Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Police-Community Collaboration In An Upper Midwest City, Samuel Imbody

Masters Theses

Recent clashes between law enforcement and civilians have brought the issue of police-community relations to the forefront of many political discourses. While community policing has achieved a degree of success in alleviating these problems, many of the issues raised by the seminal Kerner Commission in 1967 remain today. This phenomenological case study represents a contemporary look at a city named “Heartland,” which has received accolades from numerous organizations for its community policing efforts. The primary source of data were in-depth interviews with police officers, and members of community organizations in the city of Heartland, analyzing how these two parties collaborate …

The Impact Of Adverse Childhood Experiences On Attachment And Mentalization In Sex Offenders, Oksana Sklyarov

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Adverse childhood experiences have been linked to dysfunctional attachment, increased likelihood of criminal behavior, and mentalization deficits. Mentalization, also known as reflective functioning, is core aspect of social functioning that involved the capacity to “interpret both the self and others in terms of internal mental states such as feelings, wishes, goals, desires, and attitudes.” This study looked at adverse childhood experiences, attachment, and mentalization in 93 registered sex offenders attending court-ordered outpatient treatment. This study revealed that sex offenders endorse significantly more adverse childhood experiences compared to the general population. It also showed that sex offenders exhibit lower attachmentrelated anxiety …

Adolescent Perceptions Of Parental Autonomy Support And Involvement: Outcomes On Adolescent Self-Efficacy, Meagan N. Miller

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Adolescence is a challenging developmental period across domains of functioning. Parenting interactions impact one’s adjustment and well-being through this developmental period. These include Parental Autonomy Support, along with its reverse, psychological control, and Parental Involvement (Beato, Pereira, Barros, & Muris, 2016; Lansford et al., 2014; Levpušček, 2006; and Savard et al., 2013). Additionally, these parental characteristics influence the development of adolescent Self-Efficacy and its 3 subdomains: Emotional, Academic, and Social Self-Efficacy. The objective of this study was to explore how Parental Autonomy Support and Involvement, along with the subdomains of Parental Availability, Knowledge, and Concern and Social-Emotional Assets and Resilience …

The Weight Of Shame And Trauma In Bariatric Patients, Jordan D. Stricklen

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Past research has shown that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), including neglect and abuse, are correlated with obesity and other adverse outcomes in adulthood. Here it is proposed that childhood adversity follows a path to internalized shame, which then motivates a coping mechanism which can result in extreme obesity. Participants were gathered through a bariatric surgery program through support groups and as part of an amended intake process. They completed the ACEs as well as the Internalized Shame Scale (ISS). Data analysis attempted to find relationships between ACEs, the ISS, and each participant’s highest BMI at any point in the bariatric …

The Policing Of Prosecutors: More Lessons From Administrative Law?, Aaron L. Nielson

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

On a daily basis, prosecutors decide whether and how to charge individuals for alleged criminal conduct. Although many prosecutors avoid abusing this authority, prosecutors’ discretionary decisions might result in biased enforcement, inappropriate leveraging of authority, and a lack of transparency. These problems also arise when agency enforcement officials decide whether to act on conduct that violates a legal prohibition.

An inherent tension between the desire to avoid overburdening the system and the need to prevent inconsistent decision-making exists in the exercises of both prosecutorial discretion and regulatory enforcement discretion. It is clear from the similarities between the two that administrative …

Prosecutorial Misconduct: Mass Gang Indictments And Inflammatory Statements, K. Babe Howell

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article examines inflammatory statements by prosecutors in the context of mass gang indictments. I contend that inflammatory remarks not only harm the justice system and defendants, particularly minorities, but also that, when prosecutors craft and repeat hyperbolic narratives about vicious gang wars, prosecutors may come to believe the narratives and become effectively blinded to the fact that these narratives are improper, unfair, and untrue. First, I review the professional rules, standards, and case law that prohibit. Then, drawing on press releases and trial transcripts from two mass gang indictments in New York City, I demonstrate how prosecution statements exaggerate …

The Fire Rises: Refining The Pennsylvania Fireworks Law So That Fewer People Get Burned, Sean P. Kraus

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

On October 30, 2017, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania passed an act that repealed the state’s fireworks law, which had prohibited the sale of most fireworks to Pennsylvanian consumers for nearly 80 years. The law’s replacement generally permits Pennsylvanians over 18 years old to purchase, possess, and use “Consumer Fireworks.” Bottle rockets, firecrackers, Roman candles, and aerial shells are now available to amateur celebrants for holidays like Independence Day and New Year’s Eve. The law also regulates a category of larger “Display Fireworks,” sets standards for fireworks vendors, and introduces a 12-percent excise tax on fireworks sales that serves to …

Prosecutorial Discretion: The Difficulty And Necessity Of Public Inquiry, Bruce A. Green

