This research targeted elementary education graduates of a large Southwestern university who were transfer students, and compared them to native students on selected variables. These variables included retention in teaching, and perception of supports and obstacles at the university. The sample consisted of 143 respondents: 73 native and 70 transfer students. Data were collected through submission of online surveys and through postal mail. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were used to answer the research questions. Astin’s input-environment-outcome model provided the conceptual and theoretical framework for this study. Native and transfer students considered student teaching to be the “most helpful” course or service during their time at the university, yet both felt they lacked elements of preparation for teaching in the real world. Transfer students reported the following as supports during their transition from community college to university: academic advising, finances, support network, and the university. They reported these obstacles: university bureaucracy, credit transfer, expenses, and adapting to campus. There was no significant difference between the two groups’ intentions to remain in teaching (p = .249), and a statistically non-significant higher percentage of transfer students than native students reported to be teaching at the time of survey completion (p = .614). The …

This dissertation is a study of two major topics that involve synthetic strategies for new classes of phosphorescent gold(I)-based metallodendrimers. The phosphorescence of organic and inorganic luminophores originates from spin-orbit coupling owing to internal or external heavy atom effects as well as metal-centered emissions. Previous work in the Omary group entailed systematically designed small molecules, metallopolymers, and unconjugated metallodendrimers that contain d10 and d8 metals, whereas this dissertation aims in part to expand such strategies to the conjugated metallodendrimer regime. In one approach novel synthetic strategies were used to make first-generation phenyl acetylene dendrimers and phosphine derivatives thereof. The phosphine dendrimers are made by tethering one of the phosphines to an unsaturated dendrimer, as such phosphine dendrimers are better chromophores and luminophores due to their structural rigidity and extended conjugation. In another approach, 2- and 3-coordinate Au(I) dendritic complexes are synthesized from these phosphine dendrimers. This study is further extended to study metallodendritic complexes with different cores, for example triphenylene-based metallodendritic complexes with six acetylene branches. The physical properties of the metallodendrimers can be modulated upon proceeding to further dendrimer generations or by using solubilizing groups on the peripheral phosphines, thus allowing better processability for thin-film fabrication as required for …

Studies indicate that Latina/o immigrant youth engage in a wide range of sophisticated literacy practices outside of school that are often transnational, crossing various linguistic, cultural, and social spaces. Technology has further afforded immigrant youth the opportunity to develop transnational capabilities which are rare in the mainstream population, yet needed in the 21st century of global connectedness. However, Latino immigrant youth drop out of school at disproportional rates, suggesting that their literacy practices are not recognized or valued by the educational system. Using a New Literacy Studies perspective that recognizes multiple literacies that are meaningful within their sociocultural traditions, this collective case study investigated the range, form, and purpose of the out-of-school literacies of four Latina/o adolescent English Learners who are new arrivals. The qualitative methodology employed constructivist interviews, digital and actual artifacts, and observations. Findings demonstrated that the most prevalent out-of-school literacies the participants practice take place on the social networking site of Facebook, in their workplaces, and through the entertainment media sources of music and television. A cross-case analysis suggests that the literacy practices in these spaces have unique and purposeful roles for the individuals that allow them to connect to their home countries and maintain their Latina/o …

This auto-ethnographic study focuses on Houston’s art car community and the grassroots movement’s 25 year relationship with the city through an art form that has created a sense of community. Art cars transform ordinary vehicles into personally conceived visions through spectacle, disrupting status quo messages of dominant culture regarding automobiles and norms of ownership and operation. An annual parade is an egalitarian space for display and performance, including art cars created by individuals who drive their personally modified vehicles every day, occasional entries by internationally renowned artists, and entries created by youth groups. A locally proactive public has created a movement has co-opted the cultural spectacle, creating a community of practice. I studied the events of the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art’s Art Car Weekend to give me insight into art and its value for people in this community. Sources of data included the creation of a participatory art car, journaling, field observation, and semi-structured interviews. The first part is my academic grounding, informed by critical pedagogy and socially reconstructive art practices. The second part narrates my experiences and understandings of the community along with the voices of others. Dominant themes of exploration include empowerment, community, and art. I …

Research continues to show that pharmaceutical environmental contamination has caused adverse environmental effects, with one of the most studied effects being feminization of fish exposed to pharmaceutical endocrine disruptors. Additionally, there are also public health risks associated with pharmaceuticals because in-home reserves of medications provide opportunities for accidental poisoning and intentional medication abuse. Pharmaceutical take back programs have been seen as a remedy to these concerns; however a thorough review of peer-reviewed literature and publicly available information on these programs indicates limited research has been conducted to validate these programs as a purported solution. Furthermore, there are significant data gaps on key factors relating to take back program participants. The purpose of this dissertation was therefore to address these gaps in knowledge and ultimately determine if take back programs could actually improve public and environmental health. This was accomplished by conducting social and scientific research on a take back program called Denton Drug Disposal Day (D4). Socioeconomic, demographic, and geographic characteristics of D4 participants were investigated using surveys and geographic analysis. Impacts on public health were determined by comparing medications collected at D4 events with medications reported to the North Texas Poison Center as causing adverse drug exposures in Denton …

