Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Stress Management In The Kitchen, Haley Rosano

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Catholic Charities - Diocese of Monterey has implemented Stress Management in the Kitchen though the Family Support Services department of the Seaside office. Stress Management in the Kitchen was implemented to address the knowledge gap between nutrition and healthy living.The purpose of the workshop series was to give clients a fun and digestible way to increase their knowledge on how their health and nutritional habits can or should be applied to how they deal with stress. These workshops were implemented through presentation and a series of activities.The measurement of these workshops will be obtained through an exit survey from participants. …

No Senior Or Persons With Disabilities Left Behind, Elizabeth Lopez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The Monterey County Department of Social Services has been serving the community through the various programs to the community. The Aging and Adult Services unit of the department offers In-Home Supportive Services program which serves the senior population and people living with disabilities. This program unfortunately is not very known in the community and can serve a lot more people than it currently is. The problem being addressed is the lack of awareness that the program has among the community. The project implemented to remedy this lack of awareness is the creation of a county brochure that explains the program, …

Father Engagement, Marisa Morales

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The Monterey County Office of Education Head Start & Early Head Start Family & Community Engagement service has identified the need for father involvement in early childhood education. With a very meaningful purpose “Padres Bien Padres, Very Cool Dads”, was started. Four workshops were given to male role models to support parenting engagement with their children. In addition, professional development training was provided to head start Policy Council to raise awareness of the “Padres Bien Padres, Very Cool Dad’s” program and share different ideas and activities to improve and encourage fathers to participate in head start. The Policy Council members …

Barriers From Youth Participation In Monterey County, Erika Ramirez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Monterey County Behavioral Health (MCBH) aims to serve residents who suffer from mental illnesses in the Monterey County area to help them live a healthy and productive life. Currently there are low service participation rates from the youth population with mental health issues in Monterey County. The purpose of this research project was to develop and distribute a survey to identify different service acquisitions to increase youth participation in overall services offered. Data from the Monterey County website showed that 12,154 youth that are eligible for services, yet only 779 actually went in for one or more visits for mental …

Breaking Through The Echo Chamber: Teaching Students To Use Technology For College Research And Global Citizenry, Kaitlin Drake

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Preparing high school students for college level courses is vital to their success in higher education. Information literacy and digital literacy are necessary skills for college students in order to conduct their research for their classes. My own research was a compilation of scholarly articles and books focused on digital literacy, information literacy, and the issues surrounding these terms to understand what today’s students need in the classroom to succeed as young researchers. Search engines like Google operate under a facade of being an unbiased source. In reality, they are a for profit company whose search results go through an …

Free Trade And Corporate Social Responsibility: Ethical Dilemmas In Global Economic Development, Sarah Papion

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Through the lens of the free-trade-optimist, it is black and white: corporations bring jobs, and jobs equal a happy and healthy economy. A major oversight in this neoliberal Utopian ideology is that corporations are not in the business of building communities, nor do they have an interest in keeping their operations stationary enough to allow economic growth to occur over a span of years. Corporations abandon communities as quickly as they arrive to find their next cheap labor hub. Quite contradictory to the original purpose of free trade, economic growth in Free Trade Zones is not long term or secure. …

First-Generation Students’ Satisfaction With The Csumb Academic Advising Program, Daniela Zaragoza

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The aim of this study was to examine first-generation students’ satisfaction with advising services from the Center for Advising, Career, and Student Success at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). To this end, a survey was administered to 78 first-generation students at CSUMB. Concepts from the Developmental Academic Advising Model created by Terry O’Banion were applied in the analysis of data to explore the quality of information provided by advisors during advising sessions. Also, concepts from Social Cognitive Theory by Albert Bandura were applied to examine how academic advising affect students’ self-confidence and strategies for developing academic and career objectives. …

A Partnered Approach To School Change In A Rural Community: Reflections And Recommendations, Sara Rimm-Kaufman, Mary Fant Donnan, Dianne Garcia, Melinda Snead-Johnson, Eugene Kotulka, Lia Sandilos

The Foundation Review

With so many education policies and practices made at the local level, community-based foundations are in a unique position to support their local school districts in taking a comprehensive, systematic approach to improving the lives of young people. This article describes a research–practice partnership designed to produce school improvement in a rural community in western Virginia and reflects on a three-year collaboration among The Alleghany Foundation, two school districts, and the University of Virginia.