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Prosecutors’ discretionary decisions have enormous impact on individuals and communities. Often, prosecutors exercise their vast power and discretion in questionable ways. This Article argues that, to encourage prosecutors to use their power wisely and not abusively, there is a need for more informed public discussion of prosecutorial discretion, particularly with regard to prosecutors’ discretionary decisions about whether to bring criminal charges and which charges to bring. But the Article also highlights two reasons why informed public discussion is difficult—first, because public and professional expectations about how prosecutors should use their power are vague; and, second, because, particularly in individual cases, …

Between Brady Discretion And Brady Misconduct, Bennett L. Gershman

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The Supreme Court’s decision in Brady v. Maryland presented prosecutors with new professional challenges. In Brady, the Supreme Court held that the prosecution must provide the defense with any evidence in its possession that could be exculpatory. If the prosecution fails to timely turn over evidence that materially undermines the defendant’s guilt, a reviewing court must grant the defendant a new trial. While determining whether evidence materially undermines a defendant’s guilt may seem like a simple assessment, the real-life application of such a determination can be complicated. The prosecution’s disclosure determination can be complicated under the Brady paradigm because …

Functional Analysis Of Excessive Crying In Infancy: Two Empirical Case Studies, Jamie L. Hirsh

Dissertations

Excessive crying and infantile colic account for a significant percentage of caregivers’ calls and visits to the pediatrician early in infancy. Despite myriad research studies across medical and psychological disciplines over the years, there is no conclusive evidence regarding a cause for excessive crying in early infancy; as a result, there is no gold standard for treatment. The goal of this study is to develop and test an experimental functional analysis methodology to determine a cause for excessive crying in infants. The study involves the development of an interview and paper-based functional assessment tool for excessive crying in infancy, as …

Habitat Suitability Of The Mountain Pine Beetle In Alberta, Canada Under Future Climate Scenarios, Nathalie Woloszyn

Masters Theses

Mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) is the most destructive insect currently devastating North American forests (Safranyik & Carroll, 2006). Native to western North America, the mountain pine beetle has recently expanded beyond its historic range, into the novel territory of Alberta, Canada. Since its arrival in the mid-2000s, the mountain pine beetle has diffused eastward at an average rate of 80km/year (Cooke & Carroll, 2017). Poised at the doorstep of the boreal forest, current concern anticipates the potential diffusion of the mountain pine beetle to eastern North America.

The Maxent (maximum entropy) model, a presence-only spatial distribution model, …

Deterrence Under Nuclear Asymmetry: Thaad And The Prospects For Missile Defense On The Korean Peninsula, Inwook Kim, Soul Park

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The 2016 decision to deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korea has generated multitude of intensely politicized issues and has proved highly controversial. This has made it challenging to alleviate, let alone clarify, points of analytical and policy tensions. We instead disaggregate and revisit two fundamental questions. One is whether THAAD could really defend South Korea from North Korean missiles. We challenge the conventional “qualified optimism” by giving analytical primacy to three countermeasures available to defeat THAAD–use of decoys, tumbling and spiral motion, and outnumbering. These countermeasures are relatively inexpensive to create but exceedingly difficult to offset. …

Facilitating Social Change: Bridging Participatory Methodology With Training Design To Support Equitable Community Development In Kent, Washington. A Journey Of Learning And Development., Folake Oyegbola

Capstone Collection

Including community members in decisions that affect their lives is an agreed upon practice in participatory development. When exercised without attention to key details like defining the need for a participatory approach, understanding the history of a given community, and how this all influences training design, it can be used to uphold inequitable development practices. This Training Course-linked Capstone combined participatory development approaches with training theory and design to support my growth as a development professional and facilitator. Through this study, I sought to support the Kent Community Development Collaborative’s efforts to encourage diverse participation of Kent residents on a …

Decarcerating America: The Opportunistic Overlap Between Theory And (Mainly State) Sentencing Practice As A Pathway To Meaningful Reform, Mirko Bagaric, Daniel Mccord

Buffalo Law Review

Criminals engender no community sympathy and have no political capital. This is part of the reason that the United States has the highest prison population on earth, and by a considerable margin. Incarceration levels grew four-fold over the past forty years. Despite this, America is now experiencing an unprecedented phenomenon whereby many states are now simultaneously implementing measures to reduce prison numbers. The unusual aspect of this is that the response is neither coordinated nor consistent in its approach, but the movement is unmistakable. This ground up approach to reducing prison numbers suffers from the misgiving that it is an …

The Implications Of Inequality For Fiscal Federalism (Or Why The Federal Government Should Pay For Local Public Schools), Brian Highsmith

