Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Coupled Correlates Of Attention And Consciousness, Ravi Varkki Chacko

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Introduction: Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have been shown to restore lost motor function that occurs in stroke using electrophysiological signals. However, little evidence exists for the use of BCIs to restore non-motor stroke deficits, such as the attention deficits seen in hemineglect. Attention is a cognitive function that selects objects or ideas for further neural processing, presumably to facilitate optimal behavior. Developing BCIs for attention is different from developing motor BCIs because attention networks in the brain are more distributed and associative than motor networks. For example, hemineglect patients have reduced levels of arousal, which exacerbates their attentional deficits. More …

Subtypes Of Neglect In Relation To Reporting Practices, Safety Outcomes Among Known Cases, And Risk And Protective Factors, Chien-Jen Chiang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Objectives: The overall objective of this dissertation is to build knowledge about the phenomena of neglect subtypes to better guide prevention and child welfare intervention efforts in the future. The first aim focuses on how we come to officially identify cases of child neglect and its relationship to policies that set definitions for what is reportable in a given state. The second aim highlights whether or not there appear to be differences in safety and permanency outcomes for children known to CPS for different forms of neglect. The third aim focuses on why families may develop specific neglecting behaviors that …

A Formative Assessment Of The Vulnerability Context Of Three Indigenous Communities In Rural Ecuador For Improved Intervention Design, Ivy Blackmore

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Nearly 20 % of the current world population are small-scale producers living in rural areas who rely on agriculture and related activities to support their families (IFAD, 2016; World Bank, 2008). Despite the almost 76 billion USD of official development assistance committed to agriculture improvement projects and associated activities over the past decade, many of the intended beneficiaries remain poor and struggle to meet their basic needs. The lack of success in addressing rural poverty highlights the need for quality research focused on understanding what type of intervention/s could help rural communities sustainably improve their livelihood security.The goal of this …

Social Engagement Among Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment And Conversion To Dementia, Takashi Amano

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Promoting social engagement is a promising approach to prevent or delay conversion from cognitive impairment no dementia (CIND) to dementia. However, little is known about social engagement among people with CIND. This dissertation project aimed to improve understanding of social engagement among people with CIND by addressing gaps in the literature. It had three specific aims including: to describe and identify factors associated with heterogeneity of social engagement among older adults with CIND, to assess the association between heterogeneity of social engagement and conversion from CIND to dementia, and to investigate the relationship among heterogeneity of social engagement, other types …

“You Have To Want It”: A Pervasive Mental Model Of Addiction Recovery And Its Implications For Sustaining Change, Erin Stringfellow

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Background: Addiction to illicit drugs is a complex phenomenon characterized by cyclical patterns of relapse, remission, and, for some, a full recovery. People who use drugs (PWUD) and their loved ones form ‘mental models’ of recovery that develop over time through experience and observation. The role of these mental models and how they interact to undermine or support recovery is poorly understood. Therefore, this study asks: 1) What do people who use drugs and their loved ones believe it takes to successfully recover from addiction? and 2) Given these beliefs about recovery and the available evidence on remission, relapse, and …

Promoting Child Behavioral Health In Homeless Services: A Community-Based System Dynamics Approach, Katherine Marcal

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Families with children comprise one-third of the entire homeless population (Henry, Watt, Rosenthal, & Shivji, 2017). Homelessness exposes children to chaotic, unsafe living environments that pose threats to healthy development; unsurprisingly, children in homeless services display high rates of mental health disorders compared to stably housed children (Bassuk et al., 2015; Buckner, 2008). Despite concerted efforts at the state and local levels to end family homelessness by 2020, rates have remained largely unchanged over the past decade (Henry et al., 2017; U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, 2015). Additional indicators such as increasing wait times, average length of stay, and reentry …

Your Internet Data Is Rotting, Paul Royster

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

The internet is growing, but old information continues to disappear daily.

Many MySpace users were dismayed to discover earlier this year that the social media platform lost 50 million files uploaded between 2003 and 2015. The failure of MySpace to care for and preserve its users’ content should serve as a reminder that relying on free third-party services can be risky. MySpace has probably preserved the users’ data; it just lost their content. The data was valuable to MySpace; the users’ content less so.

