Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Arts Voices: Middle School Students And The Relationships Of The Arts To Their Motivation And Self-Efficacy, Heather Moorefield-Lang

The Qualitative Report

This study explores the question "Does arts education have a relationship to eighth-grade rural middle school students' motivation and self-efficacy?" Student questionnaires, focus-group interviews, and follow-up interviews were data collection methods used with 92 eighth-grade middle school students. Strong emphasis was placed on gathering personal narratives, comments, and opinions directly from the students. Content analysis was used to analyze the student interviews. Middle school students felt that there were both positive and negative relationships between their arts education classes and their motivation and self-efficacy. The students in this study had much to share on the arts courses offered in their …

Question Utilization In Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: A Recursive Frame Analysis Of Insoo Kim Berg's Solution Talk, Jeffrey Cotton

The Qualitative Report

Recursive frame analysis (RFA) was used to conduct a single case investigation of Insoo Kim Berg's question utilization talk in a solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) session. Due to the lack of process research that explores how SFBT questions facilitate change, the author investigated how Berg's solution language influenced a client to respond in session. The purpose of this case study was to explore how SFBT questions served as interventions to facilitate change. The research question for this study was twofold: (a) how does Berg's language influence conversation and (b) how is the client influenced by Berg's questions in a therapeutic …

(Re)Constructing Reflexivity: A Relational Constructionist Approach, Diane Marie Hosking, Bettine Pluut

The Qualitative Report

This article distinguishes three discourses of reflexivity in relation to human inquiry. One of these arises from a post-modern, relational constructionist perspective which radically re-conceptualizes reflexivity: (a) as a local and co-constructed process oriented towards the question (b) how are we 'going on' together, and therefore paying attention to (c) the realities and relations we are co-creating during the research process and so (d) is concerned with local pragmatic and ethical issues (Gergen & Hosking, 2006; McNamee, 1994) rather than with the quality of truth claims. Regular reflexive dialogues as part of, and directed at, the research process can heighten …

Action Research In Practice: Issues And Challenges In A Financial Services Case Study, Peter Marshall, Phyl Wilson, Kristy De Salas, Judy Mckay

The Qualitative Report

In this paper we give a direct and personal account of the issues and challenges that occurred in an action research study. The research team consisted of five researchers from two Australian universities. The action research case was carried out in a small financial services company and concerned the development of an information systems strategy. However, the focus of the paper is not on information systems, but on the general methodological issues and problems of action research. The authors hope that readers will benefit from the direct and transparent account of the practical methodological problems encountered in the study.

Dialoguing With Body: A Self Study In Relational Pedagogy Through Embodiment And The Therapeutic Relationship, Chantale Lussier-Ley

The Qualitative Report

This article emerges from a self-study (Baird, 2004; Bergum, 2003; Grumet, 1990; Ham & Kane, 2004; Kitchen, 2005a, 2005b; Loughran, 2004) conducted as a requirement for a doctoral class at the University of Ottawa in the Faculty of Education. In this study, I reflected on my embodied experiences and the role of the body in my consulting practice in sport and performance psychology with athletes and dancers. Inspired by the work of Chehayl (2006), I engaged in a narrative analysis (Sands, 2002; Sparkes, 2002) of my own emerging autobiographic tale, and actively worked towards re-storying my body through a multi …

Incorporating Mythic And Interpretive Analysis In The Investigation Of Hearing Loss On The Family Farm, Mark Meister, Theresa Hest, Ann Burnett

The Qualitative Report

Despite knowing about the dangers of hearing loss, farmers typically choose not to protect their hearing. Examining the myth of farm life, this study aims to discern whether rhetorical myths influence farmers' decisions to wear hearing protection. Researchers conducted 40 interviews with farmers regarding farm life and hearing loss. Results suggest that farmers typically do not use hearing protection; their answers reflect the myths of sacrifice and safety. Analysis demonstrates that knowledge of the relationship between myth and practice should impact future attempts to change farmers' behaviors

Programme Of Strategic Cooperation Between Irish Aid And Higher Education, Research And Non-Governmental Institutions, James Loughman

Conference Papers

BACKGROUND It is increasingly recognised that a well-functioning higher education system is a necessary condition for economic and social development. The sector however needs to considerably strengthen its capacity to make an effective contribution to poverty reduction. The Irish Aid funded Programme of Strategic cooperation is designed to facilitate the systematic integration and expansion of education and research institute engagement in development cooperation. OBJECTIVES This ambitious North-South programme aims to achieve capacity strengthening, through a medium term effort to invest in people, systems and knowledge building. The longer term consolidation of this collaboration aims to foster academic and non-academic leadership …

Phenomenological Views And Analysis Of Culinary Arts Student Attitudes To National And International Internships: The “Nature Of Being” Before, During, And After International Internship, Frank Cullen

Articles

This article presents the results of research conducted between 2006 and 2007 as part of a 4-year study on culinary internships. The article explores what can be described as the culinary life, developing a picture of working in a kitchen. It then compares and contrasts the work of key writers in the area of internship. Phenomenological views are provided and quantitative data analyzed from the 2006 and 2007 cohorts of students studying for a bachelor of arts in culinary arts to establish their attitudes toward international internships. The research found that gaps existed between the attitudes of the 2006 and …

Social Networking And The Perception Of Privacy Within The Millennial Generation, Andra Gumbus, Frances S. Grodzinsky, Stephen J. Lilley

WCBT Faculty Publications

Has technology caused a generational divide between current college age users (Millennial Generation) who have no problems posting intimate details of their personal life on the Web and more traditional older users who seem to value privacy? This paper presents the results of a survey of 251 university students and follow-up focus groups on the topic of the perceptions of social networking and privacy. We will use Facebook as an example of social networking, and review attitudes about privacy and control over personal information among traditional and non-traditional college age users and light and heavy users of social networking sites.

