Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Using Principles Of Seascape Ecology To Consider Relationships Between Spatial Patterning And Mobile Marine Vertebrates In A Seagrass-Mangrove Ecotone In Bimini, Bahamas, Sarah Rebecca Taylor Driscoll

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Seagrass meadows and mangrove forests are ecologically and economically important systems that are increasingly threatened by anthropogenic activity. This study used a non-invasive method, baited remote underwater video systems (BRUVS), to observe mobile marine vertebrates in the seagrass-mangrove ecotone in North and South Bimini, the only area where mangroves remain in the northwestern Bahamas. An extensive area of mangroves and seagrass was removed for coastal development in North Bimini, where a marine protected area, the North Bimini Marine Reserve (NBMR), has been under consideration for decades. This research applied principles of seascape ecology to assess species abundance, diversity, and richness …

“We’Re More Than A Daycare”: Reported Roles And Settings For Early Childhood Professionals And Implications For Professionalizing The Field, Rachel E. Schachter, Qingyu Jiang, Shayne B. Piasta, Erin E. Flynn

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the US, recent efforts have focused on professionalizing the field of early childhood. One way to indicate professionalism is through the terms used to describe both the field and the workers. However, few have examined how practitioners or researchers describe early childhood professionals’ work. Using multiple data sources and analytic strategies, we examined the ways that those working with young children described their role and setting, as well as how these were described in research and practitioner journals. “Teacher” was the preferred term for both journals and professionals, and terms for setting reflected traditional K-12 school structures. Professionals linked …

Evaluating The N/Ne Preference Policy, Amie Thurber, Lisa Bates, Susan Halverson

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

North/Northeast Portland has long been the heart of Portland's Black community. By 2010, the area had lost two-thirds of its Black residents to displacement. In response, the City adopted a Preference Policy that prioritizes displaced affordable rental and homeownership applicants. This report describes findings from the first phase of a study to understand what difference this policy is making in the lives of residents.

Ready? Set? Go?: Examining Organizational Readiness For Change In A Quality Improvement Intervention For Youth Mentoring Programs, Renee Spencer, Alison L. Drew, Carla Herrera, Bowen Mcbeath, Thomas E. Keller

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

The number of youth mentoring programs has risen significantly in recent decades. This trend, coupled with evidence that programs employing a greater number of empirically supported practices achieve more positive effects for youth participants, has prompted increasing interest in how to promote more widespread use of evidence-based practice standards in mentoring programs. In an effort to describe and better understand efforts to implement recommended standards, we studied a multi-level initiative sponsored by a national advocacy organization in which its state-level Affiliates guided local mentoring programs through a structured quality improvement process. Specifically, we examined organizational readiness for change among mentoring …

Tailored Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity (Sogi) Education: Assessing Network Needs Through A Survey Of Knowledge And Attitudes, Luke M. Higgins

Family Medicine Clerkship Student Projects

No abstract provided.

Playing To Heal: The Impact Of Bereavement Camp For Children With Grief., Clarissa L. Salinas

Counseling Faculty Publications and Presentations

Child bereavement is a difficult topic to explore and study because of stigmas in discussing death, and because of restrictions in doing research with young children. Thus, research in childhood bereavement is limited. This study focused on children who attended a bereavement camp after the traumatic loss of a loved one. The purpose was to understand the participants’ grief experiences. This research study used phenomenological inquiry and analysis methodology. Five female participants were interviewed for this study. In addition, participants created a sandtray world to convey their experiences at bereavement camp. The essence of participants’ experiences as revealed through verbal …

Visual Perception And Action In Reaching During Upper Limb Obstacle Avoidance, Nondon Chakraborty

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

During everyday activities, people reach to specific objects with their hands and avoid obstacles. For people to move successfully through an obstacle gap, it is necessary to be able to accurately perceive the actions that the surroundings afford and adjust hand movements accordingly. Reaching behaviours, including planning (perception) and execution (action), depend on visual information. This study aimed to understand and detect the differences between perceptual judgment and actual performance of both hands during a reaching task at the time of obstacle avoidance by using a hand-scaled approach. Participants were young adults (male (n=7) and female (n=10) aged 18 to …

Impaired Suppression Of Attentional Capture Near The Hands, Xiaojin Ma

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Attention tends to be attracted to eye-catching stimuli, which, however, are not always helpful to look at, depending on the particular task. Recent findings demonstrated that attention to a salient but task-irrelevant distractor could be actively suppressed via a top-down process. In other research, increased scrutiny in visual inspection has been found in the near hand space, making it interesting to question, at the intersection of the two lines of research, whether the ability to ignore salient distraction would be compromised near the hands. Two experiments were conducted to test this idea. Experiment 1 compared the attentional allocation to a …

Screening For Food Insecurity In New Milford, Ct, Liana K. Mathias

Family Medicine Clerkship Student Projects

Food insecurity is defined as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Litchfield county, home to New Milford, CT, suffered severe economic changes over the Covid-19 pandemic. The number of food insecure households, represented by those requesting food from local food pantries, skyrocketed. This study demonstrates the importance of screening for food insecurity in primary care. A 3-part screen is implemented in a primary care setting to better assess those at risk and connect them to resources and local food services.

