Browsing by Subject "Knowledge"
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Item A study of sexual and mental health among baby boomers in the United States(2023-07-24) Aguilar, Rodolfo Antonio; Rew, Lynn; Waite, Linda J; Acton, Gayle; Kwak, Jung; Phillips, CarolynBaby boomers, the epicenter of revolutionizing sex during their coming-of-age years, carry their revolution onto older adulthood. Regardless of their expected physiological, physical, mental, and sexual age-related changes, when it comes to their sexuality, baby boomers demand respect, choice, and dignity. Therefore, nurses trained to use an integrative approach to care are uniquely qualified to catalyze necessary changes in care to meet and complement the needs of aging baby boomers, particularly those who live in nursing homes. To inform necessary changes, this dissertation presents a cross-sectional analysis of the prevalence of sexual activity, behaviors, and problems among baby boomers. The work is based on the secondary cross-sectional analysis of the third round of data collection of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), which aggregates data from 2,742 representative baby boomers born between 1945 and 1964 (1,228 males and 1,514 females). I also describe the association of sexual activity, behaviors, and problems with age and mental health status. Additionally, I identified associations between sexual health factors and mental health outcomes. I also explored how sexual health factors impact mental health outcomes differently for men and women, including mediating and moderating relationships. My analysis establishes that sexual health factors influence mental health outcomes uniquely and differently in women than men. While future research will always be necessary to keep up with changing health demands in patient-centered care, this dissertation is essential in guiding pertinent changes in healthcare practice, system, and policy. I propose additions and modifications to nursing education curricula and devise appropriate interventions to advocate for sexual rights and sexual health in nursing home residents. My work's detailed findings, proposals, and advisories can serve as an empirical foundation for developing sustainable policies in nursing homes regarding residents' sexuality and sexual expression. If implemented, the revised policies will better prepare nursing care, and healthcare in general, by integrating personal views, needs, and rights of prospective nursing home residents, the baby boomer generation.Item An analysis of consumers' knowledge and perceptions in relation to genetically engineered (GE) Cotton : marketing and utility(2011-12) Watson, Megan Mignon; Krifa, Mourad; Lee, Hyun-Hwa; Xu, BugaoCotton makes up a majority of the world’s fiber market, with genetically engineered (GE) cotton the current staple of the US agricultural landscape. With GE cotton’s overall acceptance for US farmers and manufacturers, it is of concern that the majority of literature concerning GE crops primarily compares negative attitudes towards GE food crops in stricter economies such as the European Union. Due to the inadequate literature regarding both the market advantages and consumer perceptions of GE cotton specifically, this study was conceived to provide marketers with a baseline analysis of the factors that affect US consumers’ current attitudes (knowledge, risk perceptions, etc.) regarding GE cotton. Multiple regression analyses were used for our models which measured purchase intentions towards GE cotton and perceived risks of GE cotton based on both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Paired and single t-tests were performed to predict the current positioning of GE cotton as a marketable alternative to organic and conventional cotton, and to determine which institutions consumer’s trust most for information on the risks and benefits of GE cotton. Our studies showed that while knowledge of cotton and agriculture is low, GE cotton was regarded more positively than conventional cotton with the potential to improve in consumer’s opinions. According to our findings, by efficiently communicating the benefits of GE cotton through trusted channels of communication (i.e. scientists, consumer organizations, the media), particularly addressing ethical concerns, policy regulation, and how the product is useful to the consumer individually, GE cotton could become a comparative market alternative to organic, at a greater available supply.Item Assertion and belief without knowledge(2010-12) McGlynn, Aidan Neil; Sainsbury, R. M. (Richard Mark)Recent epistemology has been dominated by the knowledge first approach championed by Timothy Williamson and others, and its influence continues to grow, spreading into the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and beyond. Proponents of the knowledge first approach have argued for the centrality and importance of knowledge in these areas of philosophy by arguing that there is something wrong with asserting or believing something that one doesn’t know, that assertion and belief are to be understood in terms of knowledge, and that a knowledge‐maximizing principle of charity is constitutive of the contents of one’s assertions and beliefs. I attack the knowledge first approach by developing more plausible accounts of assertion, belief, and the determination of content that break these supposed ties with knowledge.Item Breaking barriers : pioneer women elite at University College, Ibadan, 1948–1960(2017-05) Finley, Mackenzie Jean; Falola, ToyinBetween 1948 and 1960, less than one hundred women attended Nigeria’s first degree-granting university, then called University College, Ibadan. Women’s access to the school was dictated by both their class and gender. Conversely, women’s access to an elite education impacted conceptions of class and gender. In terms of class formation, the