Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effects Of An Evening Structured Problem-Solving Procedure In Undergraduate College Students With Insomnia, Colleen E. Carney

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Worry is often reported as interfering with sleep onset and sleep maintenance, and pre-sleep cognitive arousal can persist after successful behavioral treatment of insomnia. The present investigation will examine the effects of a "constructive worry" procedure in an undergraduate population with impaired sleep. Thirty-three undergraduate students who reported three or more nights per week in the last month of sleep onset and/or sleep maintenance problems, either recorded worries and possible solutions (experimental CW group) or recorded worries and completed worry questionnaires (control Worry group) for five nights. As hypothesized, the CW group had decreased pre-sleep cognitive and overall arousal relative …

Social Sector Participatory Development In Honduras: A Process Across Institutions, Culturesval And Continents, Denese Ashbaugh Vlosky

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research was conducted to determine whether our participatory process of curriculum development for vocational technical schools in Honduras was successful. This study analyzed program documents and correspondence to answer two questions: a) How did individual stakeholders perceive and negotiate the participatory process? and b) What factors --individual and environmental-- promoted and impeded the participatory process of development in this project? Participatory development concepts applied to Human Ecology Theory guided this research. Qualitative methodologies were utilized to develop the curriculum—Phenomenology-- and to evaluate the process of development—Grounded Theory and Matrix Analysis. An analysis of individual counterpart contacts revealed that stakeholder …

Fractal Compression And Analysis On Remotely Sensed Imagery, Ke Xiao

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Remote sensing images contain huge amount of geographical information and reflect the complexity of geographical features and spatial structures. As the means of observing and describing geographical phenomena, the rapid development of remote sensing has provided an enormous amount of geographical information. The massive information is very useful in a variety of applications but the sheer bulk of this information has increased beyond what can be analyzed and used efficiently and effectively. This uneven increase in the technologies of gathering and analyzing information has created difficulties in its storage, transfer, and processing. Fractal geometry provides a means of describing and …

Regimes, Institutions And Foreign Policy Change, David Baker Huxsoll

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the effects that different political regime types and institutional arrangements have on the amount of foreign policy change occurring a state. Scholars in International Relations studying the democratic peace have identified a relationship between characteristics of democracy and non-democracy and the behavior of states. Scholars in Comparative Politics have noted that certain institutions more easily facilitate policy change. This dissertation synthesizes these perspectives and develops and tests a number of hypotheses relating regime type, institutional arrangement, and party system to the amount of foreign policy change a state undertakes. Employing a pooled, cross-sectional time series design, the …

Mediators Of Weight Loss In An Internet-Based Intervention For African American Adolescent Girls, Marney A. White

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The primary aim of this study was to assess the process variables involved in a weight loss program for African-American adolescent girls. This internet-based intervention compared a behavioral treatment program to an educational treatment program; it was hypothesized that participants randomized to the behavioral condition would lose more weight at 6 months than those in the educational condition. Several process variables have been identified as affecting success in in vivo weight loss programs for adults and children, including program adherence, self-efficacy, and social support. The current study sought to broaden the understanding of these process variables as they pertain to …

The Southeastern Librarian V. 50, No. 4 (Winter 2003) Complete Issue

The Southeastern Librarian

Complete issue of The Southeastern Librarian, volume 50, no. 4 (Winter 2003).

From The Editor, Frank Allen

The Southeastern Librarian

Column by Frank Allen, editor of The Southeastern Librarian.

Low Tech And High Tech: The Spectrum Of Special Collections Use In A Technological Institute, Anne A. Salter, Marilyn Williamson

The Southeastern Librarian

The gradual expansion of the Georgia Institute of Technology ‘s Library and Special Collection has resulted in a unique and outstanding science and technological research facility. The process was expanded by a number of individuals who dedicated their professional years to improving the holdings. Unique among these treasures is the first edition of Newton’s Principia. Collecting, preserving, and utilizing the new technologies to expand access to this outstanding collection has proved challenging. The primary materials, carefully collected over the years, are being protected and made available through traditional means; while at the same time technological advances are being utilized to …

Collaborating With Campus Administrators And Faculty To Integrate Information Literacy And Assessment Into The Core Curriculum, Jim Jenkins, Marcia Boosinger

The Southeastern Librarian

This article describes the efforts of faculty at Auburn University Libraries in identifying opportunities for librarians, classroom faculty, campus administrators and those in charge of curriculum planning and change to collaborate on developing an institutional information literacy and assessment program.