Who Is The Stranger Really? A Reluctant Autoethnography Of The Strange Situation Procedure, Tara Yazdani

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This paper aims to review the cross-cultural application of attachment theory as a western model of thought and practice. That is, this research aimed to recognize and question how embedded attachment theory has become in programming and education within North American academic and practical arenas. In applying the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) to a limited sample of Eritrean dyads, important considerations and questions arose regarding the cross-cultural application of this protocol. The aims of this research shifted toward further exploring these considerations and questions, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the new research aim emphasized how to inform future …

Field-Scale Soil Moisture Bridges The Spatial-Scale Gap Between Drought Monitoring And Agricultural Yields, Noemi Vergopolan, Sitian Xiong, Lyndon Estes, Niko Wanders, Nathaniel W. Chaney, Eric F. Wood, Megan Konar, Kelly Caylor, Hylke E. Beck, Nicolas Gatti, Tom Evans, Justin Sheffield

Geography

Soil moisture is highly variable in space and time, and deficits (i.e., droughts) play an important role in modulating crop yields. Limited hydroclimate and yield data, however, hamper drought impact monitoring and assessment at the farm field scale. This study demonstrates the potential of using field-scale soil moisture simulations to support highresolution agricultural yield prediction and drought monitoring at the smallholder farm field scale. We present a multiscale modeling approach that combines HydroBlocks a physically based hyper-resolution land surface model (LSM) with machine learning. We used HydroBlocks to simulate root zone soil moisture and soil temperature in Zambia at 3 …

Rapid Transition Of A Technical Course From Face-To-Face To Online, Swapna Gottipatti, Venky Shankaraman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Just like most universities around the world, the senior management at Singapore Management University decided to move all courses to a virtual, online, synchronous mode, giving instructors a very short notice period—one week—to make this transition. In this paper, we describe the challenges, practical solutions adopted, and the lessons learnt in rapidly transitioning a face-to-face Master’s degree course in Text Analytics and Applications into a virtual, online, course format that could deliver a quality learning experience.

Recognizing Figure Labels In Patents, Ming Gong, Xin Wei, Diane Oyen, Jian Wu, Martin Gryder

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Scientific documents often contain significant information in figures. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) awards thousands of patents each week, with each patent containing on the order of a dozen figures. The information conveyed by these figures typically include a drawing or diagram, a label, caption and reference text within the document. Yet associating the short bits of text to the figure is challenging when labels are embedded within the figure, as they typically are in patents. Using patents as a testbench, this paper highlights an open challenge in analyzing all of the information presented in scientific/technical documents …

Automatic Metadata Extraction Incorporating Visual Features From Scanned Electronic Theses And Dissertations, Muntabir Hasan Choudhury, Himarsha R. Jayanetti, Jian Wu, William A. Ingram, Edward A. Fox

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain domain knowledge that can be used for many digital library tasks, such as analyzing citation networks and predicting research trends. Automatic metadata extraction is important to build scalable digital library search engines. Most existing methods are designed for born-digital documents, so they often fail to extract metadata from scanned documents such as ETDs. Traditional sequence tagging methods mainly rely on text-based features. In this paper, we propose a conditional random field (CRF) model that combines text-based and visual features. To verify the robustness of our model, we extended an existing corpus and created a …

Extractive Research Slide Generation Using Windowed Labeling Ranking, Athar Sefid, Prasenjit Mitra, Jian Wu, C. Lee Giles

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Presentation slides generated from original research papers provide an efficient form to present research innovations. Manually generating presentation slides is labor-intensive. We propose a method to automatically generates slides for scientific articles based on a corpus of 5000 paper-slide pairs compiled from conference proceedings websites. The sentence labeling module of our method is based on SummaRuNNer, a neural sequence model for extractive summarization. Instead of ranking sentences based on semantic similarities in the whole document, our algorithm measures the importance and novelty of sentences by combining semantic and lexical features within a sentence window. Our method outperforms several baseline methods …

Using Pair Programming As A Collaborative Learning Approach To Support Students With Learning Disabilities Via Zoom Breakout Rooms, Ling Li, Li Da Xu, Yuming He, Wu He, Silvana M.R. Watson, Shana Pribesh, Debra A. Major, Elizabeth Langran (Ed.), Leanna Archambault (Ed.)

