Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Three Empirical Essays On International Trade And Public Economics, Yusuf Kenan Bagir

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation consists of three empirical essays on the economic impacts of various policy issues on Turkish labor market and international trade. Chapter 1 examines the employment and wage effects of the refugee influx from Syria on Turkish native labor. Results indicate statistically significant negative employment and wage effects on the low-skilled and less-experienced individuals especially in the border regions. The second chapter investigates the impact of the presence of foreign missions on trade. This study uses Turkey’s aggressive expansion in its foreign mission network as the source of variation and finds significant positive effect on both the exports and …

Using Erp Reflective Language And Relationship Based Practice Principles To Address Post-Election Anxiety In Young Children, Lesley Koplow

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Helps teachers think about how they can ease anxiety in young children worried about what they have seen and heard during and after the presidential election.

Testing A Comprehensive Model Of Body Image, Anxiety, And Eating Pathology Among College Men, Emily Katherine White

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Historically, researchers conceptualized eating disorders, subclinical eating pathology, and negative body image as issues that only affected women. However, more recent research suggests that men experience significant body image concerns that mirror current Western cultural ideals of appearance (i.e., desire to attain a lean, muscular physique with very little body fat). Theoretically, men with a strong desire to achieve this cultural ideal (i.e., drive for muscularity) may experience dissatisfaction with their appearance (i.e., muscle dysmorphia), unpleasant psychological states (e.g., social physique anxiety), and engage in potentially harmful behaviors related to eating pathology (e.g., body checking) that lead to clinical impairment …

A Business Intelligence Framework For Network-Level Traffic Safety Analyses, Naveen Kumar Veeramisti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Currently, there are both methodological and practical barriers that together preclude a substantial use of theoretically sound approaches, such as the ones recommended by the Highway Safety Manual (HSM), for traffic safety management. Although the state-of-the-art provides theoretically sound approaches such as the Empirical Bayes method, there are still various important capabilities missing. Methodological barriers include among others (i) lack of a theoretically sound approach for corridor-level network screening, (ii) lack of a comprehensive approach for estimation of Safety Performance Functions based on a simultaneous consideration of both crash patterns and associated explanatory variables, and (iii) lack of theoretically sound …

The Failure Of Westphalia: A Constructivist Examination Of Western And Middle Eastern Relations, Jayson Warren

Masters Theses

This thesis is not intended to be a dogmatic or pedantic endorsement of any one religion, ethic, or culture. To the contrary, it is the intent of the author to examine a number of competing ideas, philosophies, and belief systems in order to extrapolate their geopolitical implications and to pursue them to their logical (albeit sometimes inevitable) conclusions. Too often, any number of presuppositions at work within a given situation go overlooked and subsequently skew geopolitical analysis and resulting policy decisions. This thesis seeks to transcend mere opinion or speculation and achieve instead a framework of Constructivism for pragmatic comprehension …

Ends+Ways+Means=(Bad) Strategy, Jeffrey W. Meiser

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Bursting The Backpacker Bubble: Exploring Backpacking Ideology, Practices, And Contradictions, Mark J. Salvaggio

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this dissertation, I discuss the growing development of international backpacking in Central America. I focus on backpackers because they are a significant, yet understudied and undertheorized, part of the newly mobile world. Drawing from more than 12 months of ethnographic data collected in Central America, I explore backpacking as a youth subculture. I used a subcultural framework to explain backpacking ideology, practices, and contradictions. Understanding backpacking as a youth subculture tells us a lot about the myths and realities of 21st century adventure in the context of global mobility, globalization, and economic changes in international tourism that shape what …

The Iterative Nature Of Descriptive Experience Sampling: Do Interviewees Build Skills Across Sampling Days?, Vincent Peter Brouwers

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Hurlburt (2009) asserts that iterative training is an essential component of the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method and that interviews of untrained participants are generally characterized by presuppositions about experience and miscommunication rather than pristine experience. Hurlburt and Heavey (2015) further assert that other experience sampling methods (e.g., the Experience Sampling Method) are inadequate due to the minimal training provided in those paradigms. In Study 1, we sought to determine whether DES interviewees decrease in density of subjunctification (i.e., behavioral and verbal indicators that an interviewee is not providing a straightforward account of inner experience) across multiple sampling days, which …

Demolition, Rehabilitation, And Conservation: Heritage In Shanghai’S Urban Regeneration, 1990–2015 [Post-Print], Xiaohua Zhong, Xiangming Chen