The purpose of this study was to assess the emotional support needs of mothers of multiple birth children based on administration of a survey the researcher developed. The survey consisted of 25 demographic items, six 6-point Likert scale items, and three open-ended questions. Likert scale items were based on amount of perceived emotional support mothers received in their environments at the time of survey administration. Open-ended questions addressed negative and positive aspects of parenting multiples and emotional support needs. The sample consisted of 171 mothers of multiple birth children from 23 states in the United States. Participants ranged in age from 20-50 years old with 38% not reporting age. Participants were 95.3% Caucasian, 0% African-American, 1.8% Asian, 0% Native American and 1.2% other; of these, 5.8% were Hispanic. We used demographic statistics and constant comparison to determine basic demographic characteristics of this sample and to identify emotional support needs of mothers of multiple birth children. We used Pearson product moment correlation to determine potential relationships between variables. Results indicated a statistically significant positive correlation between overall life satisfaction and partner satisfaction (r = .420, n = 170, p < 0.01). Therefore, mothers of multiples experience increased satisfaction with their lives …

Quality of appearance is important in nature and individuals have a basic need to establish the normality of appearance to confirm their acceptability to others. In daily inter-relationships of the same species, for instance, normal-appearing members of a species group reject or kill other members who appear abnormal. In human society, appearance is considered as one of the most direct sources of information about other people, and unattractiveness is often accompanied by negative judgments, which can cause emotional distress and isolation. Accordingly, humans tend to pay great attention to their personal appearance and make improvements to enhance their self-representations. The growth of the beauty and cosmetic surgery industries is an indication of an increasing willingness to enhance physical appearance. However, despite the growing demand for cosmetic procedures, the consumer research literature on this topic is extremely sparse. In fact, little is known about the attitudinal and motivational drivers that facilitate undergoing such procedures. This dissertation enriches our understanding of factors that affect consumers’ motivation to pursue cosmetic procedures and examines the role of emotions in such decisions. To that end, objective self-awareness (OSA) theory is applied and the interplay between the state of public OSA, beauty standards, and self-conscious emotions …

Polymer gels have been studied extensively due to their ability to simulate biological tissues and to swell or collapse reversibly in response to external stimuli. This work presents a variety of studies using poly-N-isopropylacrylamide (PNIPA) hydrogels. The projects have been carried out both in the lab of Dr. Zhibing Hu and in collaboration with others outside of UNT: (1) an analysis of the swelling kinetics of microgel spherical shells prepared using a novel design of microfluidic devices; (2) a comparison of the drug-release rates between nanoparticle structures having either core or core-with-shell (core-shell) designs; (3) an investigation into the thermodynamics of swelling for microgels of exceedingly small size.

As increasing emphases are placed on the importance of a muscular male physique in Westernized culture, more men are experiencing eating, exercise, and body image (EEBI) disturbances. Clinician-researchers have identified a syndrome, termed muscle dysmorphia (MD), in which individuals, usually men, are pathologically preoccupied with their perceived lack of muscularity. The current study tested a modified version of an extant theoretical model of MD symptomatology as well as an alternative model of MD symptomatology. Over 700 adult men completed a demographic questionnaire, a symptom inventory, a self-esteem questionnaire, a measure of perfectionism, a measure of the media’s influence on EEBI disturbances, and measures of body dissatisfaction and MD symptoms. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the goodness of fit of the proposed models. Overall, the first model demonstrated poor fit with the data. Conversely, the alternative model fit the data adequately. The alternative model was cross validated with a second sample, and also fit this data adequately.

The purpose of this study was to better understand value development in an emerging adult, college student population, and to further define, identify and clarify family characteristics that influence values. Theories have sought to examine the developmental influences in emerging adulthood, but little research exists examining the role of the family, particularly in regards to value development. The current study reviewed the literature on emerging adulthood, values, and self-determination theory with attention to family influence. Questions addressed in this study included: 1) are perceived parent values predictors of emerging adult values, 2) will the quality of communication between parents and emerging adults and the presence of an emotionally supportive relationship with both mother and father moderate the relationship between the perception of parent values and emerging adult values, and 3) does the family environment influence the types of values emerging adults perceive to be important to their parents? For this purpose, 200 college students completed 5 different self-report questionnaires measuring the constructs of values, perceived parent values, family environment variables, family communication variables, and quality of relationship with both father and mother. Parents of college students completed a self-report questionnaire measuring their socialization values for their children and a questionnaire …

