<p> The purpose of this project was to write a grant proposal to fund a transitional housing program for disenfranchised minority youth between the ages of 16-24 who are students at Youth Justice Coalition (YJC) in Inglewood, California. This program will provide underprivileged youth with an opportunity to have a basic life need met, while developing autonomous abilities that will serve as a core foundation to help youth who are identified as marginal at best to reach self-actualization, thus breaking the generational cycle of depravity and immobilization. The transitional housing program's foundational core is centered on the Ecological Perspective, which takes into account not only the individual, but also the environment from which the individual came as a basis to better understand how to best meet the needs of those from various walks of life. The submission and/or funding of this grant was not a requirement for the successful completion of this project.</p>

<p> This dissertation argues that bullying is a fundamental response to bullies&rsquo; feelings of insecurity. Past research has found factors associated with bullying to include socioeconomic status and propensities towards violent behavior. Contextual factors posited here that produce the feelings of insecurity, which lead to bullying, include peer group dynamics, school climates, and teaching. </p><p> In relationship to peer groups, the theoretical framework of this dissertation draws primarily from the theories of Robert E. Crosnoe and Dorte M. Sondergaard. The assumption is that students are socially embedded in peer groups in which they struggle for social status (Crosnoe 2011) and in many cases experience the threat of social marginalization (Sondergaard 2012). Sondergaard, in particular, theorizes that the more insecure students feel about their social status in peer groups, the more likely they are to resort to bullying behavior. </p><p> All multivariate analyses in this dissertation are limited to white, black, and Latino boys. The resulting sample comprises N=6,491 student observations nested within 153 schools. The nested sampling structure requires multi-level modeling (MLM) for the calculation of unbiased estimates.</p><p> I find that individual-level student background characteristics are stronger predictors of bully identification than the school context, as measured by student body composition and teaching style factors. In addition, social status insecurity is a mediating factor for many of the student- and school-level predictors of bullying. </p><p> The dissertation distinguishes four types of schools, each of which is above or below average on two major dimensions. The first dimension is academic support (i.e., how caring and responsive teachers are), while the other is academic press (i.e., how strict and demanding they are). </p><p> I find that black male students are more likely to self-identify as bullies in schools that are below average on both academic support and academic press, compared to those that are above average on both. The pattern for Latino boys is different. For them, self-reported bullying is higher when the school rates high on academic support, but low on academic press. </p><p> I find no statistically significant role for teaching styles in predicting the amount of bully identification among white males.</p>

<p> Employee volunteering and service learning programs both enable large numbers of individuals to work together to address some of the most challenging problems in our world today. A large volume of academic research exists on service learning and much less academic research has been done on employee volunteering; there is very little research that connects these two fields. Student volunteers report developing skills in areas such as problem solving and decision making, the same skills employees require to be successful on their jobs. This inquiry combines lessons from volunteer narratives, input from volunteer professionals, and existing volunteer and service learning theories to create recommendations for improving employee volunteer experiences. </p><p> Narrative method was chosen for this study to capture the lived experiences of the two types of volunteers and their impact on the nonprofits they serve. Three case studies were created from narrative interviews with selected student and employee volunteers, and triangulated by interviews with nonprofit staff. Knowledge gained was crafted into case level and then cross case recommendations. Once developed, these recommendations were validated through a process of progressive analysis. The ultimate objective is to increase participation and improve outcomes for employee volunteers. When employee volunteering is well designed and well managed, the experiences can be beneficial to volunteers, their companies, and their communities.</p>

<p> This qualitative research of the life stories of ten spiritual healers is focused on the threads of their journeys that led them to this unusual line of work, and their descriptions of their inner experiences while they do their work. Spiritual healers use some form of prayer, a communication with the world of spirit, as a significant part of their healing practices. Their stories reveal their controversial beliefs in invisible dimensions and how and why they believe they interact within these dimensions to experience their own mental, emotional, and spiritual healing, and offer this to others. A recurrent theme throughout participants&rsquo; lives is their ability to find positive meaning and personal growth through unusual adversity. They all have a strong sense of calling, of life purpose, that drew them to this work in divergent and fascinating ways, many having this awareness even as young children, with self-actualization as an expected purpose and outcome in life.</p>

<p> As internal migration started to increase in the late 1970s in China, ethnic minorities have also participated in this demographic event to improve their livelihood. However, minority migration has been much neglected in the current literature. To fill the gap in the literature, the dissertation aims to: (1) examine migration selectivity and destination selection process of ethnic minorities in China; (2) investigate whether migration can lead to upward socioeconomic mobility for ethnic minorities; (3) assess the extent of socioeconomic integration of minority migrants at destination places; (4) reveal and explain differences in patterns of migration and destination adaption across ethnic groups; and (5) uncover temporal patterns of minority migration, migration outcomes, minority integration at destinations. To achieve these goals, this dissertation makes use of the micro-data of the 1990 China population census, the 1995 mini-census, the 2000 census and the 2005 mini-census. </p><p> Regarding minority migration process, model results suggest that education selectivity of minority migrants is mostly positive, but it is only consistently observed for the Zhuang. While migrant networks and co-ethnic networks does not matter much for the out-migration decision for minorities, they do weigh more on minority migrants&rsquo; decision as to where to go. Minority migrants tend to go to places with larger migrant networks. In general, they also go to places with more co-ethnics, but the effect of co-ethnic networks reveals important group-specific differences. </p><p> Minorities can mostly benefit from engaging in migration. However, what is interesting is the finding that the Uyghurs stand out as the only minority group that shows a trend of deteriorating migration outcomes. Moreover, evidence also reveals that for the Uyghurs and the Zhuang, long-distance migration is not more beneficial than short-distance migration. <?Pub _newline></p><p> Finally, very different patterns of incorporation at destination communities emerge from the analyses. The relative position of the Uyghur migrants to the Han is declining over time and in the most recent time period, they are doing significantly worse than their Han counterparts. The Hui and the Koreans are doing more successfully. Surprisingly, the Zhuang migrants are disadvantaged to the Han and this disadvantage is consistent across time.</p>