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Peer learning through pair programming is a type of collaborative learning that involves students working in pairs to discuss computer programming concepts or develop codes to solve problems. The Zoom breakout room method is applied to teach pair programming in a virtual classroom during the COVID-19 environment. By facilitating pair programming in a virtual learning environment, we gained valuable experience in promoting collaborative learning, active learning, and problem-based learning activities in a cloud setting.

The Lie Of Pandemic Pivot And Essential Work, Alexandra Crampton

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

My emotional responses to this moment include feelings of anger, hope, and déjà vu. Although the scope and scale of this pandemic is unprecedented in our lifetimes, what has been especially hard is not necessarily new – nor entirely unprecedented – and therefore unavoidable. In this essay, I reflect on what was avoidable and call for better response. We must question the seemingly benign (if not optimistic) terms emerging as pandemic discourse, such as “pivot to a new normal” and “essential work,” for what they reveal of social injustice and failure to avert future crisis.

For The Children? A Mixed Methods Analysis Of World Bank Structural Adjustment Loans, Health Projects, And Infant Mortality In Latin America, Shiri Noy

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Perceptions Of Criminal Responsibility Through The Lens Of Race, Kyle Gamache, Judith Platania, Matt Zaitchik

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

Historically, Black defendants have faced more severe sentences compared to White defendants. Research investigating this phenomenon in the paradigm of the insanity defense, found that Black defendants were acquitted as “not guilty by reason of insanity” (NGRI) significantly more often than White defendants (Poulson, 1990). In the current study, we investigate the influence of race of defendant and race of victim on judgments of NGRI in a 3 (race of victim: Black v. White v. Hispanic) x 3 (race of defendant: Black v. White v. Hispanic) between-subjects design. Our results indicated that a Hispanic defendant was acquitted NGRI more frequently …

Dangerous Women/Women In Danger: Gendered Impacts Of The September 11th Attacks, Louise Cainkar

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

VERBAL AND PHYSICAL EXPRESSIONS of public animosity toward Arab and Muslim Americans surged in the United States in the first months after the attacks on September 11, 2001 (9/11), and then quelled to highly varying degrees afterward, depending on place (Levin 2017). This pattern was unlike punitive government actions, which continued nationwide at high levels for years (see Cainkar 2009). My ethnographic and sociological study of the impacts of 9/11 on Muslim Arabs in metropolitan Chicago, involving field research conducted between 2002 and 2005 and in-depth interviews with 102 Arab Muslims (45 percent of whom were women), found that women …

Palestine—And Empire—Are Central To Arab American/Swana Studies, Louise Cainkar

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Taking the small number of ethnographic studies of Palestinian communities in North America as its problematic, this article situates that predicament in the larger context of decades of academic silencing of Arab American and SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) studies, efforts that represent but one component of a larger political project to quash pro-Palestinian activism. Abetted by the absence of a racial category, scholars continue to face substantial hurdles at the institutional level, inhibiting the robust growth of the field and boding poorly for an expansion in community studies. Yet recent scholarship on Palestinians in North America—exemplified by the …

Review Of Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism And The Domestic War On Terror, Louise Cainkar

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Downeast Maine Mat Expansion Project: Year 3 Final Data Summary, Mary Lindsey Smith Phd, Evelyn Ali Bs, Katharine Knight Mph, Tyler Egeland Ba

Substance Use Research & Evaluation

This report summarizes the collaborative effort of Healthy Acadia, its providers, the Downeast Substance Treatment Network, and Downeast Substance Use Response Coalition, to combat opioid use disorder (OUD) in Downeast Maine through multiple evidence-based strategies.

Project goals included the reduction of barriers to accessing medication-assisted treatment (MAT) and the enhancement of MAT services by improving provider capacity through training and implementation of best practice treatment.