Faculty Scholarship

Urban heritage sites in central cities are most difficult to protect during rapid and large scale urban (re)development. Rising land values from property development conflict with and constrain heritage preservation. Compared with many cities in developed and developing countries, large Chinese cities have experienced a stronger redevelopment imperative, faster population growth, and a weaker concern for urban heritages over the last three decades. We use Shanghai to examine the contested evolution of heritage preservation against massive urban redevelopment through three stages from 1990 to the present. Using three heritage projects (Xintiandi, Tianzifang, Bugaoli), we focus on: 1) how each project …

Hashtag Recommendation With Topical Attention-Based Lstm, Yang Li, Ting Liu, Jing Jiang, Liang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging services allow users to create hashtags to categorize their posts. In recent years,the task of recommending hashtags for microblogs has been given increasing attention. However,most of existing methods depend on hand-crafted features. Motivated by the successful use oflong short-term memory (LSTM) for many natural language processing tasks, in this paper, weadopt LSTM to learn the representation of a microblog post. Observing that hashtags indicatethe primary topics of microblog posts, we propose a novel attention-based LSTM model whichincorporates topic modeling into the LSTM architecture through an attention mechanism. Weevaluate our model using a large real-world dataset. Experimental results show that …

Efficient Online Summarization Of Large-Scale Dynamic Networks, Qiang Qu, Siyuan Liu, Feida Zhu, Christian S. Jensen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information diffusion in social networks is often characterized by huge participating communities and viral cascades of high dynamicity. To observe, summarize, and understand the evolution of dynamic diffusion processes in an informative and insightful way is a challenge of high practical value. However, few existing studies aim to summarize networks for interesting dynamic patterns. Dynamic networks raise new challenges not found in static settings, including time sensitivity, online interestingness evaluation, and summary traceability, which render existing techniques inadequate. We propose dynamic network summarization to summarize dynamic networks with millions of nodes by only capturing the few most interesting nodes or …

From Footprint To Evidence: An Exploratory Study Of Mining Social Data For Credit Scoring, Guangming Guo, Feida Zhu, Enhong Chen, Qi Liu, Le Wu, Chu Guan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the booming popularity of online social networks like Twitter and Weibo, online user footprints are accumulating rapidly on the social web. Simultaneously, the question of how to leverage the large-scale user-generated social media data for personal credit scoring comes into the sight of both researchers and practitioners. It has also become a topic of great importance and growing interest in the P2P lending industry. However, compared with traditional financial data, heterogeneous social data presents both opportunities and challenges for personal credit scoring. In this article, we seek a deep understanding of how to learn users’ credit labels from social …

Violation Of Short-Term Mate Preferences, Jose C. Yong, Norman P. Li

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Violations of short-term mate preferences refer to instances in which a person in a short-term, casual sexual relationship has mate preferences that were in place when the relationship commenced but subsequently are not being met.

Cross Cultural Regularities In The Cognitive Architecture Of Pride, Daniel Sznycer, Laith Al-Shawaf, Yoella Bereby-Meyer, Oliver Scott Curry, Delphine De Smet, Elsa Ermer, Sangin Kim, Sunhwa Kim, Norman P. Li, Maria Florencia Lopez Seal, Jennifer Mcclung, Jiaqing O, Yohsuke Ohtsubo, Tadeg Quillien, Max Schaub, Aaron Sell, Florian Van Leeuwen, Leda Cosmide, John Tooby

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluatethe theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the costeffective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others’ valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose …

Shrinkage Estimation Of Regression Models With Multiple Structural Changes, Junhai Qian, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we consider the problem of determining the number of structural changes in multiple linear regression models via group fused Lasso. We show that with probability tending to one, our method can correctly determine the unknown number of breaks, and the estimated break dates are sufficiently close to the true break dates. We obtain estimates of the regression coefficients via post Lasso and establish the asymptotic distributions of the estimates of both break ratios and regression coefficients. We also propose and validate a data-driven method to determine the tuning parameter. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that the proposed method …

‘Tweetboard’ – A Case Study Of Developing A Micro-Blogging Platform For Higher Education, Shao Cheh Joyce Hsu, Gan, Benjamin, Jin Lee, Shu Hui Sheryl Lim, Xie Yan Jeremy Lim, Thomas Menkhoff, Si Xian Sherman Tan, Charles Jason Woodard, Qiu Cheng Yap

