Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Stop Running In Laps: Evaluating The Lethality Assessment Program's Effectiveness In Reducing Repeat Intimate Partner Violence, Dory A. Mizrachi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Repeat victimization is a phenomenon which is generally understood as the pattern and prevalence of victimization. This is an important factor for local authorities in their attempt to develop innovative policies and practices to facilitate predicting and preventing crimes. Thus, many police departments around the country, including the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) have adopted the Lethality Assessment Program (LAP). This is a risk assessment tool used by responding officers on domestic violence calls that intends to prevent future risk of lethal violence to victims of domestic violence by assessing their risk of lethality and providing immediate referrals to …

From Deviant Symbol To Cultural Icon? Understanding Pit Bull Stigma, Genevieve Minter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This research draws from twelve months of ethnographic data using Las Vegas as a case study to understand how pit bull owners experience and negotiate stigma in various social settings. The human-dog relationship, long rooted in utility, transformed in the modern era as animals were promoted from worker to companion. The world’s first dog register, The American Kennel Club, created breed standards and encouraged selective breeding, which influenced the idea of certain dogs being more physically “dangerous” than others. Though the pit bull is not the first dog “breed” to be the object of discrimination, it is the first dog …

Modeling Driver-Pedestrian-Infrastructure Interactions At Signalized Midblock Crosswalks, Boniphace Kutela

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Cities and metropolitan areas are increasingly facilitating pedestrians’ movement by the provision of pedestrian walking facilities. As pedestrian traffic increases, the risk of crash involvement increases, especially at midblock locations, where pedestrians are exposed to unsafe interactions with vehicular traffic. To improve pedestrians’ safety at midblock locations, various countermeasures are provided, which include signalized crosswalks. Several studies have analyzed driver-pedestrian interactions, as well as pedestrian-infrastructure interactions at signalized midblock crosswalks. However, more in-depth studies are necessary, due to shortfalls of study assumptions, which have led to the application of improper statistical models, as seen in the literature. Improved models are …

Is Easier, Better? A Reevaluation Of The Use Of Non-Remodeled Bone As A Histological Predictor Of Age-At-Death From The Femoral Midshaft Using Gis Software, Mariah Elaine Moe

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Traditional macroscopic methods for estimating age-at-death from human skeletal remains have been highly successful in practice but are notoriously inadequate when aging individuals over the age of 50 years. Skeletal histology has the potential to overcome these challenges to narrow the gap in age estimation and more accurately address older individuals.

Primary bone is produced during normal growth and development. Once fully matured, individuals undergo the lifelong process of remodeling wherein primary bone is replaced with microstructures called secondary osteons. As individuals age, the amount of primary bone tends to decrease. This study reexamined the use of percentage of primary …

The Bioarchaeology Of Instability: Violence And Environmental Stress During The Late Fort Ancient (Ad 1425 - 1635) Occupations Of Hardin Village, Amber Elaine Osterholt

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Conflict, poor health, environmental instability, captive taking, and culture change are all potential contributors for the abandonment of the Middle Ohio River Valley at the end of the Protohistoric Period in eastern North America. This project investigated the relationship between these factors among the Fort Ancient community of Hardin Village. The data presented in this study use bioarchaeological analysis to reveal how environmental and cultural instability influenced communities to leave their homeland. Bioarchaeology was well suited for this investigation because it links the most direct evidence of violence and poor health and nutrition (skeletal injuries and evidence of disease) to …

Laughter, Discomfort, And The Mechanics Of Subversion: How Amy Schumer Uses Comedy And Performance To Change The Way We Think About Women A Thematic Analysis Of Amy Schumer, Stephanie Rosauri

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Amy Schumer earned a spot as the first woman ever on Forbes Top Ten Highest Paid Comedians List. This was a huge accomplishment but it begs the question why Schumer is the first. Past research on female comedians like Lucille Ball and Lily Tomlin illuminates how comedy can be used as a rhetorical device and highlights the importance of women in comedy. Through an in-depth thematic analysis of Schumer's movies Trainwreck (2015), Snatched (2017), and I Feel Pretty (2018), this thesis examines how Schumer uses different comedic techniques and how that compares to the way other women used comedy in …

An Exploration Of Nursing Communication Competence During The Handoff Report, Megan Elizabeth Smith

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Introduction Nurse handoff reporting is a crucial time for communication exchange in healthcare settings. During the handoff report, patient information is exchanged between senders and receivers transferring responsibility for care with the main purpose of providing accurate and timely information about the patient. The Joint Commission reports that shortcomings related to communication can be directly related to an increase in patient care errors, with approximately 80% of medical errors resulting from miscommunication during the handoff process. Numerous intervention studies focus on standardizing information, developing physical locations and environments for ideal handoffs, and creating tools for structured information exchange between different …

