Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Delineating A Stream Network At Gale Crater, Mars, On Arcgis Pro: A Geographic Information Systems Approach, Elpidio Guzman De La Cruz

West Chester University Master’s Theses

The northwestern region of the Gale crater experienced flooding in the past. Delineation of stream networks for the northwestern region of Gale Crater, Mars employing geographic information systems (GIS) techniques is applied. The stream network produced by the algorithm in the study traverses the clay unit in Gediz Vallis, and visual HiRISE imagery analysis correlates with a topologic cross section of an inverted river channel of 750 meters wide and 90 meters deep. HiRISE imagery analysis further confirms a sulfate and clay stratigraphic unit in a stream 125 meters wide and 25 meters deep. Lastly, data smoothing procedures in the …

Contents, Discovery Editors

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

No abstract provided.

Letter From The Dean, Jean-Francois Meullenet

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

No abstract provided.

Featured Faculty Mentor/Student Team, Gisela Erf, Alessandro Rocchi

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

No abstract provided.

Does Encouraging Use Of Self-Testing In An Introductory Psychology Course Increase Effective Study Behaviors?, James Koppenhofer

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Students continue to use ineffective study strategies in classroom settings. Research suggests the efficacy of student study strategies may be enhanced by learning encouragement interventions. The present study implements a flashcard-oriented learning encouragement intervention in an applied setting and measures its effectiveness through a one-group pretest-posttest design which was used with three surveys. Undergraduates were recruited from two sections of an Introductory Psychology course (n=89) and all students received the learning encouragement intervention. Results indicated that the intervention increased flashcard use, and exam performance was correlated with flashcard use when measured immediately after the intervention. After the intervention …

It's In The Design: Student Perceptions Of Intercultural Interactions In Online Communication Classrooms, Darius Lana

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This study identifies how intercultural interaction takes place in online communication courses within higher education. Radically politicized efforts to remove discussion around identity and difference from education and increased enrollment in online courses has raised a concern regarding the degree to which diversity, equity, and inclusion goals are being met in college classrooms generally and online sections specifically. This study identified how current pedagogical content, structure, and delivery of online communication courses may impact intercultural interaction and interaction. Findings indicate a need to address the design of online communication courses to better meet the desired intercultural interaction of the students …

The Relationship Among Identity Development, Dark Personality, And Risk-Taking Behaviors, Reilly Branch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Previous research has found significant relationships between various dark personality traits (Machiavellianism, sadism, narcissism, and psychopathy) and externalizing behaviors including delinquency (Muris et al., 2013). Although many studies have examined the relationships among dark personality, risk propensity, and delinquency, little research has examined the role of identity development and identity distress in predicting risky or antisocial behaviors. Therefore, this study examined the utility of using both the Dark Tetrad and identity dimensions to predict risk propensity and delinquent behaviors. Emerging adult college students (N = 424) completed an anonymous online survey battery. Results indicated that specific dark personality traits (i.e., …

It Is Time To Change The Way We Change, Thane Keller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Seventy percent of organizational change initiatives fail. Among organizations where change and adaptation are necessary for survival, the U.S. military stands at the top. The disparity between desired health and fitness behaviors and actual behaviors is a glaring reminder that change is difficult to implement and that current change systems struggle. Merit-based systems offer a solution by rewarding and reinforcing good behavior to generate lasting change. This paper evaluates Kotter's Change Model and Nudge Theory and found them insufficient because they do not sufficiently address reinforcement learning or the temporal tie between behaviors and rewards for reinforcement. This paper then …

Gendered And Racialized Bodies In Dobbs V. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Saphronia Carson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In June 2022 the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abandoning nearly 50 years of precedent, and removing federal protections for abortion access. In doing so, the Court drew on a lineage of explicit and implicit discourses that have constructed abortions, abortion providers, and pregnant and fetal bodies in ways that make overturning Roe seem inevitable. This thesis takes a reproductive justice perspective while conducting a feminist critical discourse analysis of the majority and concurring opinions in Dobbs. Two main findings stand out. First, the decision relies on originalist constructions of abortions, abortion providers, pregnant people, and fetuses to …