Off The Shelf And Into The Classroom: Working With K-12 Teachers To Integrate Digitized Collections Into Classroom Instruction, Tara Zachary Laver

The Southeastern Librarian

Thanks to a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Special Collections Department of LSU Libraries and the LSU digital library have been digitizing, cataloging, and making available via the World Wide Web selected documents and publications from the era of the Louisiana Purchase held by LSU and the New Orleans City Archives. A goal of the grant was to enhance K-12 teaching and learning by working with Louisiana teachers to integrate the use of the digital collection into their classroom activities. The digital collection’s availability on the web would also give access to any teacher, …

Lexical Comparisons Of Signed Languages And The Effects Of Iconicity, Stephen J. Parkhurst, Dianne Parkhurst

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

Lexical comparisons of signed languages present new methodological challenges not found in comparisons of spoken languages. Two standards for comparing wordlists are examined using a sample of four European sign languages that are not known to be related to each other and a second sample of different dialects of the signed languages of Spain. The use of different standards is shown to affect the numerical results; comparing signs on the basis of probable historical relatedness typically yields percentages that are 5-10% greater than comparisons on the basis of similarity. The amount of iconicity inherent in signed languages affects the wordlist …

Millennial-Scale Variations And Centennial-Scale Events In The Southwest Asian Monsoon: Pollen Evidence From Tibet, Caiming Shen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Using quantitative reconstructions of vegetation and climate based on 234 surface samples and four fossil pollen records, a systematic study of millennial-scale variations and centennial-scale events in the Southwest monsoon over the last 14 000 years in the Tibetan Plateau was conducted. The SW monsoon stayed weak between 14 000 and 11 000 cal. yr BP. A marked drop in July temperature during 12 800 –11 500 cal. yr BP may indicate the occurrence of the Younger Dryas cold event. The SW monsoon started to intensify at 11 000 cal. yr BP. However, it did not increase monotonically, but abruptly …

Chairmen Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff: Monitoring The Evolution Of An Agency Through Rhetorical Snapshots Of Speeches By Generals Omar N. Bradley, Earle G. Wheeler, George S. Brown And Colin L. Powell, John Robert Foster

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

There is a need to examine the long term rhetorical strategies of military spokesmen within a democratic state characterized by civilian hegemony. This study uses Kenneth Burke's discussion of cluster analysis to discover the various recurring themes from Chairman to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This form of analysis enabled the researcher to document periodic variances or shifts in emphasis among the four Chairmen whose speeches will be examined. The investigation involved two speeches representative of each of these four distinct periods of the discourse of Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one given to a civilian …

Critical Praxis, Spirit Healing And Community Activism: Preserving A Subversive Dialogue On Reparations, Christian Sundquist

Articles

African-American reparations have the potential to deconstruct racial privilege, promote racial reconciliation, and heal the psychic injuries of the African-American community. However, many models of reparations have given up on the promise of reparations in exchange for the slim possibility of short-term progress.

A subversive dialogue on African-American reparations, however, will inevitably critique equal opportunity, individualism, and white innocence and privilege. Embraced by the majority, and internalized by the African-American community, the principles of individualism, equal opportunity, and meritocracy reinforce white innocence and privilege to the extent that future, current and past inequality are cast as the natural and inevitable …

Louisiana Sugar: A Geohistorical Perspective, Elizabeth Vaughan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The planting of sugarcane in Louisiana’s southern parishes has persisted with stunning continuity since its introduction in the late eighteenth century. This industry, however, is an economic and agricultural anomaly. It is a relic of the sixteenth-century expansion of European capitalism in which granulated sugar, then a novel product, stimulated the Atlantic slave trade and contributed to the incorporation of the sugar-producing colonies of the Americas into an emerging European-world economy. The Louisiana sugar industry was launched in 1795 with a historic granulation from a new variety of sugarcane recently introduced into the Caribbean. From this early success, the industry …

Semantic Role Parsing: Adding Semantic Structure To Unstructured Text, Sameer Pradhan, K. Hacioglu, W. Ward, James H. Martin, D. Jurafsky

Psychological Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

There is an ever-growing need to add structure in the form of semantic markup to the huge amounts of unstructured text data now available. We present the technique of shallow semantic parsing, the process of assigning a simple WHO did WHAT to WHOM, etc., structure to sentences in text, as a useful tool in achieving this goal. We formulate the semantic parsing problem as a classification problem using support vector machines. Using a hand-labeled training set and a set of features drawn from earlier work together with some feature enhancements, we demonstrate a system that performs better than all other …

