Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Examining The Utility Of A Brief Self-Compassion Intervention For Emotion Regulation In Individuals With Exposure To Trauma, Sara Jean Himmerich

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Research suggests that abilities to moderate and process trauma-related emotions may predict symptoms of posttraumatic stress, with the overuse of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies presenting a potential vulnerability to experiencing difficulties following trauma exposure. Self-compassion has been associated with the acceptance of negative emotions, with research finding evidence for positive associations between self-compassion and adaptive emotion regulation. Additionally, research suggests an inverse relationship between self-compassion and symptoms of posttraumatic stress. Self-compassion has been conceptualized and studied as a skill that can be learned, with studies finding support for improved abilities following targeted interventions. However, more research is needed to establish …

The Good, The Bad, And The Uncivil: An Analysis Of Uncivil Members Of Congress From The 45th To The 113th Congresses, Nathan Lea Holm

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Incivility in Congress has often been attributed to partisan and ideological conflict, but there is a growing body of evidence that suggests incivility may hinge on factors concerning members’ personal attitudes as defined by their life experiences. To investigate this, background and experiential factors that may lead to incivility are tested, including variables such as family dynamics, religion, occupation, and education. All of these factors are tested on the basis that they could have formative influence on a legislator’s behavior and how they conduct themselves as a member of the US Congress. Seven members of Congress from the 45th to …

The U.S. Corporate Tax Debate, Md Rafi Hossain

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation comprises of three essays in the field of public economics. The first essay investigates the employment effects of corporate taxation at the industry level; Specifically, do corporate taxes affect employment rates at the industry level and are the effects consistent across industries? This paper uses an identification strategy that exploits variation in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states and tries to understand how they impact industry employment at the county level with contiguous counties straddling state borders acting as controls. The results show that any change in the corporate tax rate affect the employment rate in goods …

Principals' Perceptions Of Professional Development And Caring Communities For English Learners, Sunny Sue Chang Jonas

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

A growing population of English Learners (ELs) have unique challenges when navigating the American educational system. In fact, there is an achievement gap such that EL students lag behind their native English peers in school outcomes. Accordingly, there is increased demand for professional development (PD) lead by principals to address the needs of the changing population of ELs. To support effective PD aimed at improved achievement for ELs, principals need embrace transformative thinking in their work. Although PD has the potential to be the driving force of change, traditional approaches to PD have limited impact on academic success of ELs. …

Contesting Consent: Consent, Sexual Scripts, And Gendered Power, Julia Kristine Metz

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Within the past decade, the United States has seen an upsurge of affirmative consent policies being introduced or passed within the legislation of state governments and universities (Laker and Boas 2015). However, in a moment when the President of the US has been recorded saying “Grab ‘em by the pussy,” two Supreme Court justices have been accused of sexual misconduct, and a Secretary of Education has rolled back Title IX policies that had made progress in curbing sexual violence in schools, the meaning of sexual consent is now being contested more than ever. However, there have only been a handful …

Role Of Religion For Christian Couples Who Successfully Cope With Trauma, Bernadette Collins

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Most of the research concerning couples focuses on either couples and trauma or religion and couples. The current research investigated what role religion plays when Christian couples effectively navigated a trauma. Interviews were conducted with five Christian couples who experienced joint trauma more than eight years prior to the study. Interviews of the couples consisted of questions concerning what their trauma was, religious coping strategies utilized during and after their trauma, and the effect religious coping had on the couples’ ability to effectively navigate the traumatic event. Qualitative analysis found several major themes which included meaning making of the traumatic …

Providing Counseling In A Rural Setting: A New Multicultural Perspective, Danessa Ann Carter

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Counseling research shows a lack of information regarding training counselors to work in rural communities. However, more than 80% of the United States land is considered rural. This appears to be an extremely desperate combination of lack of information and training for a large portion of the country’s population. An additional complication to this dynamic is that neither CACREP standards nor the ACA Code of Ethics mandate any specific trainings or address any specific needs of rural communities.