Christian Nationalism Among Evangelical Christians Through A Critical Race Theory Lens, Marina I. Rivera Ramos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In this study, I conducted ethnographic participant observations and semi-structured interviews at two evangelical congregations in central Florida, Free Baptist Church (FBC) and Cornerstone Church (CC), to explore how Christian nationalist ideas (CN) are negotiated, embraced, and/or rejected in church messaging and among congregants. I collected notes from eight sermons at each church and interviewed a total of 14 congregants regarding their concerns and lived experiences as Christians in the U.S. and their opinions on racial injustice. Expanding on previous research on CN, I incorporated Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an analytical framework to understand CN as inextricably connected to …

Sexual Violence In Armed Conflict: How Levels Of Sexual Violence In Peacetime Affect Levels Of Sexual Violence In Conflict, Sydney Snowden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Why do some armed conflicts have higher levels of sexual violence than others? Some existing theoretical work has pointed toward the possibility that the presence of sexual violence before armed conflict occurs can impact the levels of sexual violence during armed conflict, however, little empirical work has examined these theories. This thesis uses new, unique data to address concerns about the validity of previous studies and to explore sexual violence over the boundaries of time, looking at pre-conflict levels of sexual violence in addition to levels of sexual violence during armed conflicts. Using a parallel mixed methods research design, this …

Predicting Implementation Citizenship Behavior Rating Discrepancies Between Supervisor-Subordinate Dyads, Alexandra Kandah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), defined as behavior that is discretionary and not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, has gained significant interest in the literature over the past few decades. Recent OCB research has begun to address more specialized facets of citizenship behavior that target behaviors that support specific strategic goals in the organization. One form of OCB encompasses those behaviors that assist with the implementation of new practices or innovations in the organization, above and beyond typical implementation. This study extends both the general OCB literature and the newer literature on implementation citizenship by examining factors …

Using Gis To Better Understand The Cracker Community Of Pat's Island In The Ocala National Forest, Florida, Nicholas Kopp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This research uses GIS methods to contextualize a Florida Cracker community in the Ocala National Forest. My case study is drawn from two seasons of fieldwork and supporting desktop surveys associated with Pat's Island, the home of multiple Cracker families. Cracker culture is historically categorized by its efforts to avoid modernization and prevent the commercialization of traditional lifeways in the quickly shifting society of late-19th and early 20th-century Florida. The geospatial expressions of these Cracker values are an emphasis on semi-remote living, adaptations to a unique environmental context, and the development of a semi-self-sufficient community. This research evaluates how GIS …

The Narratives Of Sexulization: The Perspectives Of Young Entertainers Around Their Own Public Sexulizaiton, Alexis Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Sexualization happens when agency is taken away from the individual being sexualized, where one is seen, depicted, and treated like a sexual object rather than a person. This thesis aims to explore celebrities' reactions to their own public sexualization. To do this, an inductive approach was used when analyzing first-person narratives (written and video) and interviews (podcast, magazine and newspaper) by those whose sexualization is a notable feature of their career in the United States. I used a nonprobability sampling technique in order to cast a wide net to find the sample (prior knowledge, Google searches, and Google alerts). This …

A Design Concept For A Tourism Recommender System For Regional Development, Leyla Gamidullaeva, Alexey Finogeev, Mikhail Kataev, Larisa Bulysheva

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Despite of tourism infrastructure and software, the development of tourism is hampered due to the lack of information support, which encapsulates various aspects of travel implementation. This paper highlights a demand for integrating various approaches and methods to develop a universal tourism information recommender system when building individual tourist routes. The study objective is proposing a concept of a universal information recommender system for building a personalized tourist route. The developed design concept for such a system involves a procedure for data collection and preparation for tourism product synthesis; a methodology for tourism product formation according to user preferences; the …

The Powerful Actors Of The Criminal Justice System: Understanding Prosecutorial Discretion From The Viewpoint Of Prosecutors. A Public Administrator's Perspective, Ja'von Long