Preserving content or intellectual property on the internet presents a conundrum. If it’s accessible, then it …

Epistemic Justice And Epistemic Participation, Kate C.S. Schmidt

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

I advance a new theory of epistemic injustice, with important implications for pursuing epistemic justice. This project develops a positive account of epistemic justice, broadens the scope of the phenomenon, and motivates new interventions. This dissertations works towards a better understanding of what it means to be an epistemic subject and to be treated as such.I argue that epistemic injustice can be understood through a lens of participation in inquiry, rather than using the received view that focuses on testimony. On my account, victims are marginalized when disrespected and devalued as potential participants in inquiry due to prejudice. This account …

Essays On Microeconomic Theory, Geyu Yang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters on topics in microeconomic theory. In Chapter 1, I study reputation effects under uncertain monitoring. I examine a repeated gamebetween a long-run player and a series of short-run opponents. The long-run playercan either be a strategic type or a commitment type that plays the same action inevery period. The modeling innovation is that the short-run player is unsure aboutthe monitoring structure. The uncertainty about the monitoring structure introducesnew challenges to reputation building because there may not be a direct relationshipbetween the distribution of signals and the long-run player’s strategy. Thus the long-runplayer may not …

Essays On Econometrics And Rational Choice, Junnan He

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Decision and choice theory is a topic of interest in both econometrics and microeconomic theory. We contribute to the theory of decision under both contexts, that is, the theory of model selection in econometrics, and the theory of rational decision in microeconomics.There is a long-lasting theoretical interest in model selection. More recently, research on sparse estimators, a class of estimation methods that select and estimate important parameters simultaneously, has been the central focus on model selection. The methods become especially relevant when the problem is of high-dimensional nature. Theoretically, sparse methods can perform well when the true data generating process …

Essays On Macro-Finance Affine Term Structure Models, Biancen Xie

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I focus on theoretical affine term structure models and the development of Bayesian econometric methods to estimate them.In the first Chapter, we address the question of which unspanned macroeconomic factors are the best in the class of macro-finance Gaussian affine term structure models. To answer this question, we extend Joslin, Priebsch, and Singleton (2014) in two dimensions. First, following Ang and Piazzesi (2003) and Chib and Ergashev (2009), three latent factors, instead of the first three principal components of the yield curve, are used to represent the level, slope and curvature of the yield curve. Second we …

Essays On Macroeconomics, Helu Jiang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Cohabitation, Marriage, and Fertility: Divergent Patterns for Different Education Groups. The United States has been experiencing a long-term decline in the rates of marriage and fertility and a steady rise in cohabitation. Contradicting the prediction of standard theory that emphasizes the opportunity cost of childrearing from labor market and gender specialization, skilled females have experienced a less pronounced drop in marriage and fertility, while unskilled females have experienced a more evident increase in cohabitation. I propose the following mechanisms to understand this puzzle: for high-skilled females, the higher implicit return of investment in children’s human capital compensates for part of …

Politics And Society After Violent Conflict, Dino Hadzic

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine how elite rhetoric about past inter-group violence affects citizens’ post-conflict social and political attitudes. To do so, I conducted a survey experiment in the post-conflict country of Bosnia. In the first substantive chapter, I find that when individuals are reminded of the violence that was committed against their co-ethnics, they adopt negative views of out-group members. However, in the subsequent chapter, I find little evidence that this rhetoric induces individuals to ostracize co-ethnics who socially engage with out-groups. Combined, these findings indicate that (1) rhetoric about past violence makes reconciliation less likely by engendering negative …

Marriage, The Market, And Gendered (In)Securities In Kibera, Kenya, Elizabeth Ashley Wilson

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Based on more than two years of anthropological fieldwork, 157 household surveys, and 40 in-depth interviews, my dissertation research examines a conjugal form in Kenya known as “come-we-stay” marriage, or long-term intimate cohabitation that is often not seen as legitimate neither by the law nor kinship networks. Whereas various opinion leaders, from clergy to feminist organizations, have hailed come-we-stay as an affront to moral decency and women’s rights (respectively), women and men with whom I have conducted research in Nairobi’s Kibera slum emphasize the complexity of the issue and highlight the social, economic, and intimate challenges and benefits of their …

Sinning Men, Sinful Places: Spatial Politics Of Moral Transgressions In The Franco-German Borderland, Oguz Alyanak

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Where do Muslim Turkish men who live in Strasbourg go after work? What are the kinds of places they socialize? Is it home? Is it the mosque? Or is it elsewhere, like coffeehouses, or wherever the car takes them in Strasbourg, and beyond, such as nightclubs, drinking alleys, bistro-casinos and brothels in Kehl and other neighboring German cities? And if it is the latter, and it rarely should be, as the imams would warn the pupils attending religious conversation circles, and the Friday sermons, how do these men justify their presence in these spaces? How do they reflect on their …