university setting reinforced the distinction between elite and the everyday woman in Nigeria. With regards to gender ideology, the colonial university became a site of epistemological confluence where women mediated multiple and shifting expectations of womanhood. This paper highlights the lives and work of some of these women pioneers at University College, Ibadan. It begins to trace the nature of the spaces in which the women operated and the people with whom they may have come into contact. These experiences and encounters shaped the lives of the women themselves, as well as impacting the nature of women’s leadership in early independent Nigeria. Ultimately, the women’s time at University College, Ibadan, facilitated a changing relationship between elite womanhood and knowledge production on the eve of Nigerian independence.Item Climate change framing in the New York Times : the media’s impact on a polarized public(2015-12) Goff, Paepin D.; Jensen, Robert, 1958-; Wilson, KristopherWhile the threat of climate change grows stronger along with the consensus of scientists about the certainty of anthropogenic causes, researchers observe an opposite effect in the public’s acceptance of climate science. While climate change is a salient topic in society, the media’s presentation of climate change has varied over time and the public remains politically divided on the issue. This content analysis of 134 New York Times’ climate change articles between 2001 and 2013 identified six different types of media frames associated with climate change coverage and investigated the presentation of scientific information within those frames. This study also investigated the congruence between scientific consensus regarding climate change, the public’s perception of current scientific knowledge and the way climate change is talked about in the media.Item From noticing to knowledge : an analysis of teacher noticing and professional knowledge in one-on-one mathematics tutoring(2019-05) Fliss, Rebecca Kathleen; Marshall, Jill Ann; azevedo, flavio s; salinas, cynthia s; TURNER, jack sTutoring is a widespread educational practice that has proven to be an effective teaching approach in many domains, including the domain of mathematics. Students who have engaged in school-based tutoring programs have outperformed their peers in numerous studies, sometimes by very large margins (Bloom, 1984; Cohen, Kulik, & Kulik, 1982; Fuchs et al., 2008; Powell, Driver, & Julian, 2015; Smith, Cobb, Farran, Cordray, & Munter, 2013). In a most notable study, Bloom (1984) showed that the average student in a tutoring group performed better than 98% of the students in a conventional group. Bloom termed this outperformance of tutored students the 2 sigma problem, stating that important research should be done to determine practical ways in which the positive effects of one-on-one tutoring, "which is too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale," can be realized in classroom settings (p. 4). This Dissertation study looks to teacher noticing as an analytical framework for understanding the practice of mathematics tutoring. The knowledge that tutors build in one-on-one tutoring interactions through the process of noticing is discussed, particularly tutors’ development of knowledge of individual students, knowledge of social and practical aspects of teaching and learning, and Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching (Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008). A new model for Knowledge for Tutoring is constructed and the widely cited Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching model is revisited. Finally, limitations and future research are discussedItem A generative epistemic theory of remembering(2014-08) James, Steven Patrick; Tye, MichaelThis dissertation is about the nature and epistemic significance of remembering. Recent philosophical work has exploited the constructive nature of memory to weaken its relationship to knowledge. Against this, I argue that memory's constructive nature actually helps us to understand memory as a source, and remembering a species, of knowledge. I provide a positive account of remembering facts, objects, and events. In light of this account, I offer philosophical insights concerning memory's relation to other epistemic sources.Item The intellectual given(2010-05) Bengson, John Thomas Steele; Sosa, David, 1966-; Bealer, George; Dancy, Jonathan; Pautz, Adam; Sainsbury, Mark; Tye, MichaelSome things we know just by thinking about them: for example, that identity is transitive, that three are more than two, that wantonly torturing innocents is wrong, and other propositions which simply strike us as true when we consider them. But how? This essay articulates and defends a rationalist answer which critically develops a significant analogy between intuition and perception. The central thesis is that intuition and perception, though different, are at a certain level of abstraction the same kind of state, and states of this kind are, by their very nature, poised to play a distinctive epistemic role. Specifically, in the case of intuition, we encounter an intellectual state that is so structured as to provide justified and even knowledgeable belief without requiring justification in turn—something which may, thus, be thought of as given. The essay proceeds in three stages. Stage one advances a fully general and psychologically realistic account of the nature of intuition, namely, as an intellectual presentation of an apparent truth. Stage two provides a modest treatment of the epistemic status of intuition, in particular, how intuition serves as a source of immediate prima facie justification. Stage three outlines a response to Benacerraf-style worries about intuitive knowledge regarding abstract objects (e.g., numbers, sets, and values); the proposal is a constitutive, rather than