migration, and resettlement stages. These experiences put refugee children at risk for distress and other mental health difficulties. Refugees must learn how to adjust and acculturate once in the host country, which can be a difficult task. Teachers are in a unique position …

The Impact Of Feminist Identity Development On The Internalization Of Sociocultural Pressures And Body Dissatisfaction, Jill R. Klotzman

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The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between perceived sociocultural pressures and internalization of the thin ideal and to determine whether or not high levels of feminist identity development moderate this relationship. The study also investigated the relationship between internalization of the thin ideal and body dissatisfaction and whether or not high levels of feminist identity development moderated the relationship. Two multiple hierarchical regression analyses were performed using data collected from a female undergraduate student sample (N=403) from Wright State University. These data were derived from a survey containing the Perceived Sociocultural Pressure Scale (PSPS; Stice …

Revisiting Afghanistan's Modern History: The Role Of Ethnic Inclusion On Regime Stability, Rahimullah Akrami

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This study examines the role of ethnic inclusion as a factor of regime stability in Afghanistan through an historical case analysis from 1880 until 2009. By utilizing case study research methods, the goal of the study is to examine all the past regimes in order to show whether there is a relationship between the dependent variable regime stability and the independent variable ethnic inclusion. The study assumes the hypothesis that an ethnically inclusive regime will be stable while an ethnically exclusive regime will be unstable. Five indicators are used to measure each variable respectively. Each indicator is assigned a score …