Three Essays On Separation Of Powers And Competitive Elections, Myunghoon Kang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how separation of powers and competitive elections affect the policymaking process at its various stages. First, I explore how the super-majoritarian rule in the legislature, which is the consequence of separation of powers, affects votersˆa electoral decisions, which in turn indirectly affects the policy outcome. I demonstrate that the super-majoritarian rule of the legislative policymaking process creates not only a legislative gridlock but also incentives that lead some districts to strategically elect more ideologically extreme delegates in certain circumstances, which expands the legislative gridlock region. Second, I examine when competitive elections can restrain the president’s unilateral policymaking …

The Ontogeny Of Complex Tool Use Among Chimpanzees Of The Goualougo Triangle, Republic Of Congo, Stephanie L. Musgrave

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Various factors are hypothesized to have contributed to the flourishing of technology during human evolution, including high-fidelity social learning, a propensity for prosocial helping, and sex differences in foraging tool use. In this research, we examined the role of these factors on the development of complex tool-using skills among wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) in the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo. These apes exhibit among the most complex tool behaviors of any nonhuman animal, including the flexible use of multiple tool types and the manufacture of tools from specific raw materials, according to a particular design. Specifically, we drew upon …

Use Of E-Resources By The Faculty Members And Research Scholars Of Srm Institute Of Science & Technology – Kattankalathur Campus, Ganesh P, Dr.Rajendran P

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The present study was carried out at SRM Institute of Science & Technology (SRMIST). This study was conducted to examine the use of electronic resources and databases, awareness factor, purpose and problems faced while accessing the e-resources subscribed at SRMIST Central Library. For this purpose, a well-structured Questioner method was employed to gather data from the faculty members and research scholars of SRMIST. The result shows that despite the availability of a wide range of e-resources the frequency of their use was low. The reason behind was identified as their lack of awareness & subject coverage.

Publication Trends In Global Output Of Rfid: A Bibliometric Profile, Rekha A.J., Jayaprakash M Dr

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The paper presents an analysis of 2735 global publications in RFID(Radio Frequency Identification), indexed in Web of science database during 2014-2018. The collected records were analyzed with the help of ‘Histcite tool’.The present study attempted to reveal the year, country and institution, formwise distribution, authorship pattern, degree of collaboration, relative growth rate and doubling time of publications. The findings of this showed that degree of Collaboration was high at 2017 (0.96).The relative growth rates (RGR) has increased and the doubling time (DT) has rapidly decreased while calculated year wise i.e.2014 to 2018.

Lessons Of A Failed Study: Lone Research, Media Analysis, And The Limitations Of Bracketing, Katherine Gregory

Publications and Research

Failed research can function as the underbelly of all qualitative research projects that come to fruition. These shadow projects offer invaluable insights to future research and researchers alike. In this article, I trace a failed life history of sex offenders project from its conceptualization to its abandonment, after conducting a series of searches on the online National Sex Offender Registry database. Through the use of preliminary field notes and an analysis of media representations, I examine the role of bracketing of the topic, as a by-product of the phenomenological tradition, and other methodological issues such as physical and emotional vulnerability …

Essays On The Chinese Economy, Fan Duan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation includes three essays which contribute to the literature on economic growth, innovation, and international trade in China. Chapter 2 examines the implication of early economic prosperity, measured by the city-level population density in 1776, for modern day China. It shows that uneven economic performance across cities in the modern-day China can be traced to variation in living standards in 1776. Chapter 3 investigates the effects of innovation and human capital on firms’ export decisions over the 2003-2011 period, and it shows that more innovative and skill-intensive firms are more likely to export and stay in the export market. …

What Role Has Social Media Played In Violence Perpetrated By Incels?, Olivia Young

Peace Studies Student Papers and Posters

This paper aimed to answer the question, what role has social media played in violence perpetrated by Incels?

Incels, or Involuntary celibates, are members of an online subculture who define themselves as unable to find sexual partners. Incels have been responsible for a number of violent attacks and mass killings in recent years.