Assessing Factors Of Physical Risk-Taking In A Novel Behavioral Measure, Edward A. Smith

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Risk taking is a complex heterogeneous construct that has proven difficult to assess, especially when using behavioral tasks. A new measure, the Assessment of Physical Risk Taking (APRT) is presented as a comprehensive assessment of several factors of risk. Specifically, the measure seeks to examine the effects of several decision-making elements (e.g., probability of success and failure, magnitude of reward and punishment) of different types of physically risky behaviors and produce a variety of different outcome scores. Participants (N = 256) completed APRT in a laboratory setting, with half being assigned to an enforced Delay condition. Main effects, two-way interactions …

Missed Opportunities: The Effect Of Cps Involvement On Trafficking Victims In The Delinquency System, Kelly Rae Stout

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Children and youth involved in the child welfare system are an incredibly vulnerable population that could potentially have an increased risk for being sexually exploited. In 2014, Federal Public Law 113-183 mandated that all child protective service (CPS) agencies in the United States improve services of commercially sexually exploited children and youth (CSEC). This federal directive requires that states and counties train their staff in identifying and helping children who have been or are at risk for being trafficked. To explore this complex issue, quantitative methods were used. The data were analyzed for CPS engagement among the CSEC victims identified …

Beyond Suffrage: Intermarriage, Land, And Meanings Of Citizenship And Marital Naturalization/Expatriation In The United States, Shiori Yamamoto

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation investigates how the laws of marital naturalization/expatriation, namely the Citizenship Act of 1855, the Expatriation Act of 1907, and the Cable Act of 1922 and its amendments throughout the 1930s, impacted the lives of women who married foreigners, especially in the American West, and demonstrates how women directly and indirectly challenged the practice of marital naturalization/expatriation. Those laws demanded women who married foreigners take the nationality of their husbands depending on the race of women and their husbands, making married women’s citizenship dependent on that of their husbands. Particularly under the Expatriation Act of 1907, all American women …

Exploring The Pristine Inner Experience Of Individuals In Psychotherapy, Alek Emily Krumm

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Inner experience is a frequent topic in psychotherapy and in psychology more broadly, yet very little research has carefully and systematically observed the naturally-occurring experience of psychotherapy clients. The current study begins to fill that gap by using descriptive experience sampling (DES) to survey the inner experience of a small sample of individuals seeking psychotherapy. DES is a method that uses a random-interval beeper to signal participants to pay attention to their pristine inner experiences—the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so on that are directly apprehendable ‘before the footlights of consciousness’—and describe them in high fidelity. We used about eight days …

The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments And New Ways To Argue, Jordana Cox, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In response to the latest “crisis” in the humanities, advocates have marched, rallied, fundraised, and—especially—argued. This essay contends that communication scholars can support the growing “case for the humanities” by analyzing argumentative strategies, and more specifically, by offering ethical argumentative strategies that avoid replicating structures of domination. In particular, we look to Mari Lee Mifsud's theorization of rhetoric as gift, which follows Henry W. Johnstone in conceptualizing argument as something other than winning over an adversary. We place Mifsud's theorization of the gift in conversation with the methods of the digital public humanities (DPH), which acknowledge and offer abundant resources …

Cracking The Social Media Code Of Post-Millennials, Bailey Elizabeth Kinney

Theses

This project will investigate the way that generation z/post millennials interact and respond to digital marketing and social media. The final deliverable is a 30-minute webinar offering a wide assessment of this up and coming generation. The video will include a comparison between how advertising is currently conducted for millennials and how it will need to change their successors. The webinar will also include research, examples of successful marketing to this generation, and practical application tips.

Updating Powerpoint For The New Business Classroom, Sabra Brock, Yogini Joglekar, Ayushi Tandon, Gena Bardwell

New York School for Career and Applied Studies (NYSCAS) Publications and Research

Aim/Purpose To update a 2010 study that recommended “rules of thumb” for more effective use of PowerPoint in the post-secondary business classroom. The current study expanded the focus to include the business classroom in India as well as the US and examined possible shifts in student perception of the utility of PowerPoint among Generations Y and Z.

Background The study examined students’ perception of the learning utility of PowerPoint in post-secondary business classrooms in the US and India and the relationship of the use of PowerPoint to course ratings.