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports experiences made at an Asian university in developing a social media platform based on Twitter in the context of a final year capstone project where information systems management students get an opportunity to solve ‘a real-world problem for a real client’. In this case study, the challenge was provided by a faculty member’s request for an interactive social media application which engages less outspoken students in class via a social medium they are familiar with: Twitter. We reconstruct the project’s evolution; describe the main features of the application called ‘TweetBoard’ and share lessons learned in developing a …

The Impact Of Exports To China On Latin American Growth, Andre C. Vianna

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article analyzes the relationship between GDP growth in seven major Latin American countries and China’s demand for their exports. GLS panel estimation using annual data for the period 1994-2013 shows that the relationship was both statistically and economically significant. Control variables found to be significant in positively affecting GDP growth include the investment-to-output ratio, the exchange rate, and the terms of trade, and, in negatively affecting it, population growth and the unemployment rate. Consistent with recent literature, foreign direct investment was found not to be significant. A sharp drop in exports to China for many of the countries in …

Passenger Satisfaction And Mental Adaptation Under Adverse Conditions: Case Study In Manila, Andra Charis Mijares, Mio Suzuki, Tetsuo Yai

Journal of Public Transportation

Public transportation systems in several developing cities face congestion, air pollution, and safety problems, yet many passengers use them regularly. This study examines the structure of passenger satisfaction and the role of mental adaptation under such conditions. Metro Manila MRT-3 was analyzed as a case study.

The actual and perceived conditions at the MRT-3 were assessed using surveys. Results of the waiting time and PM_2.5 monitoring surveys revealed that passengers queue for 30 minutes, on average, while being exposed to unsafe levels of PM_2.5. The questionnaire survey results show some discrepancies between actual and perceived values, suggesting …

A Study Of The Perceptions Of Racial Equity In One Early Childhood Education Program, Dawn M. Meskil

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although public education in the United States has had remarkable growth and improvement since its beginning, significant inadequacies concerning racial equity continue to cast a shadow on the system. Despite desegregation efforts and specific attention to providing integrated school settings there has been little progress in establishing educational justice. The purpose of this case study was to uncover perceptions about racial inequity within Asheville City Schools as well as potential facilitators of equity. A qualitative case study using 10 guiding research questions was conducted to evaluate the perceptions of parents as well as educators at Asheville City Schools Preschool regarding …

A Dollar A Day: Child Sponsorship And The Marketization Of Human Development, Taylor Hallett

Capstone Collection

Child sponsorship as a method of international development offers child sponsors a personal connection to the process of alleviating poverty in the global South. As a form of human development, child sponsorship is constituted by neoliberal principles of marketization and social entrepreneurship. How does child sponsorship, in this context, require us to rethink the ethics of international development in light of ongoing debates about neoliberalism? In this research, I argue that child sponsorship reifies the binary of the “developed” and “undeveloped” worlds. Through undertaking a content analysis of three organizations (Compassion International, World Vision, and UNICEF) and applying post-structural critique …

The 2015 Al-Shabaab's Attack In Garissa, Kenya. An Immersion Into The Structural, Socio-Political And Psychological Roots Of Violence, Mathilde Simon

Capstone Collection

The paper studies the attack conducted by the Somali insurgent group al-Shabaab in Garissa, north of Kenya, on April 2, 2015. In contrast to judgmental and narrow- minded media explanations which tended to dominate the debate after the attack, the present paper uses conflict theories in order to investigate the deep roots of violence. It questions how a group such as al-Shabaab has been able to emerge, to find support and to become a major actor in the Horn of Africa, and to some extent internationally. It draws on Basic Human Needs, Collective Psychology and Structural and Cultural Violence theories …

Archives & Special Collections Preservation And Reformatting Report, Meg Miner

Administrative Reports

No abstract provided.

