Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Cultivating A Culture Of Food Justice: Impacts Of Community Based Economies On Farmers And Neighborhood Leaders In The Case Of Fresh Stop Markets In Kentucky, Heather Hyden

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

In this thesis, I focus on two tensions within the alternative agro-food movement. First is a question of who/what community is allowed to define food systems problems and then implement solutions. For example, food desert metaphors rely discursively on defining communities as being “without”, which perpetuates needs-based narratives, in which only professional “experts” know how to solve problems of food access. These representations ignore the creativity, agency, and resiliency of everyday food justice mobilizations happening at the grassroots level. Second, what form can solutions take within hegemonic constructions of development? I build a theoretical model based on Black geographies (McKittrick, …

Exploring The Quality Of Life Impact Of The Bluegrass Double Dollars Program, Rebecca L. Warta

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

Food Security is a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO, 1996). 17% of Kentuckians are food insecure (Kentucky Department of Agriculture, 2016). This study explored the quality of life (QoL) impact of the Bluegrass Double Dollars (BGDD) program on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants through secondary data analysis. Utilizing the categories of quality of life indicators established by The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress …

The Role Of The Community Capital Framework And Christian Faith-Based Community Development Organizations In Kentucky, Samson S. Tarpeh

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

The purpose of this study is to investigate the work of Christian faith-based organizations (FBO) doing community development work in Kentucky and to learn about how they might be using community development concepts and system approaches as articulated in the Community Capitals Framework (CCF) and to critically examine those findings. The CCF is comprised of seven capitals including Natural, Cultural, Human, Social, Political, Financial, and Built. Emery and Flora (2006) assert that the “CCF offers a way to analyze community and economic development efforts from a systems perspective by identifying the assets in each capital (stock), the types of capital …

Teaching Social Skills To Individuals With Comorbid Down Syndrome And Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Single-Subject Design Study, Matthew A. Cody Davis

Theses and Dissertations--Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology

Social skills are important for building and maintaining relationships, effective communication, and providing appropriate responses within social contexts. Deficits in social skills are often exhibited in individuals with comorbid Down syndrome (DS) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Peer-delivered interventions and other behavioral techniques for teaching specific social skills show effectiveness; however, the paucity of intervention research including individuals with DS-ASD has resulted in little guidance for how best to teach social skills and ensure generalization and maintenance. In the present study, a multiple probe study across behaviors, replicated across participants, assessed the effectiveness of peer-delivered simultaneous prompting in teaching socials …

“I Wonder What You Think Of Me”: A Qualitative Approach To Examining Stereotype Awareness In Appalachian Students, Chelsea G. Adams

Theses and Dissertations--Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology

Historically, Appalachia has been stereotyped as being a culture bred in poverty and ignorance. Much research has shown that stereotyping reveals a pattern of behavioral change and an impact on psychological well-being for the stereotyped (e.g., Pinel, 1999; Woodcock, Jernandez, Estrada, & Schultz, 2012), and has largely been centered on race and gender (e.g., Byrnes, 2008; Tuckman & Monetti, 2011). Less is known about the development of culture-specific stereotypes such as those related to Appalachians – a highly stigmatized group (Daniels, 2014; Otto, 2002). The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of how adolescents in rural Appalachia …

Beyond The Coal Divide: The Cultural Politics Of Natural Resource Extraction In Central Appalachia, Julie A. Shepherd-Powell

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

During the last several years far southwest Virginia, like elsewhere in the central Appalachian region, has faced a decline in all coal mining activity and a subsequent loss of coal mining jobs, meaning that local economies are suffering and the unemployment line is long. In addition, this area continues to face environmental pollution from surface coal mines that are still in operation or have not been reclaimed. Drawing upon anthropological literature on natural resource extraction and economic and environmental inequality, this dissertation highlights the lives of members of a local grassroots environmental organization, as well as other local residents, in …

Body Image And Sex: How Women's Body Image Influences And Impacts Sexual Experiences, Sarah E. Christian

Theses and Dissertations--Family Sciences

Body image, the subjective view about one’s own body and how others perceive it, has been shown to have numerous impacts on women in multiple facets of their lives, including sexual experiences. This study seeks to examine the specific impact that body image has on women using sexual relationships for self-validation. Findings suggest that the more likely a woman is to perceive herself as overweight, the higher the chance that she seeks out sex in order to validate her feelings with regards to her body. Parental involvement and comments about the participant’s body were also shown with the woman seeking …

Essays On Organic Food Marketing In The U.S., Bo Chen

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

This dissertation examines organic food marketing from three aspects: household demand for organic food, household choice of retail formats accounting for preference organic food preference, and farmers’ joint adoption of organic farming and direct marketing methods. In Chapter Two, given the fast growth of private label milk and organic milk in the U.S., we estimate a censored demand system to study the demand relations among types of milk differentiated by brand types and organic status, using recent Nielsen Homescan data. We find that sociodemographic factors still play important roles in a household choice of milk types, and fluid milk is …