To improve the understanding of rural community dynamics, this qualitative study explored the phenomenological experiences of counselors working in rural communities. This …

How Fitting In To The Social Context Influences Work-Life Balance Effectiveness And Work Performance, Amanda Lynn Conlin

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the notion that what may matter most in achieving an authentic feeling of work-life balance is fit within the immediate social context among work teams. Both work-life balance effectiveness and work performance depend on managing and meeting others’ expectations. Thus, the extent to which an individual shares work-life balance values and preferences with others on their team (i.e., a form of person-team fit influences the amount of resources expended or gained from navigating and negotiating others’ expectations. In a field study, 106 full time employees at a commercial real estate company were surveyed measuring the extent to …

Educational Experiences Of 1.5 Generation Cambodian Americans, Kassandra A. Chhay

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

During the 1980s, an influx of Cambodian Americans resettled in the United States due to the Cambodian genocide. Those Cambodian refugees who came to the United States as either infants, children or adolescents due to warfare, are members of the 1.5 generation. This thesis examines the educational trajectory of 1.5 generation Cambodian Americans in the context of family, school, and community from their resettlement in the United States to adulthood. Using a narrative approach, I examine how the eighteen participants in the study overcame certain challenges to attain success and how they negotiated their cultural and ethnic identity in relation …

The Effects Of Pre-Existing Beliefs About Alcohol Consumption On Predicting Victim Blame In Incapacitated And Drug Facilitated Rape, Robyn Alyssa Ellis

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Alcohol-involved sexual assault is more common on college and appears to garner more negative social reactions, such as victim blaming than forcible assault. There are two specified types of alcohol-involved sexual assaults identified in the literature: drug and alcohol facilitated rape (DAFR) and incapacitated rape (IR). Factors such as rape myths, rape scripts and alcohol expectancies also have been implicated in victim blaming. This study sought to test Abbey’s model of alcohol’s role in sexual assault in predicting victim blame by a third-party observer and examine differences in victim blame between IR and DAFR. Participants included 227 undergraduates at a …

Behavioral Interference Of Memory Reconsolidation As A Treatment For Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms, Benjamin Darnell

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is best conceptualized as a failure of the stress response to naturally resolve following trauma exposure (e.g., Orcutt, Bonanno, Hannan, & Miron, 2014). Current treatments are effective for some, but not all who suffer from PTSD (e.g., Bradley, Greene, Russ, Dutra, & Westen, 2005; Lee et al., 2016), and relapse is common (Ursano et al., 2004; Davidson et al., 2001). Considering that PTSD is a memory-based disorder, a treatment that could augment trauma memories has the potential to address the limitations of current interventions. Research on memory suggests that, if a memory is retrieved under the …

Assessment Of “Meaning Made”: An Empirical Examination Of Factorial Structure And Measure Validity, Andrea M. Despotes

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Meaning-making theory posits that appraisal of a stressful event leads to distress if it is discrepant with one’s sense of “global meaning,” and such distress stimulates meaning-making processes aimed at eliminating the discrepancy. If meaning making leads to new meaning (i.e., “meaning made”), the stress-induced discrepancy is reduced, which generally is expected to result in positive adjustment. This study investigated the factorial structure of the meaning made construct using a sample (N = 372) of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers in the United States having “Masters” status and a minimum approval rating of 95%. Participants reported an average age of about …

The Social Presence Of Jibo, Parisa Farhadi

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This research is an attempt to investigate how a social robot is perceived by users at the first encounter. And to find out whether a social robot like Jibo is understood merely as a kind of a technological object or a social entity. Previous studies in Human-Robot Interaction have considered social presence as a mediator in users’ social responses toward robots; however, the focus of this study is the social presence itself and investigates whether Jibo produces a sense of presence during initial encounters. To this end, the current study examines individuals’ perceptions of and responses to Jibo. Participants (N=8) …

Dekalb, Illinois, Muslim Women’S Agency Negotiating And Re-Affirming Their Muslim Identity, Sinta Febrina

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Post 9/11 American Muslim women are stereotyped as victims of their patriarchal religion and as perpetrators of terror. These conditions led to the discrimination of American Muslim women which requires them to continuously strategize and negotiate their identity. This thesis examined DeKalb, Illinois Muslim women’s agency to strategize and negotiate their identity in lager American society. In this study, fifteen Muslim women from three different categories were interviewed: American-born citizens, naturalized citizens, and immigrants. This study found that Muslim women’s various backgrounds (country of origin, education, socio-economic status, and immigration status) affected their strategy and agency to negotiate and re-affirm …

Minimum Dropout Age And Juvenile Crime In The United States, Md. Abdur Rahman Forhad

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation examines how an increased minimum dropout age (MDA) affects juvenile crime not only in the community, but also in school. I first empirically estimate the magnitude of the impact of a higher MDA on high school enrollment. I then develop an economic model of crime that explains the relationship between an MDA and contemporaneous juvenile crime and empirically examine how a higher MDA affects juvenile crime both in the community and in school. I find that raising the MDA from 16 to 18 significantly increases school enrollment by 2.57%. Next, I find that raising the MDA to an …

A Review Of Reasons For Failure In Applying Machine Learning To Financial Trading And An Experiment Investigating Combinatorial Purged Cross Validation’S Merit In Preventing The Most Prominent Of These Reasons, Multiple Testing Bias, Colin Fritz

