Despite calls for concerted, two-way engagement and for the development of reciprocal partnerships between institutions of higher education (IHE's) and their communities, IHE's continue to implement a disparate menu of activities that prove largely ineffective at addressing society's most challenging social and environmental problems. A relatively new conception of engagement lays out a framework by which IHE's engage with communities in democratic ways. Democratic engagement values inclusive, reciprocal problem-oriented work that brings together university and community stakeholders as co-generators of knowledge and solutions. The resulting democratically engaged partnerships position diverse members to take on roles as collaborators and problem solvers. They are mutually transformed through the processes of reciprocation, power diffusion, and knowledge generation. <br>How these democratically oriented roles and processes emerge and come to be enacted is unknown. Neither the literature on democratic engagement nor that on community-university partnerships addresses this gap. This dissertation study purposefully selected a case of community-university partnership that has a high degree of democratic engagement. Through interviews, observation, and document review, qualitative evidence was collected of the ways in which the roles and processes of democratically engaged partnerships emerged and were enacted. Atlas.ti 6.2 was used to code and retrieve themes related to democratic and technocratic engagement, stakeholder roles and processes, and the emergence and application of roles and processes. <br>Understanding how democratically oriented roles and processes emerge and are adopted is critical to building democratically engaged partnerships that support systems of democratic engagement. If we do not know how to be democratic within our partnerships, and if we cannot teach others, we will not be able to answer the calls for more purposeful, reciprocal engagement with our communities. / School of Education / Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program for Education Leaders (IDPEL) / EdD / Dissertation

Online crowdfunding, an emerging business model, has been thriving for the last decade. It enables small firms and individuals to conduct financial transactions that would previously been impossible. Along with unprecedented opportunities, two fundamental issues still hinder crowdfunding ability to fulfill its potentials: the information asymmetry and the understanding of the impact of crowdfunding. Both are actually exacerbated by the "virtual" nature of these marketplaces. The success of this new market therefore critically depends on both improving existing mechanisms or designing new ones to mitigate the issue of unobservable fundraiser quality, which can lead to adverse selection and market collapse; and better understanding the impact of crowdfunding, and particularly its offline impact, which will allow the effective allocation of scarce resources. My dissertation includes three essays around these topics, using data from debt-, reward- and donation-based crowdfunding contexts, respectively. My first two essays focus on two popular but understudied components in crowdfunding campaigns, texts and videos, and aim at predicting fundraiser quality by quantifying texts and videos. In particular, the first essay focuses on developing scalable approaches to extracting linguistic features from texts provided by borrowers when they request funds; and on using those features to explain and predict the repayment probability of the problematic loans. The second essay focuses on videos in reward crowdfunding, and preliminary results show excellent predictive performance and strong associations between multi-dimensional video information and crowdfunding campaign success and quality. The last essay investigates the impact of educational crowdfunding on school performance, using data from a crowdfunding platform for educational purposes. The results show that educational crowdfunding plays a role far beyond simply a financial source. Overall, my dissertation identifies the non-financial impact of crowdfunding as well as potential opportunities for efficiency improvement in the crowdfunding market, which have thus far not been documented in the literature.

Background: Individuals experiencing negative and potentially traumatic life events are at increased risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors; however, suicidal outcomes are not inevitable. Individuals who attribute negative life events to external, transient, and specific factors, rather than internal, stable, and global self-characteristics, may experience fewer deleterious outcomes, including suicidal behavior. Aims: This study examines the moderating effect of explanatory style on the relationship between negative life experiences and suicide ideation in a college student sample. Methods: A total of 138 participants (73% female) were recruited from a rural. Eastern college and completed a self-report psychosocial assessment. Results: Optimistic explanatory style mitigates the influence of negative and potentially traumatic life events on thoughts of suicide, above and beyond the effects of hopelessness and depression. Conclusions: Beliefs about the origin, pervasiveness, and potential recurrence of a negative life event may affect psychological outcomes. Optimistic explanatory style was associated with reduced suicide ideation, whereas pessimistic explanatory style was associated with increased thoughts of suicide. Optimistic reframing of negative life events for clients may have treatment implications for the prevention of suicidal activity.