Further Validation Of The Child Routines Inventory (Cri): Relationship To Parenting Practices, Maternal Distress, And Child Externalizing Behavior, Sara Sytsma Jordan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The importance of establishing predictable routines during early childhood has been consistently emphasized by parenting experts in the popular press, despite limited empirical study or understanding of their relationship to child behavior. The lack of research may be partially due to a lack of instruments suitable for measuring children’s routines. The Child Routines Inventory (CRI) was developed as an empirically based parent-report measure of commonly occurring routines in school-aged children. Since its development, the CRI has demonstrated moderate correlations with related constructs, including family routines, child behavior problems, parenting stress, and maternal depression. However, child routines have not been evaluated …

The Effects Of Message Direction And Sex Differences On The Interpretation Of Workplace Gossip, Kristen Marie Berkos

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Gossip occurs in the organization and individuals exposed to these gossip messages must decide how to interpret the gossip. This dissertation explains the definitions and research for gossip, message direction, sex differences, message interpretation, politicalism, and believability. Applying symbolic interactionism and social exchange theory, seven relationships between variables are proposed. The seven hypotheses are tested via a web-based questionnaire that manipulated the message direction and sex of the gossiper and gossip receiver. Two hundred seventy-six full time employees completed instruments measuring gossip believability, purpose, and politicalism. Data were subjected to a MANCOVA, and correlation statistics. Results supported three of the …

Parents Whose Attitudes Do Not Support Corporal Punishment: Descriptives, Correlates, And Predictors Of Parents Who Spank And Parents Who Do Not Spank, Ruth Thornhill Weinzettle

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined variables associated with the use of corporal punishment (CP) by parents who hold attitudes that do not support CP, via secondary analysis of an existing nationally representative data set, obtained by the Gallup organization. A cross-sectional telephone survey design was used. The sample consisted of 318 parents, with at least one child between birth and 17 in the home. Independent variables included demographic characteristics, childhood experiences with CP and family violence, contemporaneous household stressors, and parental anger responses. Parents’ use of CP in the past year was the dependent variable. Results indicated that among parents who do …

Gender Inequality, Concentrated Disadvantage, And Homicide Victimization: A Sex And Race Specific Analysis Of Homicide Victimization Rates In Large U.S. Cities, Ginger Donise Stevenson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is designed to extend prior research on the structural correlates of homicide victimization among demographic subgroups in large U.S. cities. The present study draws on two broad theoretical traditions - the concentrated disadvantage perspective and gender inequality perspectives. Using Supplementary Homicide Reports data for 1990, race- and sex-specific homicide victimization measures were constructed for 120 U.S. cities. Due to the extremely rare prevalence of homicide victimization among some demographic subgroups, Poisson and Negative Binomial Regression techniques are used to test a series of hypotheses regarding the effects of concentrated disadvantage and gender inequality on homicide victimization for four …

Marginal Income Tax Rates And The U.K. Economy: Three Essays, Eon-Seon Rym

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the role of fiscal policy on economic activity by analyzing the response of major macroeconomic variables to innovations to the average marginal income tax rate (AMTR) measures in the U.K. by employing vector autoregressive (VAR) models. We identify these innovations by making certain assumptions about fiscal policy and then analyze the dynamic behavior of output, the interest rate, the exchange rate, and the trade balance in response to an increase in AMTR by studying the impulse response functions (IRFs) derived from the VAR and structural VAR (SVAR) approaches. The first essay focuses upon the calculation of the …

The Dual Paths Of A Political Movement: Convergence And Divergence In Contemporary Conservative Public Address, Lyman Davis Hunt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the rhetorical choices made in public addresses by members of the contemporary conservative movement in the United States during the 1990s. The contemporary conservative movement in this instance is defined as a post World War II phenomenon. Specifically, it is argued that the popular notion of a unified conservative ascendence in America is but an illusion. Rather, two distinct tribes of conservatives, the economic and the traditional conservative, participate in a rhetorical homology that serves to hide significant ontological differences beneath the dialectical God terms freedom and order. Additionally, the charismatic nature of the term freedom authorizes …

Water Resource Management By The Ancient Maya Of Yucatan, Mexico, Terance Lynn Winemiller

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Since the publication of popular accounts of exploration by adventurers such as John Lloyd Stephens captured the attention of an audience eager for tales from exotic places, scholars of the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica have been fascinated with the silent crumbling remains of ancient Maya cities that dot the cultural landscape of Yucatán in staggering numbers. Scientific research began in earnest nearly one hundred years ago with the first of many great Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. archaeological projects. Most researchers mention water resources in their reports, but no attempt has been made to study water resource management on a …