Agricultural Input Intensification, Productivity Growth, And The Transformation Of African Agriculture, Didier Y. Alia

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

This dissertation studies agricultural input intensification, defined as the increased use of modern inputs such as hybrid seeds, mineral fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide in African agriculture. It also analyses the potential of this intensification to accelerate productivity growth and tests the effectiveness of two policies, input subsidies and land reforms, in promoting it and consequently in increasing crop yield. In the first essay, we argue that to create the conditions for the emergence of a green revolution in Africa, modern agricultural technologies have to be adopted as a package, not in a piecemeal fashion. This argument is consistent with a …

Politics Below The Surface: A Political Ecology Of Mineral Rights And Land Tenure Struggles In Appalachia And The Andes, Lindsay Shade

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation examines how confusion and lack of access to information about subsurface property rights facilitates the rapid acquisition of mineral rights by mining interests, leaving those who live 'above the surface' to contend with complicated corporate and bureaucratic apparatuses. The research focuses on the first proposed state-run large scale mining project in Ecuador, believed to contain copper ores, and on the natural gas hydrofracking industry in three counties in north central West Virginia. Qualitative and visual methods, including mapping, are employed to determine (i.) how the geography of subsurface ownership patterns is changing, (ii.) links between changes in subsurface …

No Such State As Palestine: Notions Of Home And The State In Palestinian Relationships With Palestine, Osama A. Abdl-Haleem

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

There is no such state as Palestine. But nearly 70 years after the termination of the British mandate for Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel, Palestine remains a home for the Palestinian. It is an identity not dependent on the existence of a Palestinian state, nor arrested by the presence of an Israeli one. Palestinians have a home relationship with Palestine, where home is a sense of belonging that comes from within, that isn’t earned and given, but personal and chosen, even while it is communal. Home is a self-determined relationship of person to place. The relationships …

Ethnic Xenophobia As Symbolic Politics: A Cross-National Study Of Anti-Migrant Activism From Brussels To Beirut, Annamarie M. Rannou

Theses and Dissertations--Political Science

Xenophobia is examined almost exclusively as a prejudice of advanced western nations. I argue that the field of study of xenophobia must be re-conceptualized in order for comparative, cross-regional inquiry to take place. With a new concept of ethnic xenophobia, this dissertation examines the determinants and causal mechanisms of ethnic xenophobic activity across developed and developing countries. I integrate studies of xenophobia and theories of ethnic threat to explain that political elites rely on structural dimensions of threat to convert native anxieties into ethnic xenophobia through the use of anti-migrant myths and symbols. I extend Stuart Kaufman’s theory of …

How The Climate Of Opinion In States And Countries Influences Gay Rights, John Poe

Theses and Dissertations--Political Science

This dissertation examines attitudes on same-sex marriage and how personal predispositions toward support and the climate of opinion interact to help create attitudes. Over the past few decades, support for gay rights has increased dramatically in the United States and many other countries around the world. I argue that, while the set of basic personal determinants of attitudes toward homosexuality and gay rights stays roughly the same, the impact of such determinants changes over time and space. The framework used in this dissertation draws on attitudinal and political psychology, political sociology and theories of contextual effects. I argue that over …

Geography, Trade, And Macroeconomics, Hao Guo

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

This dissertation studies the effects of external integration and internal liberalization on the economic geography within a country when regions within the country have different access to the world market.

The first paper introduces internal geography into the Melitz (2003) model to examine how external and internal liberalizations affect the economic geography within a country. By dividing a country into a coastal region and an inland region, the model shows that trade leads the coastal region have a higher than proportional share of industry, and causes firms in the coastal region to be larger and more productive than firms in …

The Impact Of Public Educational Investments And Education Spillovers On The Economic Growth Of States: Are State Educational Investments Affecting Earnings And Employment?, Carla J. Nietfeld

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

The first chapter provides an introduction to my investigation of the impact of state-level educational investments in public K-12 education on future labor markets, specifically earnings and employment. In Chapter 2, the current literature supporting this investigation is examined while I offer a hole in the literature that I intend to fill. Then, in Chapter 3 I present a two-period, balanced-budget theoretical model in which I relate educational investments, mobility, and future earnings. This theoretical model is then implemented in Chapter 4 using state-level data and again in Chapter 5 using individual-level data.