causal, explanation of the means by which a given intuition connects a thinker to the fact intuited.Item Knowledge and social identity(2018-10-08) Toole, Briana Marie; Dogramaci, Sinan; Buchanan, Ray; Sosa, David; Antony, Louise; Schoenfield, MiriamThere is a tension, allegedly, between traditional epistemology and standpoint epistemology. Traditional epistemologists, on the one hand, hold that knowledge is sensitive to epistemic (truth-conducive) features alone. By contrast, standpoint epistemologists argue that knowledge, in some cases, is sensitive to non-epistemic features related to the agent's social identity. My goal here is to vindicate this thesis. Though the thesis of standpoint epistemology is controversial, it plays an important role in illuminating a phenomenon that emerges in our epistemic practices - epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression occurs when an epistemic agent is excluded from the practices of knowledge production. If the aim of epistemology is to bring us closer to truth, then any practice that subverts this aim ought to be thoroughly investigated. However, as I will argue, our capacity to root out epistemic oppression is limited to the extent that we continue operating within the traditional epistemological framework. In this dissertation, I will argue that the traditional epistemologist can either acquiesce to the standpoint epistemologist's claim that knowledge is sensitive to non-epistemic features related to an agent's social identity, or consider social identity an epistemic feature. I further clarify the standpoint thesis, and examine why standpoint epistemology is able, where traditional epistemology fails, to understand epistemic oppression. I close by considering applications of the thesis to other questions in epistemology, with a particular eye towards issues in the peer disagreement literatureItem Physical activity awareness, knowledge, and behavior in college students(2018-08-17) Shangguan, Rulan; Keating, Xiaofen; Labmdin, Dorothy; Harrison, Louis; Liu, MinThe purpose of this project was to examine college students’ physical activity awareness in relation to their knowledge and physical activity levels, as well as the factors influencing their awareness. The secondary purpose was to develop and validate an instrument for measuring college students’ physical activity awareness. Three studies were conducted sequentially using a mixed-method approach. The first study used a phenomenological perspective to understand college students’ physical activity experience through focus group interview, concluding with four proposed domains that captures college students’ physical activity awareness including: personal physical activity level, social support, environment, and recommendation knowledge. In addition, the results indicated a lack of self-assessment in personal physical activity and awareness of physical activity recommendations. The second study involved multiple phases for instrument development. Participants for the content validity study were 10 experts in the field of physical activity and health. Items with unacceptable agreement (i.e. < 90%) were removed and remaining items were revised based on the suggestions of the experts. The instrument was first pilot tested among 50 undergraduate students for item clarity and the feasibility of using the online survey, and then tested for reliability and construct validity in 994 college students. The results indicated acceptable to good internal consistency (alpha ranging from .74 to .92), and an excellent model fit. The third study measured college students’ physical activity awareness, knowledge of physical activity recommendation, and self-reported physical activity using the validated instrument in study II and explored the relationships among these variables. Effects of gender, ethnicity, major and class standing on physical activity awareness were also examined. The results suggested college students had slightly moderate levels of PA awareness in the four components (ranging from 4.21 to 5.24 out of 7), and seemly overestimated activity levels. It was found that awareness was positively associated with knowledge (r = .220, p < .01) and behavior (r = .325, p < .01), however, no significant correlations were found between knowledge and behavior. Significant major effects were found in awareness, knowledge and behavior, suggesting the role of education in raising physical activity awareness and fostering physically active lifestyles. The path analysis results also confirmed significant direct effects from all the four physical activity awareness components on total physical activity level, providing future directions for physical activity promotion in higher education settings.Item Rationale management as the basis of knowledge preservation for enterprise systems value-added resellers(2010-12) Otero Lanuza, Miguel Angel; Barber, K. Suzanne; Graser, ThomasEnterprise systems (ES) implementation, especially Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP), is an extensively researched topic in recent years. Existing papers focus mainly on the success or failure of the project analyzed from the client’s standpoint. Although authors agree that a successful implementation requires the participation of consultants from a Value-Added Reseller (VAR), little or no work has been published that examines the topic from this perspective. While it is true that this kind of implementation is not strictly related to the traditional software development lifecycle, the two have many things in common and the former can benefit from software engineering techniques. Intellectual capital found in the heads of consultants, developers, project managers, and all other project stakeholders is VAR’s main asset as well as in most of software-related organizations. Hence, it is critical to preserve it in order to safeguard the foundation