This dissertation is a collection of poems preceded by a critical preface. The preface considers Anthony’s Hecht’s long poem, “The Venetian Vespers,” and the ways in which the temporally unsettled situation of the poem’s speaker parallels a problem facing narrative-meditative poets. The preface is divided into two main sections that explore divisions of this larger conflict. The first discusses the origins and effects of the speaker’s uprootedness in time, and the ways in which he tries to both combat and embrace this dislocation by temporarily losing himself in the immediacy of observing visual art. In this section I connect the dilemma of the speaker, who wishes to escape his memory by focusing outwards, to the dilemma of a representational poet who, despite his position towards the past, must necessarily confront or recollect memories and emotions in order to create authentic descriptions or characters. The second section focuses on the production and appreciation of artistic works (both visual and literary) and how the meaning, production and appreciation of beauty are inseparable from its existence within the physical limits of time. Here I discuss the significance of Hecht’s character who is surrounded with beauty yet describes himself as a person who only …

Perceived quality in the context of e-commerce was defined and examined in numerous studies, but, to date, there are no consistent definitions and measurement scales. Instruments that measure quality in e-commerce industries primarily focus on website quality or service quality during the transaction and delivery phases. Even though some scholars have proposed instruments from different perspectives, these scales do not fully evaluate the level of quality perceived by customers during the entire decision-making process. This dissertation purports to provide five main contributions for the e-commerce, service quality, and decision science literature: (1) development of a comprehensive instrument to measure how online customers perceive the quality of the shopping channel, website, transaction and recovery based on the customer decision making process; (2) identification of the determinants of customer satisfaction and the key dimensions of customer behavioral intentions in e-commerce; (3) examination of the relationships among perceived quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty intention using empirical data; (4) application of different statistical packages (LISREL and PLS-Graph) for data analysis and comparison of how these methods impact the results; and (5) examination of the moderating effects of control variables. A survey was designed and distributed to a total of 1126 college students in a …

Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies are uniformly considered highly challenging in terms of technical execution. However, their artistic value is frequently questioned. This dissertation examines the compositional elements that are often overlooked in these virtuoso works, and provides a viewpoint into their interpretative characteristics. Furthermore, it pursues a claim that besides being excellent performance pieces, these works also make an intriguing contribution to Liszt scholarship, and deserve meaningful consideration in terms of their artistic quality. Following the Introduction (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 provides a brief historical perspective of the critical affirmation Liszt the composer encountered from the musical society. It also includes a short background on Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, as well as the general reactions these works evoked from pianists, audiences, and scholars, during the time they were composed to the present day. As the main body of the dissertation, Chapter 3 investigates the three primary compositional concepts found in Rhapsodies Nos. 6, 10, and 12. These concepts are divided into three subchapters: Transformation of Themes, Controlled Pianistic Textures, and Coloristic Effects. Each of these subchapters provides explanatory information, as well as some of the most characteristic passages presented.

In the first chapter, we define Steinhaus set as a set that meets every isometric copy of another set at exactly one point. We show that there is no Steinhaus set for any four-point subset in a plane.In the second chapter, we define the orbit tree of a permutation group of natural numbers, and further introduce compressed orbit trees. We show that any rooted finite tree can be realized as a compressed orbit tree of some permutation group. In the third chapter, we investigate certain classes of closed permutation groups of natural numbers with respect to their universal and surjectively universal groups. We characterize two-sided invariant groups, and prove that there is no universal group for countable groups, nor universal group for two-sided invariant groups in permutation groups of natural numbers.

This dissertation explores how nonconscious thought processing might be affected and activated in ways that influence consumer decision making. To activate nonconscious thought processes, this dissertation relies on priming—the unobtrusive activation of mental representations by stimuli in a social context, which occurs without participants' conscious awareness. Three dimensions of consumer decision making are investigated: purchase intention, product evaluation and arousal. The dissertation is based on the auto-motive model of nonconscious goal pursuit and somatic marker hypothesis. The dissertation is driven by three experiments, which respectively explore crucial areas in priming effects and addresses the following research question: can primes be shaped or controlled by marketers? Specifically, the dissertation examines whether shopping behavior can be primed. Second, the dissertation also examines how facial primes displaying basic emotions (happiness, anger, contempt, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise) can prime emotion and arousal. Finally the dissertation examines the effect of the interaction of the buying prime with the primes of faces displaying basic emotions on the dependent variables of purchase intention, product evaluation, emotion, and arousal. Results from three experimental studies show that shopping behavior can be primed, and primed participants will exhibit higher product evaluation than those exposed to a control prime. Second …

This dissertation is a study of the political transformation of Texas during the twentieth century from a predominantly Democratic to a two-party state. It is commonly asserted that the fundamental conservatism of Texas voters led them to abandon the national Democratic Party as it embraced more liberal reforms. This shift led to a rise in support in Texas for the Republican Party, which continued to advocate a more conservative agenda. But this change demands a more thorough explanation at the local level, in part because such a study can also reveal other factors at work. This dissertation first examines how prohibition impacted the state's political status quo and provided an opportunity for the Republican Party to increase its numbers. It then discusses the New Deal and the growth of Texas's oil industry, and how government regulation shaped political developments. The impact of urbanization and suburbanization on Republican growth are also addressed, along with numerous campaigns that reflected the changes occurring in Texas's electorate during this time. Although Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1952 and 1956 wins in Texas were a strong indication of the realignment among Texas voters, it was John G. Tower's election to the United States Senate that served as …