Methodology Surveys were distributed in post-secondary business classrooms in India and …

Boosting The Hodrick-Prescott Filter, Peter C.B. Phillips, Zhentao Shi

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter is one of the most widely used econometric methods in applied macroeconomic research. The technique is nonparametric and seeks to decompose a time series into a trend and a cyclical component unaided by economic theory or prior trend specification. Like all nonparametric methods, the HP filter depends critically on a tuning parameter that controls the degree of smoothing. Yet in contrast to modern nonparametric methods and applied work with these procedures, empirical practice with the HP filter almost universally relies on standard settings for the tuning parameter that have been suggested largely by experimentation with macroeconomic …

Necessary And Sufficient Conditions For Determinacy Of Asymptotically Stationary Equilibria In Olg Models, Alexander Gorokhovsky, Anna Rubinchik

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose a criterion for determining whether a local policy analysis can be made in a given equilibrium in an overlapping generations model. The criterion can be applied to models with infinite past and future as well as those with a truncated past. The equilibrium is not necessarily a steady state; for example, demographic and type composition of the population or individuals’ endowments can change over time. However, asymptotically, the equilibrium should be stationary. The two limiting stationary paths at either end of the timeline do not have to be the same. If they are, conditions for local uniqueness are …

The Causal Effect Of Service Satisfaction On Customer Loyalty, Guofang Huang, K. Sudhir

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose an instrumental-variable (IV) approach to estimate the causal effect of service satisfaction on customer loyalty, by exploiting a common source of randomness in the assignment of service employees to customers in service queues. Our approach can be applied at no incremental cost by using routine repeated cross-sectional customer survey data collected by firms. The IV approach addresses multiple sources of biases that pose challenges in estimating the causal effect using cross-sectional data: (i) the upward bias from common-method variance due to the joint measurement of service satisfaction and loyalty intent in surveys; (ii) the attenuation bias caused by …

Using Transfer Learning In Network Markets, Kai Cai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mechanism design is the sub-field of microeconomics and game theory, which considers agents have their own private information and are self-interested and tries to design systems that can produce desirable outcomes. In recent years, with the development of internet and electronic markets, mechanism design has become an important research field in computer science. This work has largely focused on single markets. In the real world, individual markets tend to connect to other markets and form a big “network market”, where each market occupies a node in the network and connections between markets reflect constraints on traders in the markets. So, …

Older Adults’ Perceptions Regarding Transportation Services In San Jose, Ca: Access, Barriers, And Innovations, Deborah Bolding

Mineta Transportation Institute

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of older adults concerning barriers to the use of public transportation, to identify programs and services that best meet transportation needs, and to obtain suggestions for improvements or innovations in order to enable them to engage more fully in their community. Four focus groups, with a total of 25 participants, were held in three locations in San Jose, CA. While the participants were able to use public transportation to access shopping, medical services and other destinations, they expressed concerns related to physical barriers, frequency of services, the behavior of some …

Economic Revitalization In The Lower Anthracite Coal Region, Shaunna Barnhart

Sponsored Events -- Materials

Conference materials distributed at the Economic Revitalization in the Lower Anthracite Coal Region convening event organized in collaboration with Bucknell University, Bloomsburg University, Susquehanna University, Greater Susquehanna Valley Chamber of Commerce, Anthracite Region for Progress, Mother Maria Kaupas Center, Shamokin Area Businesses for Economic Revitalization, and the City of Shamokin. The convening focused on collaborative opportunities across the communities of Shamokin, Coal Township, Mount Carmel, and Kulpmon. Event materials include an eight page booklet with speaker biographies, descriptions of event partners, and descriptions of sponsors. Supplementary materials include a welcome letter and the electronic version of a printable flier.

Convening …

“It All Starts With The Parents”: A Qualitative Study On Protective Factors For Drug-Use Prevention Among Black And Hispanic Girls, Ijeoma Opara, David T. Lardier, Robert Reid, Pauline Garcia-Reid

Department of Family Science and Human Development Scholarship and Creative Works

Using intersectionality theory as a theoretical framework, this qualitative study uncovered the protective factors present among black and Hispanic adolescent girls living in an urban, underresourced neighborhood in the Northeastern United States. The sample used in this study includes eight focus groups that consisted of adolescent females only (N = 57). Female participants were sampled through six youth-serving summer programs throughout the target city. The female participants were between 11 and 17 years of age, with 73% self-identifying as black (n = 45) and 26% (n = 12) as Hispanic. Thematic analysis using an intersectional approach was used to analyze …

