The problem of this study was to determine the relationship between certain non-intellectual variables and academic achievement.

This thesis explores how pirate cultures and “informal” distribution circuits operate on the ground level and integrate global media texts (mainly Hollywood films) into a small section of the local everyday society of Hanoi, Viet Nam. Situating the pirate stores and its components as active and central, this thesis will examine the physical flow of media through these store sites. In addition, by exploring the interactions between media texts, store owners and workers, customers, and the store’s design itself, this thesis will reveal how media piracy (as a form of distribution and “normal” access) influences and negotiates modernity, cultures, identities, and meanings in Hanoi and Viet Nam.

Co-creation is an emerging phenomenon that occurs when two or more parties work together to create value. Co-creation, which is a key component to service dominant logic, is present in business to business, business to consumer, and consumer to consumer processes. This dissertation will focus on the business to consumer (and consumer to business) co-creation relationship. Much of the current business to consumer co-creation literature is qualitative in nature, with quantitative work just now beginning to emerge. As such, there is still much about the phenomenon of co-creation that is not understood. When looking at co-creation in the context of brand management, even less is known. In today's age of digital interaction where consumers are gaining more power on a daily basis, practitioners and academics should understand the motivations for consumers to engage brands in co-creation and what the outcomes of these co-creation partnerships are. Because of this, the dissertation contains three essays with the purpose of (1) identifying the motivations for co-creation from consumer and brand perspectives, (2) exploring each of these motivators on their individual relationship to the outcome of co-creation, and (3) understanding how the perceived ability to influence a brand impacts the outcomes of co-creation. Essay …

Just and equitable responses to the disparate impacts of climate change on communities and individuals throughout the world are at the heart of the concept of climate justice. Commodification, in the context of my research, is the process of monetizing nature and livelihoods for the purpose of surplus accumulation and profit maximization. In this study, my aim was to contextualize the concepts of climate injustice, disaster capitalism, and the commodification of lives and livelihoods in the specific setting of disaster vulnerability in southwest coastal Bangladesh. By conducting a case study in Kamarkhola and Sutarkhali regions of southwest coastal Bangladesh, I utilized discourse analysis and content analysis of livelihood interviews, semi-structured interviews, and policy documents to demonstrate the conceptual interrelation among global climate change, climate injustice, disaster capitalism, and capitalist expansion in environmentally precarious areas. I argue that in Southwest Coastal Bangladesh, the vulnerability to disasters stems from a complex and multifaceted layer of social hierarchies and inequalities, entwined with factors such as class and power relations. I also argue that Inequalities in the political, economic, and social realms have a key role in imposing vulnerability on disadvantaged people living in ecologically vulnerable areas. The perpetuation of inequality is sustained by …

Research questions addressed whether (1) the instruction was effective, (2) performance on persuasive tasks differed by grade level following instruction, (3) performance on persuasive tasks differed by Piagetian developmental level following instruction, and (4) whether performance differed between monolingual and bilingual subjects. Students wrote four persuasive compositions for assessment, two before instruction was administered and two after instruction. Knudson's holistic scoring rubric was used to evaluate essays for overall quality. Other measures of writing were evaluated including the number of words students used in their writing, the number of reasons included in the essay, the number of reasons per hundred words, and whether the paper had a conclusion or not. Further, the number of elaborations used in the paper was determined, as well as the number of elaborations per hundred words, and the ratio of the number of words used in elaborations compared with the total number of words in the composition.