Cognitive Effort For Multi Agent Systems, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Cognitive Effort is a multi-faceted phenomenon that has suffered from an imperfect understanding, an informal use in everyday life and numerous definitions. This paper attempts to clarify the concept, along with some of the main influencing factors, by presenting a possible heuristic formalism intended to be implemented as a computational concept, and therefore be embedded in an artificial agent capable of cognitive effort-based decision support. Its applicability in the domain of Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems is discussed. The technical challenge of this contribution is to start an active discussion towards the formalisation of Cognitive Effort and its application in …

Expanding The Sea Program: Course Conception, Rationale And A Plan For Implementation, Michelle Schulz

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The Student Educational Adventures (SEA) Program was created in 1995 to help motivate youth with Emotional/Behavioral Disorders (E/BD) to view education as important as well as to assist with the graduation rate of students with E/BD. Using an experiential method of teaching, each of the four courses in the SEA Program are specifically designed to teach life-long skills, such as team building, decision making, service, leadership, conflict resolution, anger management, goal setting, and taking responsibility, to youth who typically struggle in those areas.

Due to the current financial state of SEA Program funders, the Goodhue County Education District seeks to …

Of Discipline And Civilization: A Roundtable Discussion On The Legacies Of Norbert Elias And Michel Foucault, Sam Binkley, Paddy Dolan, Stefanie Ernst, Cas Wouters

Articles

When one considers the proximity of their concerns, it is perhaps surprising that the works of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault have not been more systematically compared and discussed. However, the differentiation of disciplinary knowledge (particularly the boundary that separates philosophy from social theory), com-pounded by parochialisms fostered by the cult of the intellectual, have delayed this process far past its due. This conversation, which began in 2008 at a conference on the works of Elias and Foucault at the University of Hamburg, is, in this regard, an effort to make up for lost time. Fashioned from hours of discussion …

"If You See Something, Say Something": The Power Of The 'War On Terrorism' To Name What We See, Polly Sylvia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to understand the cultural politics of the "war on terrorism" through a case study of the "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign within the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority Subway System. Drawing upon literature that focuses on an understanding of the affective transmission of culture, this research seeks to understand this particular campaign as a technique of social control. Through a content analysis of the advertisements of this campaign and a performative methodology that analyzes the performance of security within the subway system, an understanding of the connections this local campaign (as a security campaign) …

The Effect Of Teaching Attending To A Face On Joint Attention Skills In Children With An Autism Spectrum Disorder, Tina Rovito Gomez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized in terms of behavioral deficits in areas of social behavior and language development. A failure to attend to the faces of others is the single best discriminator between 1-year-old children later diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and those with typical development. Attending to the face of another provides the opportunity for episodes of attention sharing and is important to the development of communication, joint attention, and social behavior. A more advanced form of attending to a face is joint attention which has been defined as the ability to coordinate attention between an object …

Essays On Economic Policy: Income Inequality And Health Insurance, Eric Doviak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation contains economic analyses of two critical social issues facing the United States at the dawn of the 21st century: income inequality and the affordability of health insurance.

The chapter on income inequality uses the Solow Model of economic growth to model the evolution of inequality over time. In steady state, differences in household saving rates generate differences in household capital income. Households that save more accumulate more capital and have higher steady-state income. Tax policy affects the distribution of income through its influence on household saving rates. Increasing the tax rate on labor income causes a greater percentage …

Semi-Supervised Learning For Connectionist Networks, Rebecca Robare

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the computational level, language is often assumed to require both supervised and unsupervised learning. Although we have a certain understanding of these computational processes both biologically and behaviorally, our understanding of the environmental conditions under which language learning takes place falls short. I examine the semi-supervised learning paradigm as the most accurate computational description of the environmental conditions of lexical acquisition during language development. This paradigm is assessed for task learning and generalization and I argue that its real ecological validity and occasional improvements in performance over supervised learning make it an ideal candidate for modeling of language acquisition …

Transforming Academic Practice: Human Resources Challenges, Ellen Hazelkorn, Amanda Moynihan

Books/Book chapters

No abstract provided.

Editorial: Introducing Formations, The Formations Collective

Publications and Research

This journal is about the process of formation: the formation of our social worlds, and the formation of concepts we develop to understand and intervene in those worlds.

Theory, History, And Methodological Positivism In The Anderson-Thompson Debate, Abraham Jacob Walker

Publications and Research

This article repositions the famous debate between Edward Thompson and Perry Anderson in relation to major figures of comparative-historical sociology. The author shows that the debate was — in the last instance — an argument about methodology.

Guest Editorial: On Method, Technorealism And Aesthetic Capitalism, Patricia Ticineto Clough

Publications and Research

The guest editorial excerpts the keynote address Professor Clough held at the First Annual Graduate Student Conference hosted by the Graduate Center's Sociology Students Association.