West Chester University Doctoral Projects

Prosecutors are one of the most powerful actors in the American criminal justice system, yet there is a lack of qualitative research related to the topic. There is also a lack of policy reform that has affected prosecutors in the way that it has other actors of the system such as police officers and judges. The research seeks to increase understanding of how prosecutors view the discretion and power prosecutors hold and seeks to provide more information on the institutional and organizational pressures that can affect prosecutors and their decision-making process. The study further explores how cognitive biases along with …

Opec+ Versus The United States And World Democracies, Giacomo Luciani

Faculty Journal Articles

The OPEC+ decision to cut oil production opens the door to further politicization of the global oil industry, particularly between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Using Adult Learning Characteristics And The Humanities To Teach Undergraduate Healthcare Students About Social Determinants Of Health, Elizabeth A. Brown, Hannah Kinder, Garrett Stang, Wendy Shumpert

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Authors used an andragogy framework to help undergraduate allied health students better understand social determinants of health (SDOH) using a photo essay assignment. The study examined students’ perceptions of SDOH in various communities, description of health outcomes associated with their chosen SDOH, and lessons learned and suggestions to improve the assignment for future cohorts. Data were extracted from photo essays from 2019–2021 and entered in Microsoft Excel and Word for data analysis after course completion. Conventional qualitative content analysis was used to analyze student evaluation data from open-ended questions. Data were extracted from 53 student essays from 2019 to 2021. …

Faustian Bargains: Short‐Term And Long‐Term Contingencies In Phylogeny, Ontogeny, And Sociogeny, W. David Stahlman, A. Charles Catania

Psychological Science Articles

Rachlin's interpretations of self-control depend on the short-term versus the long-term consequences of behavior. Sometimes these effects support each other (typing an abstract produces a written product now and is later read by others). Sometimes they conflict (procrastination now is incompatible with finishing the abstract by deadline). We usually reserve the language of self-control for human cases where long-term consequences are chosen over short-term ones. Rachlin made this distinction salient in ontogeny, but it also applies to selection in phylogeny (Darwinian evolution) and sociogeny (behavior passed from one organism to another). Our account examines relations between short-term and long-term consequences …

Communication Scholarship And The Quest For Open Access, Preston Carmack, Michael R. Kearney, Abbey Mccann

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

The advent of black, green, and gold open access publication models poses unique questions for scholars of communication. Plato’s (1956) classic critique of writing in the legend of Theuth and Thamus warned that the printed word “rolls about all over the place, falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it” (pp. 69–70). More than two 2 millennia later, scholars and administrators at all levels of the discipline face just such a phenomenon. As scholars of cyberspace debate whether “information wants to be free” (Levy, 2014), a communication perspective involves consideration of the importance of authorship and …

Open, Organized, And Onerous: Understanding And Recognizing The Labors Of Open Science, Nick Bowman, Patric R. Spence, Lindsay Hahn

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

In the face of high-profile cases of scientific fraud, there has been a renewed call among scholars to reconsider current best practices in academic publishing. Prominent in these discussions is a set of open science practices that ask scholars to “publish more” of their research—not in terms of manuscripts, but in terms of supplemental materials to the scientific enterprise. Through creating, curating, and publishing artifacts such as study materials (experimental stimuli, survey texts, etc.), datasets and analysis code, and other content, the scientific process is made more transparent for readers. However, such practices involve a substantial labor cost to researchers …

Learning To Think Like A Leader, Mark Hickson Iii

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

This is the second in a three-part series that the author has been working on. The first part was included in an earlier issue of this journal.

A Typology Of Perceived Negative Course Evaluations, Heather Carmack, Leah E. Lefebvre

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

Instructors and administrators continue to debate the merit and value of using course evaluations to assess instructor effectiveness and course outcomes, especially when students see course evaluations as satisfaction surveys where they can unload negative and/or hurtful comments directed at instructors. Little is known about instructors’ perceptions of negative course evaluations. This study qualitatively examined faculty’s (N = 90) perceptions of negative course evaluation qualitative comments. Using a grounded analyst-constructed typologies approach, three types of negative course evaluation comments were identified: professional, personal, and performance. These types of negative comments call into question the disconnection between what students and instructors …