The purpose of this non-positivistic mixed-methods study is to examine parental attitudes towards the use of computer and video games in their child’s classroom and to investigate how the sociocultural contexts in which parents live affect those attitudes. The research was conducted using a mixed-methods triangulation design, including both quantitative and qualitative techniques. First, the study tried to identify which groups of parents were better positioned to accept and support digital game-based learning and which groups were less likely to have a positive attitude toward integrating digital games into the classroom. This study tried to determine if socioeconomic status, age, education level, and/or cultural background could serve as a predictor of parental attitudes toward digital game-based learning. Second, the study tried to recognize how social and cultural contexts in which parents live affect their attitudes toward digital games in the classroom. Many researchers agree that parents play an important role in students’ and eventually, educators’ attitudes toward gaming. It has been argued that if parents accept a certain non-traditional (digital) learning tool, then their children would most likely have a similar attitude toward it. Parents might be the support system that educators need in order to ensure that students are …

Disordered eating is a general term that describes a wide range of behaviors from diagnosable eating disorders to subclinical patterns of behavior that do not meet criteria for diagnosis (e.g., problematic weight loss behaviors, excessive dieting, bingeing, purging). Disordered eating is prevalent and has a wide range of physical and psychological consequences. Negative self-conscious emotions such as shame and guilt have been implicated in the development and maintenance of disordered eating. Positive attitudes toward the self (i.e., self-forgiveness, self-compassion, self-acceptance) may be helpful in reducing shame, guilt, and disordered eating symptoms. In this dissertation, I explored the associations between positive attitudes toward the self, negative self-conscious emotions, and disordered eating in a sample of college students and adults (N = 477). Positive attitudes toward the self were associated with lower levels of disordered eating symptoms, and this relationship was partially mediated by lower levels of negative self-conscious emotions. I concluded by discussing areas for future research and implications for clinical practice.

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) a public health emergency of international concern. In March 2020, the United States government imposed impactful safety and confinement measures issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) all over the country to prevent community transmission of COVID-19. Institutions of higher education rapidly transitioned to online learning and eliminated in-person engagements in the spring of 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) followed a similar trajectory by shutting down all athletic activities due to the global pandemic. While college students in general notably experienced increased pandemic related distress and mental health concerns (e.g., depression, anxiety) during the early stages of the global pandemic, the disruption of collegiate sport competitions and seasons uniquely and significantly impacted collegiate student athletes and their overall well-being. In this qualitative study, I sought to document and understand the narrative of Black student athletes' experiences of stress and coping during the first two months of the COVID-19 global pandemic and cancellation of collegiate sports. Through reflexive thematic analysis, I found that psychosocial resources such as avoidance, acceptance, mindful self-compassion, health …

Far from the frontlines, the destiny of armies and generals has been considerably influenced by anonymous public servants working long hours behind a desk. On many occasions, these bureaucrats were the actual organizers of victory or the root cause of defeat. Count Pierre-Antoine Bruno Daru (1767-1829), Intendant Général de la Grande Armée, was one such man. The research concerns the critical nature of logistics and military administration in the performance of modern armies. It challenges the conventional view that the military commissariat was primarily responsible for the defeats of the armies of the First French Republic during the Revolutionary Wars. A professional bureaucracy was the response deployed by the French government to cope with the need to enlist, train, arm, equip, feed, shelter, pay, and control ever larger military forces. The solutions designed and applied by Pierre Daru and his colleagues, tested and improved by trial and error, became the foundation of modern military administration and, eventually, a model that was extended to contemporary, multinational corporations. Most accounts of the exploits of the late eighteenth-century French armies are devoted to describing their élan, maneuverability, and operational innovations. Yet, the fundamental distinction between the Revolutionary forces and their predecessors was scale. …

Given unprecedented shifts in the U.S. demography marked by rapid growth in Hispanic, Asian and other ethnic market segments, marketing scholars and practitioners are confronting ways to cultivate ethnic consumers' brand preference formation, retail patronage and their ensuring consumption choices. Food is cited as a common signifier for consumers’ ethnic/cultural identity because food itself is a cultural symbol. However, little research has examined the influences of ethnic identities on consumers’ patronage behaviors of ethnic-themed restaurants. Thus, this dissertation critically explores the impact of ethnic identity and motivational factors to better understand consumers' choices of ethnic-themed restaurants with a mix-method approach. The present research investigates how ethnic identity and consumers’ need for uniqueness interplay with perceived authenticity in consumers’ patronage intention of ethnic-themed restaurants. The findings advocate the interplay among ethnic identity, consumers’ need for uniqueness, and perceived authenticity of general consumers in decision making choices of patronizing ethnic-themed restaurants. The findings have important implications for market segmentation guiding the owners of ethnic-themed restaurant the choice of environmental cues to encourage patronage intentions among general consumers. Furthermore, this study provides additional insights about motivating factors affecting decision making of patronizing ethnic-themed restaurants and contributes to the stream of research by enhancing …