The Institutional Determinants Of Property Regime Change In New Democracies: The Russian Federation, Hungary, And Czechoslovakia, R. Vanessa Krasner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Is there a relationship between the design of democratic institutions and optimal collective decisions? Optimum decisions are defined as achieving goals important to the transition such as deep and equitable property reforms. Democratic institutions refer to first-order institutions of governance and the electoral rules for choosing leaders. Overseeing both are the written or "parchment" constitutions. Constitutions are designed to distribute power among actors, generate efficiency, and govern the interactions among actors. My findings showed that constitutional designs intentionally and sometimes with unanticipated consequences can result in highly cooperative, competitive, or conflictual struggles by political actors over high-stakes distributive issues such …

The Relationship Between Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome And Insomnia: Implications For Treatment, Danae L. Drab

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) is a sleep-disordered breathing condition that causes disrupted sleep. Although OSAS is most often associated with daytime hypersomnolence, a number of OSAS patients complain of insomnia, i.e., disorders of initiating or maintaining sleep. If the insomnia in patients with OSAS is secondary to the medical condition, then it would be expected to abate with the successful treatment of OSAS. If, however, the insomnia is primarily of a psychological nature, thus considered primary or psychophysiological insomnia, little to no change in insomnia symptoms would be expected after the treatment of OSAS. The present study examined the …

Wwu As Environmental Justice Program Intern, Natalie Harris

College of the Environment Internship Reports

Because I was the only person in the ESP, I was the clear leader of the ESP but did not have the ESP director title. Despite this, I took on various roles of the director, a few of which were seats on committees. As a voting member of the Sustainability, Equity, and Justice Fund (SEJF) committee, I participated in biweekly meetings where we discussed incoming grant proposals. We saw proposals for many kinds of projects including travel to conferences for men of color in academia, film screenings on mental health in indigenous communities, work parties in environmental restoration for LEAD, …

Psychosocial Predictors Of Dietary Fat Reduction: The Role Of Stress And The Transtheroetical Model In A Dietary Intervention, Jennifer L. Francis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Dietary fat is related to cardiovascular disease and numerous intensive, controlled clinical trials have successfully reduced dietary fat in symptomatic populations. However, there has been less success in large, community-based studies with healthy or mildly at-risk populations. Little is known about predictors associated with actual change in dietary fat intake and this is an important omission because dietary interventions are more likely to be successful if they are based on factors known to influence behavior. The purpose of this study was to investigate the psychosocial predictors of dietary fat and dietary fat reduction through the framework of the transtheoretical model …

Dialogic Dogs And Phatic Felines: Speaking To And Through Our Pets, Nicole M. Dufour

LSU Master's Theses

While many pet owners acknowledge that they speak to their pet, Pet Communication has remained mostly overlooked by researchers. Through discourse analysis, this thesis is an attempt to analyze Pet Communication, which deals with human speech to a pet, about a pet, or through a pet. I analyze data which I transcribed in the waiting room of the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine Small Animal Clinic. Data were collected from conversations that took place between pet owners, between pet owners and the Clinic's staff, pet owners and their pets, and between staff and pets. These data were then …

The Relationship Of Feeding Problems With The Use Of Antiepileptic Medication Among Persons With Severe And Profound Mental Retardation, Rinita B. Laud

LSU Master's Theses

Epilepsy and/or seizure activity are frequently occurring phenomena and a significant co-morbid condition for persons with severe to profound intellectual disability (Burke, McKee, Pathak, Donahue, Parasuraman & Baltenhorst, 1999). The majority of seizure activity leads to deficits across a number of social, physical,occupational, and personal variables, and if left untreated, may lead to death in these individuals. The treatment of this condition frequently utilizes anti-epileptic medication, but these medications are often associated with a variety of side effects such as dental complications and disturbed gait. Previous researchers have suggested that these side effects may be manifested in forms of maladaptive …

Improvement Of Kenaf Yarn For Apparel Applications, Ting Zhang

LSU Master's Theses

The objectives of the research are to determine the impact of the retting methods and blending percentage on the properties of kenaf fiber as well as the yarns and fabrics that contain kenaf, and to analyze and characterize kenaf fiber and yarns and fabrics that contain kenaf in terms of physical properties, such as tensile strength, elongation, evenness, absorbency and surface characteristics. In this research, kenaf fiber bundles were treated by chemical methods and softened to improve fiber properties. The treated fibers then were blended with cotton having 0, 10%, 25%, and 50% blending ratio and spun into yarns with …