For more information, please contact M. Lindsey Smith, PhD, m.lindsey.smith@maine.edu

Mitigating Risks And Building Resilience To Hiv/Aids: Perspectives Of Hiv-Negative, Middle-Aged And Older Men Who Have Sex With Men, Renato M. Liboro, Brandon Ranuschio, Sherry Bell, Tammy Yates, Lianne Barnes, Charles Fehr, George Da Silva, Jenna Despres, Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco, Andrew Eaton, Aruna Sedere, Trinity Puno, Paul A. Shuper, Lori E. Ross

Psychology Faculty Research

Purpose: Although ample research has been conducted on resilience to HIV/AIDS, most studies have utilized quantitative methods and focused almost exclusively on people living with HIV/AIDS. A relatively untapped source of knowledge is the perspectives of HIV-negative, middle-aged and older men who have sex with men (MSM) who have been navigating risks and building resilience to HIV/AIDS since the 1980s. Our qualitative, community-based participatory research study examined the perspectives of HIV-negative, middle-aged and older MSM on factors that helped mitigate the risks of and build resilience to HIV/AIDS. Methods: In collaboration with community-based organizations, fourteen participants were recruited for in-depth …

The Asd Parent Perspective: Stress Contributors And Perceptions Of Feeling Supported And Understood, Chelsea Noble

WWU Graduate School Collection

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience a great amount of stress. Evidence indicates that parent stress is associated with ASD symptom severity and potentially behavior problems. However, there are gaps in the literature examining these associations in fathers and whether these associations differ across mothers and fathers. Additionally, concepts surrounding “support” and “understanding” have been understudied in this context as well as how they are associated with parent stress. The current study addresses these gaps in the literature and expands on the research regarding fathers. We recruited 244 parents of children ages 3-5 with ASD who were …

The Effect Of Cognitive Load On Involuntary Musical Imagery, Kayleigh I. Cutshaw

WWU Graduate School Collection

This research was conducted to understand the effect of cognitive load on the occurrence of earworms. A go/no go task, a typical mind wandering method, was used to create different levels of cognitive load based on the difficulty of the task. We also used a control condition which more closely matched previous earworm studies. Both probe-caught and survey reports were used to measure earworms and mind wandering in the study. Earworms were not found to occur more often in the lower experimental levels of cognitive load but controls reported spending more time with earworms. This finding is mostly inconsistent with …

Public Lands And Climate Change: An Evaluation Of The North Cascadia Adaptation Partnership, Kristen Doering

WWU Graduate School Collection

Public lands in the United States serve critical roles for ecosystems and humans alike, but they have become increasingly vulnerable to climate change. Many agencies have attempted to reduce negative effects of climate change through adaptation planning. This research evaluates the implementation of the North Cascadia Adaptation Partnership (NCAP), which was developed in 2010 to provide science-based guidance to land managers in the North Cascades Ecosystem (Raymond, Peterson & Rochefort, 2013). The NCAP consists of four federal land units: North Cascades National Park, Mt. Baker- Snoqualmie National Forest, Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, and Mt. Rainier National Park. Relying on survey and …

Cultural Differences In Emotion Regulation And Social Support Seeking, Vida Pourmand

WWU Graduate School Collection

Given the negative influences of stress on health, it is important to examine beneficial processes like social support, which can promote greater health. However, the willingness to seek social support may be qualified by emotion regulation strategy. Research indicates that there are cultural differences in both social support seeking and emotion regulation processes. In this ecological momentary assessment design, participants (N = 49) reported on their daily stress, whether they sought social support during stressful times, and if they emotionally suppressed (N = 913). They also responded to individual differences measures, including interdependent cultural orientation and ethnicity. Multilevel modeling was …

Understanding The Impact Of Stress On Sexual Behavior: A Study Of The Covid-19 Pandemic And The Masturbation Habits Of Americans, Holly Edwards

WWU Graduate School Collection

The COVID-19 Pandemic, officially declared on March 11, 2020, has shifted the world in a myriad of ways. Global citizens are now facing an increase in stress, anxiety, depression, and grief as the SARS-CoV-2 virus claimed thousands of lives as well as changed daily life. With every aspect of life different, I set out to understand how the negative emotions caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic influenced the sexual thought and behavior of American individuals, using masturbation as a focus. An online survey was employed using different Likert scale questions and a few qualitative questions, in order to gain opinions about …

Influences On The Path To Life Satisfaction: A Serial Mediation Model Of Adult Attachment, Emotional Intelligence, Emotion Regulation, And Dispositional Resilience, Misa Shimono

WWU Graduate School Collection

Objective: The goal of this study was to explore the mediating roles of emotional intelligence, emotion regulation, and dispositional resilience in the association between adult attachment quality and life satisfaction, because they may be amenable to psychoeducational intervention that increases life satisfaction among people with attachment insecurity. Method: Archival correlational data from a convenience sample of 124 first-year university psychology students in a study on stress and dropout were analyzed using PROCESS (Hayes, 2021) to test the serial impact of emotional intelligence (Trait Meta-Mood Scale; Salovey et al., 1995) and emotion regulation (Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale; Gratz & Roemer, …