Failure to Yield is a collection of creative nonfiction that explores themes of presence and emotional connection and expression. The seven essays, which include three flash essays, explore the themes by reflecting on such topics as marriage, parent-child relationships and addiction. The collection is woven together by the author's relationships with her parents and children and by her experiences growing up in a small town in Iowa.

This study measured the effect of mode of discourse and developmental factors on composition length, syntactic complexity, and sentence-production error rate in the writing of secondary school students. The study also included a descriptive analysis of syntactic and logical patterns found in the sentence production errors. The 297 students whose writing samples provided the data for this study were enrolled in grades 7, 9, and 11. The students were divided into low and high within-grade developmental groups. Each student wrote two compositions, one in the descriptive mode and one in the persuasive mode.

There is a paucity of research regarding language use among bilingual clients, particularly with Latino children. In order to provide culturally sensitive counseling for bilingual, Spanish-speaking, Latino children it is important to understand their experience of language use. The purpose of this study was to investigate how second generation, bilingual, Mexican American, 5th grade students experience language use in the two languages with which they communicate. I employed a phenomenological method to data collection and analysis and conducted semi-structured individual and group interviews with three boys and five girls (N = 8). Analysis of the individual and group interviews yielded four main structures: (a) dominant language determined perception of developing dual selves, (b) speaking two languages useful in language brokering and upward mobility, (c) dominant language determined experience of language use, and (d) language use and aspects of the complementarity principle. Findings from this study suggest that bilingual Latino children experience language brokering for their parents as difficult, speaking two languages as useful regarding upward mobility, and that their dominant language influences various aspects of their daily experiences such as with whom and where they use each language. Limitations to this research include insufficient time building rapport with participants and …

Male or female, young or old, the characters of this collection inhabit a liminal space of trauma and social dislocation in which elements of the real and fabulous coexist in equal measure. The ghosts that populate the stories are as much the ghosts of the living, as they are the ghosts of the dead. They represent individual conscience and an inescapable connection to the past.

This thesis consists of a preface and twenty-one original short stories. The preface examines the differences between creative nonfiction, autobiography, and memoir. The twenty-one interrelated stories included are autobiographical in nature, in some ways memoirs and in some ways creative nonfiction. The over-all theme of the collection explores one character's journey of self-discovery and transformation.

The problem with which this investigation was concerned is that of treating agoraphobia with cognitive-behavioral group therapy and cognitive-behavioral group therapy combined with the drug alprazolam (Xanax). The purpose of the research was twofold. The first goal was to determine the relative effectiveness of the two treatment conditions on phobic behavior, anxiety, and depression. A second goal was to analyze the results and make recommendations concerning each of these modalities available to agoraphobics, their families, and to treatment specialists. The research design of this study was a randomized, pretest-posttest, experimental group design. The sample (N = 15) consisted of Group I (N = 7), who received behavioral-cognitive group therapy combined with the medication alprazolam, and Group II (N = 8), who received behavioral-cognitive group therapy only. The treatment included 15, 2-hour weekly group sessions, with the addition of a brief medication evaluation prior to each group meeting for Group I. During these sessions, the subjects received information about agoraphobia in the form of brief didactic segments, treatment materials, homework assignments, group interaction, and various forms of desensitization. Based on the findings of this study, the following conclusions were drawn: 1. Multidimensional behavioral-cognitive group therapy can significantly reduce phobic avoidance, anxiety, …

Thesis describing the the computation of eigenstates for a particle moving in a spheroidal potential well under the influence of a strong spin-orbit interaction.