Dna Methylation Methods For Donor Age Prediction Using Touch Dna, Emily Neverett

Master's Theses

The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimated over 30 million individuals fall victim to human trafficking each year, of which, 50% are children below the age of 16. In 2012, the ILO reported there to be 168 million child laborers worldwide, with many trafficked into hazardous conditions to manufacture consumer products that are sold in developed countries. This is a modern form of slavery with poor working conditions, no access to education, and low wages. The hidden nature of this crime, however, makes it extremely difficult to identify and locate victims of forced child labor, and thus making it challenging to …

Public Utilities' Disaster Response And Management Plans: An Evaluation Of National Grid And New York State Electric & Gas, Taylor N. Vishion

Public Administration Master’s Projects

Societal dependence on electricity has rapidly increased as technological advancement has occurred, thus requiring electric utilities to advance their emergency response and repair procedures. Disaster management and response is a relatively new field for electric utilities, and despite the adoption of the Incident Command System created by FEMA, there are still opportunities for all utilities to improve. This project aims to assess the disaster response and management procedures of National Grid U.S. and NYSEG and identify opportunities for improvement. This study interviewed emergency management professionals experienced with electric utilities and found both National Grid U.S. and NYSEG can improve in …

Firm Leverage And Performance, Zongbin Li

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This paper examines the relationship between deviations from firm leverage and firm performance over time. Our results indicate that overlevered and underlevered firms both adversely affect corporate profitability. We use the 1987 tax cut as an event study, to reduce endogeneity concerns.

A Media Distortion Analysis Of Mass Shootings, Jason R. Silva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the reality and news media coverage of all mass shootings in the United States from 1966 to 2016. It employs agenda-setting and framing theoretical frameworks to determine the social construction of mass shootings via the mass media. The project uses open-source data to create a comprehensive list of mass shooting incidents. It then identifies all published New York Times articles on each incident. The study summarizes both the reality of the social problem (i.e. incidents) and the news mediated reality (i.e. New York Times). Next, this dissertation conducts a media distortion analysis to determine the perpetrator, motivation, …

Resilience To Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms In Child Survivors Of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Caroline Witek

Theses and Dissertations

Just as adults may develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after being exposed to death, serious injury, or sexual violence, so too may children. Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is one traumatic event that has been linked to the development of post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) in children. While the literature to date has drawn strong connections between CSA and subsequent psychopathology (including PTSD diagnoses), and explored factors contributing to resilience to psychopathology development, comparatively little research has been conducted on factors that increase child CSA survivors’ resilience to post-traumatic stress symptom development. Furthermore, much of the research to date has explored long-term …

Social Networks And Science Identity: Does Peer Commitment Matter?, Grace Maridyth Kelly

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

White men continue to be overrepresented in STEM fields compared to women and minorities, despite several decades of scholarly interest the disparity. Studies have shown that early adolescence is when children begin to lose interest in science. It is also in this period, that children start to develop ideas and stereotypes about who should be a scientist. It is essential that youth are able to see themselves as science kinds of people. Students who have strong science identities have been shown to perform better in science classes, retain interest in science and continue on to STEM careers. During adolescence, peer …

Drinking Behaviors, Relationships And Recovery: A Relational Sociological Examination Of Addiction, Maia C. Behrendt

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Examination of addiction from the theoretical framework of relational sociology contributes to growing efforts to understand and develop addiction recovery programs that focus on the restoration of important social relationships and ties. Aims of the study include understanding how alcohol addiction has been addressed in earlier sociological studies and to provide evidence for how relational sociology may be utilized to better understand and explain how alcoholics and Alcoholics Anonymous operate within Bateson’s Theory of Alcoholism and Addiction. Through a qualitative study and analysis of 20 in-depth audio recorded interviews with individuals in either active recovery or active drinking, this study …

How Chess Relates To Theory Of Mind, Noemi Trevino

Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to investigate the how playing chess relates to Theory of Mind. By design, the study will call for 160 participants recruited through social media, email, and SONA system. 60 of the participants are USCF rated players. The other 100 participants are not be USCF rated. Pending the results, the hypothesis being tested are that chess players would have a higher ToM score and that higher rated players would have a higher ToM score.

Policy Feedback And The Politics Of The Affordable Care Act, Daniel Beland, Philip Rocco, Alex Waddan

Political Science Faculty Research and Publications

There is a large body of literature devoted to how “policies create politics” and how feedback effects from existing policy legacies shape potential reforms in a particular area. Although much of this literature focuses on self‐reinforcing feedback effects that increase support for existing policies over time, Kent Weaver and his colleagues have recently drawn our attention to self‐undermining effects that can gradually weaken support for such policies. The following contribution explores both self‐reinforcing and self‐undermining policy feedback in relationship to the Affordable Care Act, the most important health‐care reform enacted in the United States since the mid‐1960s. More specifically, the …