Chapter 4 examines the impact of state-level …

Essays On The Political Economy Of Intergovernmental Grants, Steven A. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

This dissertation focuses on how distributive politics influences the geographic allocation of federal grants to state and local governments. A secondary focus is the role of social trust in the growth of government. In the first essay, I test the degree to which the earmark ban of 2011 prevented legislators from directing federal competitive grants to their home congressional districts and whether earmarking distorted equality in the distribution of federal grants across demographic groups. I find that earmarking skewed the distribution of federal grants toward wealthy congressional districts and away from poor congressional districts. This is a groundbreaking finding, considering …

The Relationship Between Involvement In Religious Student Organizations And The Development Of Socially Responsible Leadership Capacity, William J. Black

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

This study of 76,365 students from 82 U.S. institutions explored the relationship between involvement in a religious student organization and student capacities for socially responsible leadership, based on the Social Change Model of Leadership (SCM). Results from t-tests found students involved in both religious and secular student organizations reported statistically significantly higher scores on all eight measures of socially responsible leadership than students involved in only religious student organizations.

Hierarchical multiple regression models explained between 26% and 29% of the variance in student reported levels of overall socially responsible leadership. Compared to students involved in no organizations, involvement in …

Self-Authoring Gender Performance: A Narrative Analysis Of Gay Undergraduate Men, Casey Shadix

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

The perspectives of gay men on college and university campuses is informed by a rich gay social history and extensive roots of community politics. The experiences of gay undergraduate men have been illuminated in segmented ways in scholarly literature to date. This narrative inquiry develops and advances those efforts by exploring how gay undergraduate men construct, experience, and make meaning of their gender as a population ascribing to both liberationist and assimilationist viewpoints. Data for this qualitative study were collected at one public, four-year research university in the southeastern United States in the fall 2015 semester using recorded personal interviews …

Determined To Make A Difference: A Qualitative Study Of College Women Student Leaders, Heather Yattaw Wagoner

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

While research has grown related to the experiences of gender and leadership in the workplace, little research exists on the experiences of gender and leadership in collegiate student organization settings. This study explores the experiences of college women holding executive leadership roles in highly visible on-campus registered student organizations. More specifically, the study seeks understanding of how social role expectancies interfaced with the women’s perceptions and experiences as college leaders.

Data were generated with undergraduate women leaders at a large, public research institution in the southeast during the fall of 2014 using qualitative methods including individual interviews, group interviews, and …

Partner Influence In Diet And Exercise Behaviors: Testing Behavior Modeling, Social Control, And Normative Body Size, Brea Perry, Gabriele Ciciurkaite, Christy Freadreacea Brady, Justin Garcia

Sociology Faculty Publications

Previous research has documented social contagion in obesity and related health behaviors, but less is known about the social processes underlying these patterns. Focusing on married or cohabitating couples, we simultaneously explore three potential social mechanisms influencing obesity: normative body size, social control, and behavior modeling. We analyze the association between partner characteristics and the obesity-related health behaviors of focal respondents, comparing the effects of partners’ body type, partners’ attempts to manage respondents’ eating behaviors, and partners’ own health behaviors on respondents’ health behaviors (physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption, and fast food consumption). Data on 215 partners are extracted …

Regular Expressions In Practice, Kathryn Lybarger

Library Presentations

Regular expressions are not just for programmers anymore; they are supported by common software and systems used for cataloging and metadata, and allow for very powerful search and replace, even complete reformatting of library data! In this webinar, we’ll discuss the building blocks of regular expressions, practice identifying what they match (and do not match!), and consider how we can use them to make everyday library work more efficient.

Alcohol Use And Strenuous Physical Activity In College Students: A Longitudinal Test Of 2 Explanatory Models Of Health Behavior, Heather A. Davis, Elizabeth N. Riley, Gregory T. Smith, Richard S. Milich, Jessica L. Burris

Psychology Faculty Publications

Objective: To help clarify the effect of gender on the bidirectional relationship between alcohol use and strenuous physical activity in college students. Participants: Five hundred twenty-four (52% female) college students recruited in August 2008 and 2009 and followed up in April 2009 and April 2011, respectively. Methods: Participants reported their alcohol use and strenuous physical activity on 2 occasions (baseline and follow-up) spaced approximately 1 or 2 years apart. Results: For females, alcohol use quantity at baseline was associated with increased strenuous physical activity at 1- and 2-year follow-ups, and alcohol use frequency at baseline was …

The Carrot And The Stick? Strategies To Improve Compliance With College Campus Tobacco Policies, Amanda Fallin-Bennett, Maria Roditis, Stanton A. Glantz

Nursing Faculty Publications

Objective: Tobacco-free policies are being rapidly adopted nationwide, yet compliance with these policies remains a challenge. This study explored college campus key informants' experiences with tobacco policies, and their perceived benefits, drawbacks, and outcomes. Participants: The sample for this study was 68 key informants representing 16 different California universities with varying tobacco policies (no smoking indoors and within 20 feet of entrances, designated smoking areas, 100% smoke-free, and 100% tobacco-free). Methods: Qualitative, descriptive study. Semistructured interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using content analysis. Results: Strategies to improve compliance ranged from a social approach to a …