The Impact Of Student Motivation, Preparation, And Learned Helplessness On Undergraduate Students’ Communication With Advisors, Heather Carmack

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine communication factors that influence students’ academic advising appointments, including predictors of scheduling future advising appointments. Undergraduate students’ motivation and feelings of learned helplessness were related to their advising meeting preparation and their communication involvement during advising meetings. Students who reported high levels of motivation and low levels of learned helplessness were more likely to prepare for advising meetings and be communicative during meetings. Students with immediate advisors were more likely to communicate with their advisors during meetings. Advising meeting preparation, motivation, and learned helplessness were significant factors in future advising appointments.

“Any Means Necessary To Refuse Erasure By Algorithm:” Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’S Travesty Generator, Zach Whalen

Communication & Digital Studies Articles

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's 2019 book of poetry is titled Travesty Generator in reference to Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke's Pascal program to “fabricate pseudo-text” by producing text such that each n-length string of characters in the output occurs at the same frequency as in the source text. Whereas for Kenner and O'Rourke, labeling their work a “travesty” is a hyperbolic tease or a literary burlesque, for Bertram, the travesty is the political reality of racism in America. For each of the works Travesty Generator, Bertram uses the generators of computer poetry to critique, resist, and replace narratives of oppression and to …

Training Curriculum For Students With Disabilities (Ese), Carolynne P. Mather

Doctor of Strategic Leadership (DSL) Capstone Abstracts

Against All Odds Ministry, Inc. (AAOM) is a non-profit organization created by CEO and Founder Carolynne Mather. Carolynne's passion for serving the at-risk population dates to her years as a Preschool Owner providing moral and spiritual counseling to the young mothers of the children her facility provided care. Carolynne desired to mentor these women in a monthly meeting and guide them to see if they could move beyond their circumstances against the odds that faced them. The desire was to use the group meetings to write a book on women's success from this mentoring group. The group produced two parents …

The Need For International Ai Activities Monitoring, Parviz Partow-Navid, Ludwig Slusky

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This paper focuses primarily on the need to monitor the risks arising from the dual-use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Dual-use AI technology capability makes it applicable for defense systems and consequently may pose significant security risks, both intentional and unintentional, with the national and international scope of effects. While domestic use of AI remains the prerogative of individual countries, the unregulated and nonmonitored use of AI with international implications presents a specific concern. An international organization tasked with monitoring potential threats of AI activities could help defuse AI-associated risks and promote global cooperation in developing and deploying AI technology. The …

Determinants Of Continuance Intention To Use Mobile Wallets Technology In The Post Pandemic Era: Moderating Role Of Perceived Trust, Shailja Tripathi

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

The Covid-19 pandemic amplified the volume and importance of mobile payments using digital wallets and placed a basis for their continued adoption. The objective of the study is to formulate and test a comprehensive model by integration of the technology acceptance model (TAM) and expectation confirmation model (ECM) with the addition of three constructs, namely perceived trust, perceived risk, and subjective norm, to identify the determinants of continuance intention to use mobile wallets. Questionnaire-based survey method was used to gather the data from 550 users having experience using mobile wallets for more than six months. The data were analyzed using …

“My Ob/Gyn Has The Worst Bedside Manner…” A Qualitative Analysis Of Patient-Provider Communication And Mental Health Outcomes Of Women In Rural Georgia, Tobi F. Oloyede

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Despite technological advances in medicine and public health innovations, maternal mortality in the United States remains significantly higher than in other developed countries. Specifically, Georgia ranks as the second worst place to give birth in the country. Maternal mental health conditions are common, manageable complications that can happen at any point during pregnancy, childbirth, or in the first year following delivery, with 1 in 5 women affected. Unfortunately, 75% of women who experience MMH symptoms are left untreated.

This study focuses on patient-provider communication through the birthing experiences of women who have been pregnant in Georgia to examine how their …

Tennessee Archivist 42, No. 1, Society Of Tennessee Archivists

Tennessee Archivist newsletters

Winter 2023 issue of the Tennessee Archivist, a newsletter produced by the Society of Tennessee Archivists.