This exploration involved a content analysis of online incel forums such as such as reddit and 4-chan, and of news articles about incel attacks. The content analysis of social media examined incel ideology and online rhetoric of hate and violence; while the analysis of news articles examined …

Evaluation Of The Availability And Use Of Information Resources And Services By Sandwich Students: A Case Study Of Lead City University, Ibadan, Oyo State., Albert O. Adetunji, Taofeek Abiodun Oladokun

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract

Part-time and Distance education is fast gaining global acceptance with millions of enrolments annually. Stakeholders have argued that, just like regular students, those who chose this mode of study deserve the highest quality services available. As a result, Library and Information service providers are seeking to understand this group of users in order to properly meet their information needs and design services that best fit their unique characteristics. The study thus examined the availability and use of Library and Information Services by Part-time, Students at Lead City University, Ibadan, Nigeria. A self administered questionnaire was used to gather data. …

Implications To Rules-Breaking In Some Selected Nigerian Library Association (Nla) Online Groups And A Way Forward For National Unity, Juliet Alex-Nmecha, Mercy Echem

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The purpose of this paper is aimed at taming the unacceptable behavioural pattern of some individuals in some professional groups as it has to do with rule breaking. Rules-breaking is a menace that could jeopardize a group if care is not taking. It does not just stop at that, rather it goes further to threaten the national unity as the nation is being represented by a small segment of group of professionals. This paper through observation and existing literature stated a brief overview of the meaning of rules and national unity and benefits of being in a group. The paper …

Awareness And Usage Of E-Resources By Faculty Members At Vardhaman College Of Engineering (Autonomous), Hyderabad: A Study, Srinivasulu Palikiti, Chinna Balu C, Narendra A

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The present study is an attempt to examine the awareness and use of e-resources by the faculty members of Vardhaman College of Engineering (Autonomous), Hyderabad and also focuses on the various types of their availability in the Library. The structured questionnaire was designed and distributed among the faculty members with different cadres across the departments seeking their opinion on e-resources subscribed by the Central Library. The questionnaire was tagged on 192 faculty members who were randomly selected for the study.

Evaluating The Job Performance Of Librarians In Universities In South-East, Nigeria., Obinna A. Nwokike Phd, Vincent E. Unegbu Phd

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Job performance consists of a set of employees’ behaviours that are perceived to be in agreement with organizational goals that can be measured, monitored and assessed as an achievement at an individual level. The librarian’s job performance is that aspect of work behaviour that is of relevance to the library’s success. This paper presents findings from a self-rating questionnaire on the levels of job performance of librarians in universities in one region of Nigeria. The study was carried out using a cross-sectional survey design to collect data from 210 respondents in 21 universities based on total enumeration. Data was analyzed …

Faculty's Information Seeking Behavior In An Ict Environment: A Study Of Koforidua Technical University, Patrick Baayel, Edward Asante

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study investigated the issues affecting Faculty Information Seeking Behavior in an ICT Environment. The study was conducted in Koforidua technical university (KTU), in Ghana. The study adopted a survey approach. The sampling method adopted for this study was simple random sampling techniques. The respondents of the study were drawn from the Faculty of Business and Management Studies (FBMS) of the Technical University. No sampling technique was used as the entire population of 98 was targeted. A structured questionnaire was developed and administered to elicit information from the respondents. A total of 98 copies of the questionnaire were strictly administered …

Open Access Electronic Thesis And Dissertation Repositories: An Assessment, Javaid Ahmad Wani

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract:

Purpose- This study evaluates the Open Access Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (OAETD) repositories available at oatd.org , on the basis of various parameters like structure, content support, technical and operational feasibility. It highlights positive and negative aspects of select OAETD repositories and forward suggestions for the better improvement.

Design/methodology/approach- Survey method coupled with online visits is employed to obtain data from OAETD repositories besides schedule is drafted to understand various technical features.

Findings- The findings of present work further strengthen the belief that adaptation of open access procedures in different settings especially in modern day research is showing an …

Search Strategies And Information Search Tools Used By Pharmacy Phd Students: A Qualitative Study, Shafi Habibi, Seyede Nasrin Fatemi, Leila Doshmangir, Shahram Sedghi

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate search tools and strategies of PhD students to access required information.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews with pharmacy Ph.D. students in Tabriz University of Medical Sciences were conducted. We used MaxQDA software to analyze the content of the interviews.

Results: Scopus and Google Scholar were the most popular search tools used by participants. These databases were also recognized as the most common starting points for searches among participants. Participants’ search strategies were categorized into two themes (search tools and search strategies) and six subthemes which include: search start up tools, search tools used, reasons to use, …

Status Of Electronic Resources In Libraries: A Review Study, Dr. Sabah Jan

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract: Information sources and in turn electronic resources form the basis of all the sectors of society especially healthcare. They represent a framework to describe the wide spread management of health science information across the globe via computerized systems and its secured and scrutinized exchange between the health science professionals and various associated personals. The overall worth, security and competence of the health research and health services are known to be well determined by means of quality health information sources. Electronic resources in health sciences play a vital role by enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of the information. It is …