Selective Suppression Of The Α Isoform Of P38 Mapk Rescues Late-Stage Tau Pathology, Nicole Maphis, Shanya Jiang, Guixiang Xu, Olga N. Kokiko-Cochran, Saktimayee M. Roy, Linda J. Van Eldik, D. Martin Watterson, Bruce T. Lamb, Kiran Bhaskar

Sanders-Brown Center on Aging Faculty Publications

Background: Hyperphosphorylation and aggregation of tau protein are the pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease and related tauopathies. We previously demonstrated that the microglial activation induces tau hyperphosphorylation and cognitive impairment via activation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38 MAPK) in the hTau mouse model of tauopathy that was deficient for microglial fractalkine receptor CX3CR1.

Method: We report an isoform-selective, brain-permeable, and orally bioavailable small molecule inhibitor of p38α MAPK (MW181) and its effects on tau phosphorylation in vitro and in hTau mice.

Results: First, pretreatment of mouse primary cortical neurons with MW181 completely blocked inflammation-induced p38α MAPK activation and AT8 …

Dna Methylation Signatures Of Chronic Low-Grade Inflammation Are Associated With Complex Diseases, Symen Ligthart, Carola Marzi, Stella Aslibekyan, Michael M. Mendelson, Karen N. Conneely, Toshiko Tanaka, Elena Colicino, Lindsay L. Waite, Roby Joehanes, Weihua Guan, Jennifer A. Brody, Cathy Elks, Riccardo Marioni, Min A. Jhun, Golareh Agha, Jan Bressler, Cavin K. Ward-Caviness, Brian H. Chen, Tianxiao Huan, Kelly Bakulski, Elias L. Salfati, Whi-Empc Investigators, Giovanni Fiorito, Charge Epigenetics Of Coronary Heart Disease, Simone Wahl, Katharina Schramm, Jin Sha, Dena G. Hernandez, Allan C. Just, Jennifer A. Smith, Donna K. Arnett

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Background: Chronic low-grade inflammation reflects a subclinical immune response implicated in the pathogenesis of complex diseases. Identifying genetic loci where DNA methylation is associated with chronic low-grade inflammation may reveal novel pathways or therapeutic targets for inflammation.

Results: We performed a meta-analysis of epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) of serum C-reactive protein (CRP), which is a sensitive marker of low-grade inflammation, in a large European population (n = 8863) and trans-ethnic replication in African Americans (n = 4111). We found differential methylation at 218 CpG sites to be associated with CRP (P < 1.15 × 10^–7) in the discovery panel …

Do You Have A Stapler?: Evenings At The Reference Desk, Katie Smith, Lauren Farmer

LIS Student Conference

No abstract provided.

Community Resource Audit Of Low-Income And Poor Children, Jesse Caldwell

LIS Student Conference

Poverty is on the rise within the United States. Public Libraries located in large cities and rural communities may be seeing an increase in usage from children who identify as low-income or poor. Using national statistics from the United States and local statistics from Lawrenceburg, Indiana , I will explain how poverty is on the rise within the United States. I will then outline how to discover local poverty statistics and how those statistics can be used to directly engage the low-income and poor population within a library district.

Physicians’ Information Needs And Information Seeking, William E. Burchfield Ii

LIS Student Conference

Physicians range in age from their early twenties to their nineties. These same physicians care for people many times, from before their birth until their end of life experiences. Physicians must provide the best possible care to these patients. In order to do this, physicians need information. This poster presentation explores the information needs of physicians as well as the information seeking behavior these physicians follow.

The Invisible: Serving Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder, A Sensitivity Training, Rachel Combs

LIS Student Conference

According to the CDC, autism is the fastest-growing developmental disability (2008). In the US, the prevalence is estimated at 1 in 68 births. Academic libraries need to be aware of this growing population so that we can educate library staff and be prepared to help people who learn and communicate differently. College students with disabilities face inequity when using the academic library, including the physical space, the library website, programming or lack thereof, restrictive loan periods, and resources that aren’t available in formats that they need. Academic libraries must be proactive and learn to recognize and minimize barriers, educate library …

Community Resource Audit: Teen Users, Ashley Householder

LIS Student Conference

This poster presents the findings from my Community Resource Audit in LIS 601, which focused on teen library users. During my research, I found that teens usually seek information on the following topics: Health, Career Information, Homework Help, Reading Material, News, and General Curiosity. Along with addressing these needs, my presentation will also discuss barriers to teen access, including reasons why they might choose not to seek information. Finally, I will present my "Teen Resource Guide," which was designed to help teens conduct research on each of the aforementioned topics.