The partners identified challenges and strengths within the school districts and the community; gathered and analyzed existing district data and new findings from interviews and surveys …

By Us And For Us: A Story Of Early Childhood Development Systems Change And Results In A Rural Context, Lisa Payne Simon, Kirsten Scobie, Phoebe Backler, Catherine Mcdowell, Charles Cotton, Susan Cloutier, Clare Nolan

The Foundation Review

Since 2007, the Neil and Louise Tillotson Fund — a donor-advised fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation — has invested in early childhood development in Coös County — New Hampshire’s largest and most rural and economically disadvantaged county. Community providers from a range of disciplines formed strong professional relationships and agreed on common goals and evidence-based strategies to improve services for children and families.

This article describes how local community members joined forces with the fund to create an integrated early childhood development system for Coös’ children and families. It provides background on the investment and initiative strategy, summarizes …

Prophylactic Merger Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

An important purpose of the antitrust merger law is to arrest certain anticompetitive practices or outcomes in their “incipiency.” Many Clayton Act decisions involving both mergers and other practices had recognized the idea as early as the 1920s. In Brown Shoe the Supreme Court doubled down on the idea, attributing to Congress a concern about a “rising tide of economic concentration” that must be halted “at its outset and before it gathered momentum.” The Supreme Court did not explain why an incipiency test was needed to address this particular problem. Once structural thresholds for identifying problematic mergers are identified there …

How Holocaust Memories Continue To Divide The Serbs And The Croats, Matthew James Hone

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

In Holocaust and genocide education, we frequently and rightly stress remembrance in order to honor the victims of the past as well as to safeguard our future from repeated transgressions. However, there are parts of the world where remembering or “misremembering” atrocities accentuates the fracturing of communities. In the Balkans, the festering wounds that have been inflicted throughout history never seem to truly heal, as the past, both real and fictionalized, drives contemporary and competing realities. This is noticeably evident with the modern-day rifts separating ethnic Croats and ethnic Serbs, which despite recent political inroads and relative stability, persist in …

Art Brut & Bricolage: Manifesting Alternate Imaginaries Of The Waste Cataclysm, Dominic Alan Chequer

Communication Studies

Living within a consumer society that boasts increased sustainable consumption as the panacea to large-scale environmental degradation, the social avoidance of waste becomes an interesting psychological battleground in developing an environmentally sustainable future. In light of this situation, I used my participation in the design of a music festival to create a social critique by design. Using artistic techniques of bricolage and aesthetic upcycling, under the visage of art brut. The paper blends theory and practice, ideas with tangible outputs.

Summer Therapeutic Program For Children, Randi Losalu

Social Work Independent Study Projects (ISP)

Children who struggle during the school year will continue to do so through the summer months. As such, it is important to have therapeutic opportunities and programming available for those children. Addressing the therapeutic needs of children with serious emotional disturbances and/or social deficits can take many forms. Adventure therapy and experiential activities are supported by a variety of theoretical perspectives including Experiential Learning Theory, Systems Theory, Existential Theory, Behavioral/Cognitive Behavioral Theory, and Psychodynamic Theory. Through the use of adventure type activities, participants are able to address and reach therapeutic goals in a different manner than the traditional office setting. …

The Effects Of Musical Training On The Well-Being Of Older Adults., Brianna Nicole Berry

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

Objective. The current study sought to examine the effects of early musical training on the quality of life of older adults. Method. 58 older adults, at least 65 years old, were divided into three groups based on their levels of musicianship: non-musicians, low-activity musicians (less than ten years of lessons), and high-activity musicians (more than ten years of lessons). Self-report questionnaires were given to determine musical training and other factors such as physical activities. Quality of life was measured by the Quality of Life-AD, a 13-item survey. Results. The differences between level of musicianship and quality of life were statistically …

Developing And Validating A Scale To Measure Youth Voice, Jessica Bartak

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Scholarship

The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a scale to measure the level of engagement of youth in their community or organization using the construct of youth voice. Youth voice consists of three levels: being heard, collaborating with adults, and building leadership capacity. An initial list of 40 items were developed (13 being heard, 13 collaborating with adults, and 14 building leadership capacity). Youth development experts and youth leadership experts were invited to complete a survey to assess the content validity of the items developed for the youth voice scale. The data collected from 50 participants were …

