This thesis aims to discover, understand and appreciate the history of New Port Richey. New Port Richey's growth was affected by many of the same social changes taking place all over Florida, most notably the coming of the railroad, the popularity of the automobile, and the land boom of the 1920s. Post-World War II prosperity, pest control, air conditioning, and interstate highways attracted people to this city nicknamed the "Gateway to Tropical Florida." Unique to this area was the Legend of Chasco, an invented tradition to draw tourists and new residents to the area, and the beautiful Pithlachascotee River meandering through the heart of town as it makes its way to the Gulf of Mexico. New Port Richey hoped to become the "Hollywood of the South." What remains distinctive about New Port Richey today? What are its special features and characteristics that separate it from hundreds of other locales in the Tampa Bay metropolis? My methodology is simple; I will analyze and evaluate information gathered from available primary and secondary sources: Interviews, observations, newspapers, books, articles and government documents. Chapter one analyzes the invented tradition of Chasco, which is a part of the history and heritage of this community. New Port Richey wished to cash in on the land boom of the 1920s. Having little history of its own, the invented tradition of Chasco was born, first celebrated in 1922; it is still celebrated today. Chapters two and three chronicle the history, as well as the tales of New Port Richey, from its first inhabitants and pioneer settlers to present-day New Port Richey. Chapter four introduces the land known as the Starkey Wilderness Park and Preserve, a supplier of West Pasco's freshwater supply, which lies just east of the city. Starkey donated several thousand acres to the Southwest Florida Water Management District for his dream of permanently protecting the land and its resources for future generations. Uncontrolled growth and development has eliminated evidence of New Port Richey being the "Gateway to Tropical Florida." Land and water conservation needs to be a top priority. New Port Richey, no longer has that "special something."

One of the long-standing problems in artificial intelligence is the development of intelligent agents with complete visual understanding. Understanding entails recognition of scene attributes such as actors, objects and actions as well as reasoning about the common semantic structure that combines these attributes into a coherent description. While significant milestones have been achieved in the field of computer vision, majority of the work has been concentrated on supervised visual recognition where complex visual representations are learned and a few discrete categories or labels are assigned to these representations. This implies a closed world where the underlying assumption is that all environments contain the same objects and events, which are in one-to-one correspondence with the ground evidence in the image. Hence, the learned knowledge is limited to the annotated training set. An open world, on the other hand, does not assume the distribution of semantics and requires generalization beyond the training annotations. Increasingly complex models require massive amounts of training data and offer little to no explainability due to the lack of transparency in the decision-making process. The strength of artificial intelligence systems to offer explanations for their decisions is central to building user confidence and structuring smart human-machine interactions. In this dissertation, we develop an inherently explainable approach for generating rich interpretations of visual scenes. We move towards an open world open-domain visual understanding by decoupling the ideas of recognition and reasoning. We integrate common sense knowledge from large knowledge bases such as ConceptNet and the representation learning capabilities of deep learning approaches in a pattern theory formalism to interpret a complex visual scene. To be specific, we first define and develop the idea of contextualization to model and establish complex semantic relationships among concepts grounded in visual data. The resulting semantic structures, called interpretations allow us to represent the visual scene in an intermediate representation that can then be used as the source of knowledge for various modes of expression such as labels, captions and even question answering. Second, we explore the inherent explainability of such visual interpretations and define key components for extending the notion of explainability to intelligent agents for visual recognition. Finally, we describe a self-supervised model for segmenting untrimmed videos into its constituent events. We show that this approach can segment videos without the need for supervision - neither implicit nor explicit. Combined, we argue that these approaches offer an elegant path to inherently explainable, open domain visual understanding while negating the need for human supervision in the form of labels and/or captions. We show that the proposed approach can advance the state-of-the-art results in complex benchmarks to handle data imbalance, complex semantics, and complex visual scenes without the need for vast amounts of domain-specific training data. Extensive experiments on several publicly available datasets show the efficacy of the proposed approaches. We show that the proposed approaches outperform weakly-supervised and unsupervised baselines by up to 24% and achieves competitive segmentation results compared to fully supervised baselines. The self-supervised approach for video segmentation complements this top-down inference with efficient bottom-up processing, resulting in an elegant formalism for open-domain visual understanding.