<p> The goal of this qualitative single-case study was to investigate the problem with more than 50% of Americans admitting they are not prepared for natural disasters before they occur. The sample for this study was 24 purposively selected Hurricane Sandy survivors in New York and New Jersey who were 25 years of age or older. Data was collected through ten open-ended interview questions presented during telephone interviews. This study was guided by the theoretical framework of normative risk management decision making. Thematic analysis was used to code and analyze the data collected. This study was focused on answering two broad research questions related to why more than 50% of Americans are not prepared for natural disasters before they occur and the factors that prevent them from preparing. The major recommendations for future research and practice were related to the lack of a distinction between individuals who perceive they are prepared (who are deemed unprepared according to regulatory guidelines) and the possibility they are included with the more than 50% of Americans who are not prepared although they require modification of preparedness behavior while individuals who are not prepared require adoption of preparedness behavior. The other recommendations describe the factors that prevent individuals from preparing as lack of notification and signaling communications that indicate a natural disaster is imminent and expected to be severe; and individual disbelief in the validity of the communications. This study contributes to filling the gap in the literature related to the lived experience with natural disasters. </p>

<p> Betweenness centrality refers to the measure of a node&rsquo;s influence on the transfer of items within a network. It is a mechanism used to identify participants within an interconnected system that are responsible for processing high frequencies of traffic. This thesis examines the performance characteristics of a specialized artificial intelligence algorithm known as Ant Colony Optimization and its application in the field of social network analysis. The modeling and examination of such algorithms is important largely because of its ability to span across multiple fields of study as well as a variety of network applications. The effects of network analysis can be felt everywhere. Business and military intelligence; hardware resiliency (fault tolerance); network routing, are but a few of the fields that can and do benefit from research due in part to specialized network analysis. In this research paper, extensive social networks are built, execution time is measured, and algorithm viability is tested through the identification of high frequency nodes within real social networks.</p>

<p> This dissertation creates a bridge between American cultural and horticultural discussions related to the topic of suburban community gardens, based on a new model called &ldquo;A Lot to Grow.&rdquo; (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) </p>

<p> Storytelling is an effective means of imparting knowledge, beliefs, and traditions. In its multimedia form, digital storytelling has been made popular by the digital storytelling movement led by the Center for Digital Storytelling established in 1998. While digital storytelling has existed for a few decades, its use in education has been researched relatively recently over the past fifteen years (Holtzblatt &amp; Tschakert, 2011). As a result, it is important that continued research is done in order to understand how students are learning through digital storytelling. The constructivist environments created through digital storytelling classes and workshops need to be researched in order to gain a deeper understanding of students&rsquo; learning processes and to ascertain how to continue to create effective learning environments for them. In this study, the researcher endeavored to determine how the use of digital storytelling exercises is providing quality, learning experiences for students by examining the process of creating digital stories through the lens of social learning theory. This was done by analyzing data from an in-person interview conducted with the founder of the Center for Digital Storytelling, Joseph Lambert, the examination of another published interview from Lambert&rsquo;s (2013) book, <i>Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community </i>, as well as other publications. Utilizing Honebein&rsquo;s (1996) seven pedagogical goals of constructivist learning environments to design the categories of coded data, the researcher created a set of guidelines that served as a framework of assessing to what extent digital storytelling workshops created constructivist learning environments. By analyzing the themes that emerged from the data, the researcher concluded that Lambert&rsquo;s digital storytelling work at the Center for Digital Storytelling, reflected all seven essential characteristics of constructivist learning environments in a significant manner, thereby indicating that the workshops at CDS were indeed constructivist environments.</p>

<p> The development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has expanded the ways that people communicate and share information with one another. In the context of disaster, this has disrupted and reshaped the nature of the communication of emergency information and public participation in the emergency response process itself. Members of the public have been much quicker at adapting and improvising solutions in this new communication ecology than emergency response organizations. This difference in adoption reflects key differences in the formal constraints and responsibilities faced by emergency responders in comparison to the ability in the public sphere to improvise and organize more fluidly. My research focuses on the design and ongoing development of sociotechnical solutions within a community of emergency responders interested in integrating social media into emergency response practices. I look at both the solutions emerging across this community and the sociotechnical arrangements that support ongoing communication and the evolution of new ideas in a continual process of invention. My research spans four years, starting with an initial case study and progressing over time into a collaborative role that leverages my skills and knowledge of crisis informatics in the joint exploration of data analysis strategies and communication strategies.</p>