Understanding Consumer Attitudes Towards Antimicrobial Risk Reducing Practices, Sabrina Gulab

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance is a natural evolutionary reaction to antimicrobial exposure. However, the misuse and overuse of antimicrobial drugs in human medicine and in agriculture are speeding up the process. Antimicrobials have been used in food-producing animals for therapeutic purposes as well as to promote growth by applying low concentrations in animal feed. Antimicrobial resistant pathogens can enter the food chain through food containing residues of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and cause infections in humans. In the United States, millions of people are infected every year with antimicrobial resistant bacterial diseases causing approximately 23,000 deaths (CDC 2013). This …

Race, Social Class, And Child Abuse: Content And Strength Of Medical Professionals’ Stereotypes, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Kimberly M. Bernstein

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Black and poor children are overrepresented at every stage of the child welfare system, from suspicion of abuse to substantiation. Focusing on stereotypes as a source of bias that leads to these disparities, the current study examines the content and strength of stereotypes relating race and social class to child abuse as viewed by medical professionals. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals (Study 1: N = 53; Study 2: N = 40) were recruited in local hospitals and online through snowball sampling. Study 1 identified stereotype content by asking participants to list words associated with the stereotype that …

Doing Business In Myanmar: Dressing Up The Bride, Ma Cherry Trivedi

Asian Management Insights

Dressing up the bride.

As one of the untapped frontiers of newly emerging markets, Myanmar is rich in natural resources, underpopulated but with growing purchasing power, and an easy place to do business. From the outside, the country is very inviting, and there is considerable interest in doing business in Myanmar today. But internally, we have several pockets of obstacles.

Floral Consumer Experience Study, Wenonah Marie Marlin

MSU Graduate Theses

The main objectives of this research is to identify the retailer controlled variable that are significant to increase floral purchases. Surveys were sent to MSU alumni and dispersed through social media. Respondents answered questions regarding floral purchasing patterns, floral product selection and quality, consumer attitude and socio-demographics. Responses were separated and compared by generation. Results show that Baby Boomers and older are more likely to purchase flowers more often, floral purchases are seasonal and flower type and a stylish shop are important to consumers.

Anderson's "The Sense Of Humor: Let Humor Fast Track You To Healthier, Happier Living" (Book Review), Cynthia Hammell

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

Meeting “The One” At Midnight Is Your Destiny: The Role Of Yuan In Use Of The Taiwanese Social Network, Dcard, Wen-Yueh Shu

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This study examines how Taiwanese college students understand the traditional, culturally Chinese concept of Yuan and its role in their use of a new and distinctive Taiwanese social networking site—Dcard. Particular attention is paid to the Dcard’s unique friending mechanism, which provides users the opportunity to connect (or not) with one, seemingly random new friend each day at midnight. Through thematic analysis of 15 semi-structured long interviews, the study finds that Dcard users understand Yuan as a multi-faceted concept pertaining primarily to interpersonal relationships (relationalism). Users perceive Yuan to influence relationships in a predetermined, causal fashion (fatalism), but they still …

Early Formative Period Exchange, Crafting, And Subsistence: An Analysis Of La Consentida’S Chipped Stone Assemblage, Julian Eduardo Acuña

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The primary concern of this thesis is to quantify and analyze the lithic (chipped stone) assemblage previously excavated by Hepp (2015) and the La Consentida Archaeological Project (LCAP) at the archaeological site of La Consentida in the lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico. The lithic assemblage is comprised of over 500 artifacts mainly of obsidian and chert. This research represents a study of all primary context lithic artifacts from La Consentida and focuses on obsidian, the material most used at the site. In the first part of this thesis I provide an analysis of all lithic artifacts of this primary …

Bayesian Based Semiparametric Multidimensional Approaches To Analysis Parkinson's Disease, Jun Zhang

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

In the slow progression of Parkinson's Disease (PD), impairments arise and affect multiple domains (e.g., motor, cognitive, and behavioral). Mixed types, multivariate longitudinal data are commonly used in PD studies. Challenges exist in assessing PD status and investigating disease progression due to lack of biomarkers and ubiquitous impairment in the disease. We proposed a model framework by combining the semi-parametric approach and multi- dimensional framework, and used the proposed model to investigate the heterogeneous disease development and the non-linear treatment effects in the multiple domains predefined in PD.