Adolescence is an important period of development, where health and health behaviours have substantial impact on health and lifestyle in adulthood. Prevalence of mental illness are increasing in this group, where depression account for a substantial part of the cases. Increasing evidence present exercise as an effective treatment for adolescent with mild or moderate depression, but investigations of long-term effects are required. Qualitative studies of adolescents’ experiences of exercise as treatment for depression may lead to a greater understanding of favourable arrangements of future treatment plans to facilitate adherence and effects on depressive symptoms. The salutogenic concept sense of coherence (SOC) is associated with mental health and important for behaviour change, such as initiating an exercise treatment program. This study described adolescents’ long-term experiences of a group-based exercise intervention for depression, within the framework of SOC. Fourteen adolescents met the inclusion criteria and were individually interviewed at one-year follow-up, after their participation in a 14-week group-exercise intervention for depression. Interviews were analysed with abductive qualitative content analysis, initially using an inductive approach to create nine sub-categories and four categories. The deductive part included sorting categories into the three SOC domains manageability, comprehensibility, or meaningfulness. The consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research (COREQ) have been considered when reporting the procedures. Results revealed that the setting for the exercise intervention offered a supportive environment which made the participation manageable, while insights during the intervention facilitated comprehensibility. Furthermore, the experiences of progress in health and lifestyle together with a belief in the future that emerged during the intervention made the experience meaningful. The connection in the group was appreciated, and a feeling more energised and clearer in the head facilitated functionality in daily life. This study concludes that a group-based exercise intervention as treatment for depression can be an encouraging and valuable long-term experience for the adolescents, potentially influencing health, and health behaviours in a positive direction through SOC. The study is further suggesting that SOC may provide useful guidance for further development of exercise as treatment for depression.

Due to the Ukrainian refugee crisis, millions of people had to leave their home country. As a neighbor of Ukraine, Hungary is highly affected by this crisis and thousands of volunteers help refugees in this difficult situation. As their role is central in emergency response, the health and wellbeing of volunteers are of high importance. The aim of this study was to examine the sense of coherence among Hungarian volunteers working with Ukrainian refugees. Sense of coherence is a core concept in Aaron Antonovsky’s salutogenic model (1979), and reflects on the psychological, social and cultural resources which help people to cope with everyday stressors. In order to explore how this theory can be applied in the context of volunteering, 6 semi-structured interviews were conducted and a deductive qualitative analysis was made with the sense of coherence theory as a framework. It resulted in three predetermined categories based on the three dimensions of sense of coherence: (1) Comprehensibility, (2) Manageability and (3) Meaningfulness. The analysis of qualitative data resulted in a total of twelve themes within the three categories (e.g. Effective communication and information flow are important to me.; Supportive team spirit and collaboration are important to me.; A strong sense of service gives me strength.; I believe helping others is its own reward.). The findings suggest that the concept of sense of coherence can be applied in the context of volunteering, revealing key aspects of comprehending, managing and making sense of volunteer work. Therefore, interventions based on this salutogenic approach would improve the mental health and well-being of volunteers through enabling them to cope with the challenges of volunteer work.

Thesis advisor: Betty Leask / Thesis advisor: Laura Rumbley / A record number of incoming international students from China are studying in universities in the United States today. It is important to understand this group for several reasons. Chinese students compose the largest group of international population in the U.S. Higher Education and learning about them assists with a better institutional practice including internationalization strategies. It is also important to assess their well-being in a foreign environment to improve student services. This research explores students’ perceptions and feelings in residence halls. It investigated factors that affect first-year undergraduate Chinese international students’ sense of belonging by exploring their experiences at Boston College. Using a qualitative and phenomenological approach, this study examined feedbacks from international Chinese students and provides important insights into their daily experiences. This study focused on exploring Chinese international students’ relationships with their roommates, and residential staff, to find out if these relationships influenced their sense of belonging to the community. As a partial replicate, partial follow-up study of Yao’s (2014) research, both guided by Hurtado (2013)’s framework, findings suggested that multiple elements serve as barriers and bridges to Chinese international students’ adaptation process, which include the influences of language, cultural difference, staff professionalism, and institutional internationalization plan. The study concluded with implications for practice at Boston College which may potentially be of interest to other institutions. Suggestions for future research are also identified. The study indicated a critical need for university staff to assess, examine, and explore the diverse campus culture by paying more attention to a sense of belonging to continue with the facilitation of internationalization for the overall success of international students. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

archives@tulane.edu / In response to extant literature on college students’ sense of belonging that analyzes the concept as a relatively siloed phenomenon, this study offers a mixed methods exploratory analysis of college students’ sense of belonging that examines multiple domains of college life simultaneously. Quantitative results reveal that students fall within three classes of sense of belonging – Low, Medium, High – and that sense of belonging to a campus organization is least impactful on the classes whereas sense of belonging to a friend group is most impactful. Key factors impact a students’ probability of being in a particular class of sense of belonging: Students from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds as well as non-Honors students are most likely to experience a low sense of belonging, and students from relatively high socioeconomic statuses are least likely to experience a low sense of belonging. Qualitative results analyze students’ definitions of sense of belonging and unpack aspects of the quantitative results. First, students’ definitions reveal four categories of sense of belonging: Self-Centrics, Co-Creators, Seekers, and Conformists. Second, campus organizations offer a framework by which students meet friends, and the importance of this structure goes largely unnoticed by students. On the contrary, students highlight the importance of sense of belonging to a friend group as instrumental to developing sense of belonging in other domains. Third, the theme of exclusion operates as a foil to the similarity that informs interviewees’ sense of belonging. Exclusion refers to perceptions that one is an insider or outsider, and a key component of exclusion is the degree to which students have agency in their experiences of exclusion. Fourth, Gateways of Belonging and Conduits of Belonging offer a means by which students strengthen sense of belonging in various domains. Gateways of Belonging refer to frameworks that bring together students around shared experience or purpose. Conduits of Belonging refer to specific roles that people fill in such a way that they model what sense of belonging can look like in a specific domain. Keywords: College students’ sense of belonging; mixed methods; latent class analysis; semi-structured interviews; Gateways of Belonging; Conduits of Belonging / 1 / Robert Alexander Ellison