Buffalo Law Review

In designing public policy, a question of first principle is the degree to which government services—and the mechanisms of collecting revenue to finance those services—should be centralized within and across political systems. To inform their assessments of where redistribution should properly occur, public finance researchers have, to date, worked backwards from different assumptions about the mobility of residents within the political community. Scholars have disagreed about the viability of local governments’ efforts to redistribute wealth—with traditionalists arguing that these efforts are made impossible by residential mobility, and recent reformists countering that limitations on mobility indeed allow for limited redistribution at …

A Component Analysis Of An Electronic Data Collection Package, Cody Morris

Dissertations

Data collection is essential to the practice of applied behavior analysis, but human error in collection can lead to inaccuracies. Because inaccuracies in measurement may adversely affect treatment decisions, procedures to increase data collection fidelity are necessary. This is especially important in settings wherein behavior analysts rely on others to report data. Procedures for training and directly supervising data collectors do exist, however, few resources exist for data collectors working with limited supervisor presence. Electronic data collection (EDC) systems are uniquely positioned to help address this need, but little research exists analyzing active components of EDC systems. Therefore, the purpose …

Assessing The Cost, Quality, And Effectiveness Of Local Government Training Methodologies, Michael Dean Norman

Dissertations

Two significant factors are present in our current environment: constrained resources and increased globalization. Training is widely recognized as an imperative to increasing productivity, improving economic conditions, and exploiting global opportunities. But what is the most effective learning modality that should be applied in an environment of constrained resources and increased globalization? This study examines that question by comparing, contrasting, and analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of traditional learning vs. e-learning in local government organizations. The variables used in the analysis are cost, quality, and effectiveness.

The results indicated that there are several factors in the analysis of the advantages …

At The Crossroads Of Race, Class And Culture: Identifying The Unintended Consequences Of Technology On The Agency Of Blues Musicians, Michael D. Berghoef

Dissertations

This dissertation explores the impact the rapid evolution and implementation of technology has had on blues musicians and the music they created and shared with their audiences over the past sixty years. The past 150 years have seen the conversion of nearly all musical participation as live, unmediated and with close proximity of performer to audience, to an experience that is increasingly recorded, digitally mediated and often listened to in isolation from others.

While a great deal of live music is still performed around the world on a daily basis, the impact of the largescale cultural shift move to what …

The Connection Between Lead Pastors' Enneagram Personality Type And Congregational Size, Jeremy David Johnson

Doctor of Education (Ed.D)

This study examines the relationship between the Enneagram profile of a lead pastor and the size of congregation. This study is motivated by the research question, “Do lead pastors of Protestant

megachurches in the United States tend to share commonalities in their Enneagram personality types?” Previous research indicates that personality plays a role in the impact of a pastor, but to date, no systematic investigation has explored the connection between the Enneagram profile of the leader and the size of the congregation. Using a sample of 58 megachurch pastors and 56 non-megachurch pastors, the Enneagram type of each pastor was …

Google Trends Data As A Proxy For Interest In Leadership, Finley W. Walker

Doctor of Education (Ed.D)

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the observable patterns of online search behavior in the topic of leadership using Google Trends data. Institutions have had a historically difficult time predicting good leadership candidates. Better predictions can be made by using the big data offered by groups such as Google to learn who, where, and when people are interested in leadership. The study utilized descriptive, comparative, and correlative methodologies to study Google users’ interest in leadership from 2004 to 2017. Society has placed great value into leadership throughout history, and though overall interest remains strong, it appears that …

The Evolution Of State Higher Education Public Funding Policy, Angela Rogers

Senior Theses

In the past several decades, public colleges and universities have increasingly struggled to fund all of the programs demanded of them as states slowly drain funding from their coffers. This discussion will examine different policies and frameworks that have been used by states to determine funding for their public institutions. Different factors that will be considered include political relationships, governance structures, and accountability models. The political trend of “free college” will also be considered. Then, the discussion will narrow to South Carolina funding policy, how it has changed over the years, and what the current challenges are. A policy proposal …

Jim Jones: A Case Study In The Relationship Between Antisocial And Narcissistic Personality Disorders, Taylor Martin

Senior Theses

Ambiguity between some characteristics of Narcissistic and Antisocial Personality Disorders has caused difficulties in the accurate diagnosis of these disorders (Gunderson & Ronningstam, 2001; Burke, 2006), and some clinicians and researchers have suggested that this may reflect a lack of clinical utility in the current categorical model of diagnosing personality disorders (Livesley, 2001). This study identifies confounding factors in the concepts of NPD and ASPD as enumerated in the DSM-5 (APA, 2013) and DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000). Concepts identified in independent research that may clarify some apparent similarities and assist in differentiating between the two disorders are discussed. Clarifying features of …

Steering Clear Of Single-Occupancy Vehicles: Campus Transportation Demand Management Strategies For The University Of South Carolina, Reaghan Kelly Murphy