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The interest in applying machine learning to financial trading in the hedge fund industry has exploded in the last five years due to the massive success of a handful of ‘quantitative’ investment firms like Renaissance Technologies who has pioneered the use of machine learning techniques in investment since the 1980s. The failure rate of such firms attempting to deploy financial machine learning strategies is very high. This thesis reviews many of the causes for failure such as harmful correlations between examples in the dataset, redundant observations, improper data sampling paradigm, and multiple testing bias. Of these, multiple testing bias is …

Caring High School Teachers: Promoting Students’ Social And Emotional Development, Roberta Jean Geosling

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

High school students are experiencing increasing numbers of social and emotional stressors in their lives. While Illinois and other states have adopted state standards to address social and emotional development in the classroom, care theorists posit that the answer may lie in positive relationships between caring teachers and their students. This study explores the perspectives of six teachers from a Midwest high school who were nominated by their students as being caring teachers. After a series of three 45-minute interviews and two to three 45-minute observations, data were analyzed within the framework of Noddings’ Theory of Care (1984) and the …

Exploring The Relationship Between Facets Of Mindfulness And Emotion Regulatory Flexibility, Anthony Nicholas Reffi

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Emotion dysregulation can often be attributed to an inability to employ a range of regulatory strategies across varying stressful situations (i.e., regulatory flexibility). Therefore, it remains clinically relevant to determine the mechanisms that facilitate regulatory flexibility. Although mindfulness and regulatory flexibility have been linked, relations between mindfulness facets and regulatory flexibility have not yet been considered. This study aimed to determine which facets of self-reported trait mindfulness are related to regulatory choice flexibility. Using a previously validated performance-based emotion regulation choice paradigm, undergraduates (N = 78; 62.8% female; Mage = 19.82, SD = 2.03) chose to use either reappraisal or …

Cognitive Bias Modification For Negative Sexual Assault Disclosure Experiences: Examining A Mechanism For Improving Post-Disclosure Well-Being, Caitlin Mary Mcnamara Pinciotti

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Following a sexual assault, many survivors choose to disclose the experience to others. More commonly, these conversations occur between friends, family members, or significant others, but survivors may also disclose to professionals, such as law enforcement and medical professionals. Unfortunately, support providers often do not respond supportively to disclosing survivors, and unsupportive acknowledgement and turning-against reactions are common. Extant literature has overwhelmingly indicated that these negative reactions have lasting detrimental effects on survivors, including leading to increased symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other adverse outcomes. Although social support and PTSD theories converge to suggest that negative disclosure experiences …

Beyond Words: Newspapers, Language Usage And Disability Stigma, Laura Kruczinski

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Sociology has a long history of documenting socio-political views that are used by media to portray stereotypes and perpetuate the potential stigmas associated with race, social class, gender, and other disadvantaged social categories. There is comparatively little existing research that discusses how media coverage is connected to disability-related stigma. In this thesis, I use grounded theory to construct a content analysis of newspapers coverage of the 2016 United States Presidential Election. From the data, I examine how stereotypes related to disability may be used in political discourse, drawing from the refined theory of stigma, as outlined by Link and Phelan …

Librarians In Community Colleges: Strategies For Promoting Information Literacy, Sharon Telise Silverman

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This qualitative case study analyzed Inner-City Community College librarians’ pedagogical approach as they facilitate information literacy and the embedded librarian–faculty collaboration. Librarians traditionally provided library instruction in a brick-and-mortar classroom, but classrooms have changed over the past few decades to include the latest technology. This change makes librarians leaders in implementing the latest technology in classrooms. Embedding entails taking the librarian from a traditional classroom environment and supplementing class appointments with the librarian in the library with visits to the classroom by the librarian, which may entail more than one class session, with the librarian even co-teaching the class in …

Exploring The Use Of Podcasts On Students’ Language Learning And Change Of Students’ Self-Efficacy About The Use Of Podcasts, Silvia Rehulina Ginting

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Similar to other types of mobile technologies, podcasts are believed to provide many advantages for language instruction, including English as a second language (ESL) learners’ listening skills and pronunciation and changes in their self-efficacy from using the podcasts for learning ESL. The convergent parallel mixed methods design used Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning and Bandura’s self-efficacy as foundations. It used 11 different instruments to collect quantitative data and qualitative data from two sections of an upper-intermediate ESL class at one university in Midwest United States. Quantitative data were collected using a pre-test, a post-test, and the note taking quizzes …

Migration And Remittances, Seyedsoroosh Azizi

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on three topics: motivations behind remittances, cyclicality of remittances, and the impacts of remittances on human capital and labor supply in developing countries.