A Mother's Spiritual Journey With Her Disabled Son: An Autoethnography, Margaret C. Higgins Edd

Dissertations

Abstract

This autoethnographic research delves into a mother’s experiences with her disabled son over thirty-five years. Beginning with a thick description of the crib accident that resulted in physical and cognitive disabilities that profoundly change the course of both mother and son’s life, this research chronicles the search for meaning, community, and healing as they negotiate the realms of medicine, education, career, family, and spirituality. Models of disability that seek to explain various ways in which society often views disability are examined, but none resonate with the researcher’s intimate experiences nor satisfies her deepest needs for insight and healing. Making …

Depressive Symptoms As A Longitudinal Predictor Of Sexual Risk Behaviors Among African American Adolescents: Findings From Project Imppacs, Jacklyn Babowitch

Dissertations - ALL

Research that clarifies individual level factors associated with sexual risk behavior among African American adolescents remains an important public health priority. The current study examined the longitudinal association of depressive symptoms to sexual risk behaviors, and determined whether the association of depressive symptoms to risky sex varies as a function of gender in a sample of African American adolescents. A secondary aim was to examine whether self-efficacy for sex refusal and condom use mediate the depression-sexual risk relationship. Data analyses focused on baseline and three-month assessments of depressive symptoms and sexual behaviors assessed for the previous three-months, including: (a) engagement …

A New Method For Helping Chinese People Who Are Facing Retirement To Exert Greater Control Over Their Financial Resources, Xuanmu Yan

Dissertations - ALL

In China, personal financial advisers are not common. Chinese people who are facing retirement have a difficult time to plan for their retirement. This causes a very serious problem in China: many older Chinese do not have enough money in retirement. Therefore, my goal is to help Chinese people that are facing retirement without a detailed financial plan. In order to do so, I’ve conducted research to understand the long-term goals of those Chinese people. As a qualitative research approach, I've created three probes to explore the problems they are facing and the reasons why existing solutions do not work …

“Que(E)Rying Religious Activism: Culture, Identity, And The Politics Of Family In Unitarian Universalist Churches”, Karen E. Macke

Dissertations - ALL

Despite the longstanding debate about religion’s role in social movements, conservative religious opposition to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social movement in the United States has limited sociological research in this area to questions of individual identity or the oppositional strategies used by religious and LGTBQ groups to sway public opinion and policy decisions. This dissertation addresses the less well-understood dynamics of mainstream religious group participation in LGBTQ social movement. Through frameworks of social movement theory, organizational culture, and queer theory, it explores the organizational elements shaping congregants’ practices in two Unitarian Universalist (UU) churches considered “Welcoming Congregations”. …

"Let Me Tell You What I See" Creating A Culturally Relevant Arts Based Education Through The Use Of Photography And Storytelling, William Tran

Master's Projects and Capstones

There are many constructs that can hinder the ability of students of color to succeed in a classroom environment. Factors such as the construct of whiteness, microaggressions, the banking method, as well as cuts in arts based classes create a learning environment where oppression occurs on multiple levels. The construct of whiteness creates an environment in which only the ideas, values, lived experiences, and knowledge of whites are considered valid. Microaggressions uphold the construct of whiteness by insulting and invalidating any ideas, values, lived experiences, languages, and knowledge that are outside the construct of whiteness. The constructs of whiteness as …

Krikorian, S. (2013). 'A La Table Des Élites. Les Repas Privés En France De La Régence À La Revolution'., Elaine Mahon

Articles

Book review / Compte rendu of Sandrine Krikorian, 'A la table des élites. Les repas privés en France de la Régence à la Revolution' (2013).

https://www.brepolsonline.net/toc/food/13/1-3

Backpacking Brothers: An Experiential, Adventure Education Program To Transform Rape Culture And Prevent Sexual Violence, Matthew Lynn

Capstone Collection

Sexual violence is a public health crisis in the United States and globally, that has devastating interpersonal, social, psychological, spiritual and economic impacts. The root causes of sexual violence are tied to all forms of oppression. The normalization and perpetuation of sexual violence is buttressed by cultural paradigms used by media, religion, education and other systems that maintain rigid gender roles and power dynamics. There are promising initiatives for preventing sexual violence before it occurs. This paper explores one of those initiatives called Backpacking Brothers. The purpose of Backpacking Brothers is to engage middle school boys in an adventure education …

The University Of Hawaii At Hilo: National Student Exchange Four-Part Workshop For The Outgoing Students At The University Of Hawaii At Hilo, Kadian Shaw

Capstone Collection

The University of Hawaii at Hilo (UH Hilo) is part of the National Student Exchange Consortium, a unique, not for profit organization of nearly 170 accredited, baccalaureate-granting Colleges and Universities that provide exchange opportunities to undergraduate students. These exchange opportunities are across the US mainland, the US territories and Canada. The purpose of the National Student Exchange Office at the University of Hawaii at Hilo is to provide UH Hilo students with exchange opportunities at a reasonable and affordable cost. This capstone explores the idea that it is important to prepare students for a domestic exchange program. This capstone will …