Senior Theses

Institutions of higher education increasingly serve as fundamental sources of creativity, economic growth, and innovation. As these institutions continue to employ and enroll ever-increasing populations, however, they also become primary contributors to congestion, transportation inefficiencies, and carbon emissions. It is imperative, therefore, that universities implement better, more sustainable planning techniques, especially within the context of transportation. This thesis explores the history and nuances of sustainable transportation planning on college campuses before delving into a detailed case study of the University of South Carolina’s transportation demand management strategies. To inform the resulting analysis, an in-depth review is conducted of eight comparable …

The Claude Henry Neuffer Diaries: The Story Of A Signal Corps Serviceman In The China-Burma-India Theater Of Wwii, Kyle Brady Henderson

Senior Theses

This senior thesis project involved working with an unprocessed collection from the Manuscripts Collection of the South Caroliniana Library. The collection (which mainly consists of two diary volumes) documents Claude Henry Neuffer’s service in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II. The goal of this thesis was to aid in the processing and digitization of this collection through the creation of full transcripts, a map, and a narrative description of the collection. This work will help to preserve the collection, improve accessibility to future researchers, and provide additional historical context.

What Do High School Students Know About Information Literacy? A Case Study Of One University’S Feeder Schools, Melissa Correll

Library Faculty Scholarship

This article describes a local study that seeks to illuminate first-year college students’ prior experiences with research and information literacy (IL) during high school. A small, suburban university surveyed and conducted interviews with librarians at the university’s feeder schools. The high school librarians rated students’ levels of proficiency in IL skills and described their school’s IL programs. Overall, librarians rated students’ IL levels as less than proficient and described several challenges to helping students improve these competencies, including teacher resistance, assignment design, and students’ habits around information. Opportunities exist for academic and school librarians to collaborate to improve IL instruction …

Major Decisions: Religious Women And Their Perceptions Of Women In Stem Majors, Mandy Lou Pershing

Theses and Dissertations

Women still lack representation in many Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields, particularly those with high earning potential. Past studies on women who study STEM have failed to acknowledge the impact of religious values on choice of major among women. Using data collected at a religiously-affiliated university in 2013, this study explores how 24 religious women made decisions about majoring in STEM fields. The results from this sample closely follow the literature review, while also adding many new layers to understanding how religious women make decisions about STEM. Themes identified using this approach are useful for designing future studies …

Accessing Irs Form 990 Data With Excel, Humberto Barreto, Michele T. Villinski

Economics and Management Faculty publications

Form990.xlsm, freely available at archive.org/details/Form990.xlsm, is a standalone, macro-enabled Excel workbook that allows users to easily download and analyze IRS Form 990 tax data. This information is extremely difficult to access in machine-readable format, but the IRS recently made the data available as XML files. Form990.xlsm directly imports data in separate sheets for each institution. This paper demonstrates how to use this tool by analyzing a small sample of similar colleges. We compare Form 990 data with IPEDS and find substantial agreement, but important differences. Form 990 data offer researchers an alternative to IPEDS for higher education work and enable …

A History Of America In 100 Maps, Susan Schulten, University Of Chicago Press, Chicago (2018), 256 Pages, Us$35.00 Hardcover, Christina E. Dando

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Several years ago, browsing in the British Museum's gift shop, I noticed A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010). The idea of capturing history using material culture is an appealing one, offering readers opportunities to learn about fascinating artifacts in short, easy-to-digest essays. It often sparks similar projects such as The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects (2016). Susan Schulten's A History of America in 100 Maps appears to be such a popular, coffee table book, pairing map images with explanatory vignettes, but do not be taken in: this is a very skillfully constructed narrative of American …

Project Manager Leadership Behavior: Task-Oriented Versus Relationship-Oriented, Thomas G. Henkel, James W. Marion Jr, Debra T. Bourdeau

Publications

In this paper, we examined managers’ leadership behavior when working on a simulated team project regarding task-oriented versus relationship-oriented leadership behavior to effectively achieve successful project completion. Managers attending an advanced project management development program responded to the Fielder Leadership Behavior Style Self-Assessment, which is a useful framework to determine task-oriented versus relationship-oriented leadership behavioral styles. The degree of task-oriented versus relationship-oriented leadership behavior styles was assessed to determine the approach taken by the managers for achieving successful project completion. A Pearson’s chi-square test was conducted to determine whether the observed values were significantly different from an expected value of …

Implementing Mental Contrasting To Improve English Language Learner Social Networks, Hannah Trimble Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The present study looks at how utilizing mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII), a form of self-regulation, impacts the social networks of English language learners’ in a study abroad (SA) setting. Over 100 English language learners (ELLs) form the treatment and control groups for this study. This research compares the social network measures between students who used MCII and those who did not over the course of one 14-week semester in an intensive English program in the United States. It also examines students' perception of this self-regulation strategy. Additionally, the impact of MCII on students who are in their first …