of these organizations. The goal of this paper is to propose rationale management as the basis of knowledge preservation for enterprise systems VARs. Enterprise systems implementation process, including its actors, challenges, and the knowledge that surrounds it, is examined to justify the proposal. To assess the perception of real-world VARs about knowledge management applicability and their existing strategies, a questionnaire was applied to 3 executives. Their answers confirmed that knowledge is considered vital to their organizations but the methodologies as well as the tools currently utilized to preserve it are rudimentary and distant from the theoretical literature.Item A sociological analysis of Ibn Khaldun's theory : a study in the sociology of knowledge(1950-06) Wardī, ʻAlī; Moore, Harry E. (Harry Estill)Ibn Khaldun is a great Moslem thinker of the fourteenth century (b. 1332, d. 1406 A. D.). Modern writers are inclined to consider him as a pioneer or a precursor in the science of society and the philosophy of history. Some of them consider him as the first sociologist in the history of mankind and even the founder of modern sociology. His Prolegomena, which is the primary subject of study in the present work, is regarded by one authority as one of the six important monographic works in general sociology. The aim of this dissertation is not to study either Ibn Khaldun or his theory in minute detail. In fact, other modern students have successfully achieved that task. The aim of this work is, rather, a different one. Our aim here is to see Ibn Khaldun in a different light, or, to use Mannheim's term, through a perspective which is greatly different from the customary one. Ibn Khaldun lived in a culture quite different from our present culture, and was accustomed to view the world within a frame of reference with which we are perhaps completely unfamiliar. The first duty that lies, therefore, before us, in order to be able to understand Ibn Khaldun, is to reconstruct his perspective or his frame of reference anew, and to try to look at the social phenomena through it. In this work, the space which is devoted to the discussion of Ibn Khaldun's theory per se is small in comparison to that devoted to the reconstruction of the perspective and the categories of thought according to which Ibn Khaldun and his fellow writers viewed their world. This work is, as its subtitle shows, a study in the sociology of knowledge. Ibn Khaldun is then taken as a point in case. He is studied primarily to show how his theory and the theories produced in his culture can fit into the general scheme of the sociology of knowledge as recently developed by modern sociologists.Item Theaetetus' first definition : logos ou phaulos(2010-12) Lasell, Leah Anne; Hankinson, R. J.; Koons, Robert C.; Pautz, Adam; White, Stephen A.Socrates and Theaetetus consider and reject three different definitions of knowledge in the Theaetetus. The first of these is the thesis that knowledge is perception. According to the received reading Plato's consideration of the thesis that knowledge is perception is limited to the consideration of the naive and implausible thesis that immediate sense-perception is knowledge and there is no knowledge apart from immediate sense-perception. This reading, which limits the philosophic interest of Platos consideration of the thesis that knowledge is perception, follows from a widespread misunderstanding of Socrates' reasons for introducing Protagoras and Heraclitus which circumscribes their role in the dialogue to supplying two theses, epistemological relativism and metaphysical flux, which are sufficient or perhaps necessary conditions for the thesis that knowledge is perception. I will show that Socrates introduces Protagoras and Heraclitus, not simply because they provide the epistemological or metaphysical framework within which Theaetetus' definition holds good, but because each man is committed to the thesis that knowledge is perception. Protagoras' sophistic expertise will be classed as a kind of empirical knowledge which bases itself on past and present perceptions and makes educated predictions of future perceptions. While Heraclitus' theory of flux will lead to a radical skepticism which rejects the possibility that there should be any knowledge of the world apart from perception. Socrates will give arguments against both of these ways of understanding the thesis that knowledge is perception. Plato thus articulates, develops, and ultimately rejects three different ways of understanding Theaetetus' initial definition of knowledge.Item Weaving experiences : a study of the learning experiences of two Maya weavers in Guatemala(2020-02-05) Lopez, Elainy Rebeca; Bain, ChristinaThis thesis is an autoethnography that explores the informal learning and teaching experiences held by two Maya weavers from Guatemala. I traveled to Guatemala where I conducted interviews and made observations in order understand how weavers learned to weave, as well as how they maintain the tradition alive by passing their knowledge on to younger generations. Through this research, I began to see the significant role ancestral and familial connections played within the weaving experiences of the Maya weavers. Culture and tradition were at the center of the weaving process, but the creativity and ingenuity of the weavers allowed for changes to occur within the weaving practice allowing it to stay alive. The experiences and perspectives of Maya weavers are often overlooked, but through this research I share how learning more about their informal learning and teaching experiences influenced my personal art educator pedagogy. Exposure to multiple perspectives and experiences can help art educators, like myself, create more inclusive art curriculum, as well as learn about different forms of teaching art that can potentially apply to the art classroom.