Much research relating to children and death has focused on the age-graded developmental model originally proposed by Nagy in the late 1940s. Children are alleged to pass from an infantile to a mature view, seeing death first as separation, then as the result of intervention by a supernatural being, and finally as an irreversible biological process. Accepted theory for thirty years, scholars have since noted difficulty in duplicating Nagy's findings and have come to question the universal application of the developmental model. Bluebond-Langner proposes an alternative model in which all views of death are present in all stages of development. She maintains that the particular orientation a child displays is a result of personal and social experiences.

Chapter 1 of Phenomenal Acquaintance is devoted to taking care of some preliminary issues. I begin by distinguishing those states of awareness in virtue of which we’re acquainted with the phenomenal characters of our experiences from those states of awareness some claim are at the very nature of experience. Then I reconcile the idea that experience is transparent with the claim that we can be acquainted with phenomenal character. In Chapter 2 I set up a dilemma that is the primary focus of the dissertation. In the first part of this chapter I argue that phenomenal acquaintance has three key features, what I call its ‘directness’, ‘thickness’, and ‘infallibility’. In the second part I argue, however, that it’s really quite puzzling how thoughts about phenomenal character (or any thoughts, for that matter) could have them. In the next two chapters I consider how we might resolve the dilemma described above. I begin in Chapter 3 by considering an account of phenomenal acquaintance inspired by Bertrand Russell’s discussion of acquaintance. The general idea here is to excise mental representation from phenomenal acquaintance, and I ultimately reject the proposal. Chapter 4 is the core chapter of Phenomenal Acquaintance. In it I propose an account of phenomenal acquaintance that doesn’t excise mental representation. My account is comprised of three theses. First, token experiences are complex and have instances of phenomenal properties as components. Second, instances of phenomenal properties are mental representations, and they represent themselves. Third, the attention relevant to phenomenal acquaintance is underwritten by self-representation. I argue that my account explains how phenomenal acquaintance is direct, thick, and infallible, thereby resolving our dilemma. I argue in Chapter 5 that my account of phenomenal acquaintance explains why there is an explanatory gap between the phenomenal and non-phenomenal truths. Accordingly, I conclude that the explanatory gap doesn’t pose a problem for physicalism. Here I implement what has come to be called the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ for responding to the challenge posed by the explanatory gap.

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Credit spread is the extra risk-reward that an investor is bearing for investing in corporate bonds instead of government bonds. Structural models, which are simple in their framework, fail to explain the occurring credit spread and underestimate the predicted credit spread. Hence, the need for new models and exploration of systematic and idiosyncratic variables arose. The present paper aims to investigate if the predictability of lower-medium investment grade bonds and non-investment grade bonds credit spread can be improved by incorporating systematic and idiosyncratic variables into a fixed effect panel data regression model, and whether the selected variables’ significance has high influence on credit spread or not. Initial results showed that fixed effect panel data regression model underperforms the structural models and under predicts the actual credit spread. The applied model explained 13.5% of the lower-medium investment grade bonds credit spread and 8.5% of non-investment grade bonds. Further, systematic variables have higher influence on lower-medium investment grade bonds and idiosyncratic variables have higher influence on non-investment grade bonds. The predictability of credit spread can be improved by employing correct explanatory variables which are selected based on the characteristics of the sample size.

In this essay I defend the notion of deductive explanation mainly against two types of putative counterexamples: those found in genuinely indeterministic systems and those found in complex dynamic systems. Using Railton's notions of explanatory information and ideal explanatory text, deductivism is defended in an indeterministic setting. Furthermore, an argument against non-deductivism that hinges on peculiarities of probabilistic causality is presented. The use of the notion of an ideal explanatory text gives rise to problems in accounting for explanations in complex dynamic systems, regardless of whether they are deterministic or not. These problems are considered in the essay and a solution is suggested. This solution forces the deductivist to abandon the requirement that an explanation consists of a deductive argument, but it is argued that the core of deductivism is saved in so far as we, for full explanations, can still adhere to the fundamental requirement: If A explains B, then A is inconsistent with anything inconsistent with B.