Pulling Tangled Strings: "The Puppeteer" and Other Stories is a collection of stories with strong thematic and emotional connections that includes an opening preface describing the process used when writing the stories. Each of the stories is united by a main character that desperately wants to gain control of his environment. From a character acting out a classic revenge tale on his friend to a comatose teenager victimized by an ambiguous tragedy, these are characters who have been put into difficult life situations and need to feel like they are pulling the strings in their lives again. In all cases, however, the characters come to find that control does not come easily and that the motivations for their behavior are never clear cut, even to themselves.

Outer Edges of the Middle Kingdom is a narrative by the author about his two years as a teacher in the People's Republic of China. Organized chronologically, the account begins in August, 1985, and ends in June, 1987. The narrator describes meeting students at Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, designing English classes for English majors, daily episodes in the classroom, and interaction with Chinese colleagues. The narrative alternates between life on a university campus and extensive trips the narrator made to various cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, Guilin, Harbin, Hohot, and Guangzhou. Also recounted are the narrator's reactions to the student demonstrations of December, 1986, and the resulting anti-bourgeois liberation campaign of January-April, 1987.

This study deals with the analysis of public opinion about crime and attitudes regarding criminal justice issues along two major dimensions. The first part concerns how respondents rank crime among a list of nine social problems (unemployment, high interest rates, inflation, crime, the high cost of living, moral decline, taxes, dissatisfaction with the government, and Reagan). The second dimension examines some research questions. These are whether there was any association between the respondents' perception of crime trends and each of the following: demographic background, neighborhood safety, the death penalty, gun ownership, frequency of locking doors, avoidance of teenagers, and the evaluation of police job performance; and also whether there was any association between the respondents' victimization experience and seriousness of crime and police job performance. The data were obtained from the archives of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research in Michigan.

Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a …

This study examined the effectiveness of training Head Start teachers and aides in child teacher relationship training (CTRT). CTRT is based on child parent relationship therapy (CPRT) (Landreth & Bratton, 2006), a filial therapy model based on the principles of child-centered play therapy, and was adapted for the classroom. In this quasi-experimental design, 12 teacher/aide pairs (n = 24) were assigned to the experimental (n = 12) or active control group (n = 12). Children who scored in the Borderline or Clinical range on at least one scale of the Child Behavior Checklist-Caregiver/Teacher Report Form (C-TRF) at pretest qualified for the study (n = 54). Nine hypotheses were analyzed using a two factor repeated measures multivariate analysis to determine if the CTRT group and the active control group performed differently across time according to pre-, mid-, and posttest results of the C-TRF. Additionally, effect sizes were calculated to determine practical significance. Five hypotheses were retained at the .05 level of significance. Post hoc analysis was conducted to analyze the effects of the two phases of treatment. Results indicated that children in the experimental group made statistically significant improvements in externalizing problems (p = .003). Children of focus made statistically significant …

The following is a critical preface and portion of a novel-in-progress produced during my master's program in creative writing at the University of North Texas. The preface analyzes the way time and point of view work together to create or determine structure in fiction, as well as provide added meaning. In order to explore these topics I focus on two novels, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and speak to how these elements have influenced my own writing style in The Hostess. The Hostess is a story about a group of twenty-something’s working together in a restaurant located in a Mid-West, college town, told from multiple character perspectives, as they struggle to choose between pursuing their passions and creating stability in their lives.

A Hint of Meaning contains a scholarly preface, "Language, Experimentation, and Craft: Creating a Vivid, Continuous Fictional Dream," that discusses the ambiguities of language and how they relate to different aspects of the craft of writing. Six original short stories follow the preface. "Musical Chairs" explores a woman's conflicting emotions about her ex-husband. "Baby Steps" depicts the struggle of a woman against her father's alcoholism. "Go Home Happy" depicts a day in the life of a video store employee. "Bargain Basement Perfection" contrasts the reality of a relationship with an imagined, perfect relationship. "Did You Hear about Donald and Bitsy?" is an experimental piece that tells a story through gossip. "Glass Angels" explores a minister's relationship with his homosexual son and how that relates to the minister's faith.