Furthermore, we extended the semi-parametric multidimensional approach to the data with multi-types …

Factors Contributing To Lower Cancer Screening Utilization In A Sub-Sample Of United Way 2-1-1 Callers, Jason M. Rhoton

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

This dissertation was a secondary analysis of data from a Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT)-funded [grant # PP100077 & PP120086] cancer-control intervention with The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health and United Way 2-1-1. The aims of the three dissertation papers were addressed by examining a sub-sample of 2-1-1 callers that were drawn from the parent study baseline data. Participants were required to need at least once cancer prevention service to be included in the parent study and dissertation analyses. This dissertation was a cross-sectional analysis of de-identified data examining the …

Observed Cooking Behaviors Of Families With And Without Childhood Cancer Survivors And The Development Of A Healthy Cooking Assessment Tool, Margaret Pleta Raber

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Diet is a modifiable risk factor for several cancers and other chronic diseases. Cooking skills are a target for dietary intervention, with much of the general population reporting infrequent and inadequate home preparation of meals. Childhood cancer survivors (CCS) are a population at high risk of several chronic conditions including secondary cancers that may be influenced by home cooking behaviors. We conducted observations of food preparation practices in 29 parents of healthy school-aged children and 11 parents of CCS. Observations included an audio and video recording of one evening meal per family. Parents were asked to wear a small body …

Impacts Of Cold Weather On Health In Texas, Tsun-Hsuan Chen

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Recent events with recorded low temperature and unusual snow accumulation in the United States and Europe have raised the public awareness of the potential health impacts of extreme winter weather. Excessive cold was the leading cause of weather-related death during 2006-2010 in the U.S., accounting for 63% of weather related deaths. Several studies worldwide have demonstrated that, in general, mortality rates are higher in winter compared to summer. Studies have also shown that the association between cold temperature and death vary across cities, regions and countries and is especially relevant with decreasing latitude or in regions with mild winter climate. …

Relating Rsv Genetic Diversity To Global Transmission Dynamics, Rebecca J. Fisk

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Many studies of Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) have relied on analyses of the Major Surface Glycoprotein G gene (G gene). Global transmission patterns have not been well studied due to lack of systematic global surveillance efforts. This study used phylogenetic analysis of full genome data, categorized by geo-region, to determine the sources of RSV A and B infection in Chile and Houston, Texas. Additionally, disease severity studies have generally focused on outcomes associated with a single genotype. In this study we developed a statistical phylogenetic approach to explore the relationship between tree topology and disease severity. Disease severity data included …

Characterizing Young Adult Exposure And Engagement With Social Media Tobacco And Nicotine Product Marketing And Messaging, Stephanie L. Clendennen

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Tobacco use remains a critical public health issue in the United States. Young adults are disproportionately affected by high rates of tobacco use and heavily targeted by tobacco marketing. Social media has become an important source of exposure to tobacco and nicotine product marketing and messaging for young adults. This dissertation examined the prevalence and socio-environmental characteristics associated with young adults’ exposure to and engagement with tobacco-related social media (paper 1); the prospective associations between young adults’ exposure and engagement and tobacco and nicotine product use (paper 2); and young adults’ experiences with tobacco and nicotine product messaging on social …

Sequential Monitoring Of Adaptive Randomized Clinical Trials With Sample Size Re-Estimation, Jun Yu

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Clinical trials are complicated and involve human beings. Therefore, lots of ethical and efficient objectives are expected to be achieved. These objectives include maximizing the power of detecting the treatment effects, assigning more patients to the better treatments, saving the cost and time, and controlling the type I error rate. A variety of adaptive designs have been proposed to achieve different aims, among which sequential monitoring and sample size re-estimation are very popular in real clinical trials. In addition, adaptive randomization designs sequentially update the allocation probability aiming to target different allocation proportions and achieve different aims. Hu and Rosenberger …

Relationship Between Nursing Safety Culture And Patient Perception Of Safety In Inpatient Units Of An Academic Specialty Hospital, Miguel Angel Lozano Garcia

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

The objective of this research was to analyze the relationship between nursing safety work culture in inpatient nursing units of a specialty academic hospital and their patients’ perception of safety using quantitative and qualitative methods. The aim of the quantitative study was to quantitatively evaluate whether nursing safety culture, as measured on the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPS) safety questions of the institutional employee opinion survey, was associated with patients’ perception of safety during their inpatient care, as measured by responses on the inpatient Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey. The aim of the …