In the first chapter, I introduce the three topics. In the second chapter, I examine the primary incentives of remitting. Using estimated bilateral data on remittances, this chapter demonstrates that a rise in the remittance-receiving countries' GNI per capita leads to fewer remittances and that a rise in the host remittance-sending countries' GNI per capita motivates migrants to remit more. Real exchange rates and real interest rates have no effect on remittances. These results …

Impact Of Agreeableness On Virtual Team Performance Through Team Identification And Shared Mental Models, Alexandria Brown

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Virtual teams help organizations efficiently utilize their employees for a task without the requirement of co-location. The literature on team performance suggests that teamwork is integral to a team’s success; however, in virtual teams this is often a challenge. Certain personality characteristics on virtual teams may be particularly important to the development of effective teamwork. An under-investigated factor is the role agreeableness in virtual team processes and how it affects the overall team performance. The main research question of this study is how the degree of agreeableness on a virtual team affects the overall team performance through predicted associations with …

Psychological Reactance Applied To Instruction To Disregard, Jessica Louise Bozeman

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study applies theory of psychological reactance to instructions to disregard (ITD). When inadmissible testimony is made in front of jurors, a judge may issue an ITD that orders jurors to not consider the inadmissible evidence when making their verdicts. The theory of psychological reactance proposes that when a person’s choices are limited or their freedom is threatened, there will be a resulting attempt to regain or prioritize their freedom. Using a jury transcript study, the experiment has both a control condition including the evidence but without an ITD and a condition where the ITD is included. Results showed that …

Against All Odds: A Legacy Of Appropriation, Contestation, And Negotiation Of Arab Feminisms In Postcolonial States, Hoda Elsadda

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Arab feminists have always faced challenges related to the burden of colonialism, accusations of westernization, isolation from their cultural heritage, and elitism, but the biggest challenge of all has been the fact that their activism and their entire lives have all been in the context of authoritarian postcolonial states. This article engages with a persistent challenge to Arab feminists that questions their impact, their awareness of their cultural and societal problems, and undermines their achievements over the years. It constructs a narrative of what feminists have achieved against all odds, within the constraints of authoritarian postcolonial states that have politically …

Exploring The Role Of Repertoire In Library Cataloging, Rachel Ivy Clarke, Brian Dobreski

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

• Purpose
• Library work is increasingly being explored from the perspective of design. Still, little work has actively explored specific aspects of design as they relate to library cataloging. This study seeks to dive deeper into the relationship between library cataloging and design by exploring a specific aspect of design—the concept of repertoire, or the use of previous experiences and bodies of knowledge during current work.
• Design/methodology/approach
• To examine catalogers’ use of repertoire, this study employed a juxtaposition of field observations of professional library catalogers’ work processes with elements of “think-aloud” protocols.
• Findings
• The researchers identified three major types of repertory …

Metadata For Diversity: Identification And Implications Of Potential Access Points For Diverse Library Resources, Rachel Ivy Clarke, Sayward Schoonmaker

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate what metadata elements for access points currently exist to represent diverse library reading materials, either in libraries or from external sources, as well as what metadata elements for access points are currently not present but are necessary to represent diverse library reading materials.

Design/methodology/approach A field scan of thirteen contemporary metadata schemas identified elements that might serve as potential access points regarding the diversity status of resource creators as well as topical or thematic content. Elements were semantically mapped using a metadata crosswalk to understand the intellectual and conceptual space of …

Design Thinking And Methods In Library Practice And Graduate Library Education, Rachel Ivy Clarke, Ann Rosenblad, Satyen Amonkar

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Despite interest in the application of design thinking and methods in librarianship, there seems to be a disconnect between application and education to support it. This study used an online

questionnaire to elicit feedback from library workers in the United States about interest in and use of design thinking and methods in library practice, and the need for design skills and abilities in library education. We found that practicing librarians perceive the relevance of design thinking and methods to library work, although opinions vary based on library and work type. Design thinking and methods were used mostly for space planning …

China's Intellectual Property Rights Provocation: A Political Economy View, Shaomin Li

Management Faculty Publications

It is well recognized that intellectual property rights (IPR) violations are at the heart of the economic conflict with China. Little agreement, however, exists about the origin and solutions for this provocation. Broadly speaking, two prescriptions have been proposed: the natural evolutionary and the rule of law views. While both have merits and add to our understanding, they do not go far enough to address the more fundamental IPR policy issue: China has benefited from a rule of law overseas and a rule through law at home, manufacturing unfair advantage to its firms, many of which are owned and/or influenced …