Lung cancer patients generally experience high levels of physical and psychological distress and decreased quality of life (QOL). Sense of coherence (SOC) has been conceptualized as a personality orientation reflecting the degree to which an individual perceives their world as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful. The present study investigated the associations of SOC with QOL in lung cancer. It also examined potential psychological mediators by which SOC may exert its influences on QOL. Fifty-six participants with non-small cell lung cancer were administered self-report assessments of SOC, QOL and psychological distress. Results revealed that SOC was positively associated with QOL and this relationship may be mediated by depressive symptoms. The current study supports the notion that SOC may be a protective factor with regard to psychological adjustment and QOL in cancer survivors.

In recent years, hunting and agrarian communities have increasingly risen in opposition to nature conservation policy that is perceived to infringe on their traditional ways of life. They charge ‘conservationists’ with having a disproportionate influence on policy and maintain that the state system now disenfranchises their needs and interests. In this paper, we suggest this particular brand of resistance can be illuminated by neo-Marxist social movement framework (Cox and Nilsen, 2014) on the dialectic of movements-from-below and movements-from-above, competing for hegemony in the context of an organic crisis of the system. Our paper examines the role of Swedish hunters’ activation of a counter-hegemonic ‘good sense’ to oppose the hegemonic common sense established by wolf conservationists in the state system. The case of Swedish hunters rising in resistance toward the newfound hegemony of wolf conservation is hence resolved as the rise of a right-wing movement from below, mobilized on the basis of defensive, conservative and agrarian values. The novel contribution of this paper lies in its examination of the (often) self-professed limits of hunters’ distinctively agrarian good sense, in light of their own reluctance as an oppositional social movement from below. Not only do hunters exhibit considerable reluctance in regard to their own ‘movement’ identity and ambivalence in regard to hegemony. But we argue that from a conceptual perspective the empowerment of a counter-hegemonic good sense as in traditional resistance studies can, at best, result in a dialectical reversal of movement positions with conservationists, without appropriate mediation or compromise. This leads us to some brief recommendations from democratic theory to mediate between the below and above movements of hunters and conservationists.

This study was conducted in Gauteng Province and Tshwane North District. The study explored the poor performance of learners in Mathematics in the early grades. Learners’ performance is dependent on teacher input in class. Learners’ Mathematics performance is also influenced by various aspects contributing towards development such as nutrition, parental literacy which includes teachers’ knowledge of content and language in the subject taught. The poor Mathematics performance is exacerbated by lack of visual perceptual skills as the basis for learning. This study sought to investigate whether early grade teachers met this requirement. The proposed research investigated the teaching of number sense in the early grades. The research was informed by daily experience as subject advisor. The study was informed by theories of both Vygotsky and Piaget. Teaching in the Foundation Phase is mainly through group work and play and therefore this theory is appropriate. The primary research question for this study was as follows: How do teachers experience teaching number sense in the Foundation Phase? Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and observation. Purposive sampling was used to select participants for this study. Teachers from Grades 1-3 were interviewed and it was found that many lacked content knowledge and different strategies to teach number sense. Furthermore, teachers indicated that there was minimal support from HODs and subject advisors. They agreed that they needed more capacity building workshops to strengthen their knowledge and understanding of teaching number sense. The study revealed that teachers teach Mathematics in Foundation Phase without the relevant qualification. Due to the lack of knowledge and understanding of the Foundation Phase content, strategies and methods of teaching, teachers experienced challenges mainly in teaching number sense in the early grades. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Early Childhood Education / MEd / Unrestricted

The thesis is focused on researching the recent phenomena of the emerging virtual Esperanto communities. The aim is to understand how feeling of belonging and connectedness are generated online. The theoretical framework that the study follows is Sense of Community theory by McMillan and Chavis (1986). It presents 4 components that combined together create a strong bond within a community – membership, influence, shared emotional value, and reinforcement of needs, later revised to spirit, trust, art and trade respectively. This particular theory helped significantly structure the way the analysis was carried out. The main results from the qualitative and quantitative data are that the sense of connectedness the respondents demonstrated to the Esperanto communities was strong. The interview participants have been members for more than 10 years, and have indicated they believed they shared similar values and needs with their co-members, but most strong ones with the groups they shared other interests except Esperanto. The Internet, as all interview participants confirmed, has played a huge role for the development of the Esperanto language and culture and currently connects thousands of Esperantists worldwide and provides them with a space to be producers of their media, Esperanto. Furthermore, some statements demonstrated that not speaking the language results in excluding people from the group, excluding also new members who used auxiliary languages (e.g. English or German) along with Esperanto, to help their communication at Esperanto gatherings. Finally, there were also found signs of segregation among an older generation of Esperantists, who made division between Esperanto speakers and non-speakers and between the different Esperanto institutions.