The National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program partnered with the National Weather Service (NWS) in 2000 to create the TsunamiReadyTM (TR) Community program. TR is designed to help communities in coastal areas plan and prepare for tsunamis. To achieve TR recognition communities must meet certain criteria including specific emergency planning and management actions within the categories of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. This study’s purpose was to evaluate the acceptability and usefulness of key components of a proposed revised set of TR Community program guidelines. Research was guided by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) using Community Based Participatory Research methods to gather input from expert panels composed of local expert community stakeholders from 5 states and 1 US territory. Two qualitative data collection methods were used: online prediscussion surveys administered via Survey Monkey© and focus group discussions. Fifty participants attended 1 of 6 focus group discussions, with 20 participants completing surveys. Data analysis focused on 8 discussion topics: subdivision of communities by vulnerability, proportion of the population to be protected, evacuation effectiveness, evacuation drills or exercises, vertical evacuation, educating businesses, educating residents, and acceptability of a revised guidelines format. Supporting and opposing themes were identified, providing rich information of community-level perceptions regarding the guidelines. Most notably, the fidelity of the 2 ELM pathways were confirmed as separate. The peripheral pathway demonstrated a significant need for clarification and definition of program terms and activities through the surveys, while focus groups facilitated the central pathway for participants to discuss and debate various program guidelines. This study provides several recommendations based on community input for updating and revising the TR Community program guidelines including: revisions to the overall format, a new focus on community tsunami hazard, and additional actions and activities to improve community tsunami mitigation and preparedness efforts. Finally, the data and recommendations provided will be used to compile a final draft of the TR Community program guidelines for the NWS.

Mindfulness meditation is an emerging trend, and previous research conducted focused on benefits of mindfulness meditation as a training technique for beginning counselors, symptoms mindfulness meditation may alleviate, and specific types of mindfulness meditation (e.g., Feldman, Greeson, & Senville, 2010; Greason & Welfare, 2013; Khoury et al., 2013; Sedlmeier, et al., 2012). Little research exists on the client’s experiences when mindfulness meditation is used within the counseling session; therefore the primary goal of the present study was to explore experiences and potential benefits of mindfulness meditation and its clinical application in session. Because previous research done on mindfulness meditation used a quantitative approach, the present study utilized a qualitative approach which allows richer and more descriptive data from the participants. Themes which emerged from the data included: (1) variations of individual experience, (2) mental, physical, and emotional components, (3) perceptions of mindfulness meditation, (4) preferences for mindfulness meditation, and (5) continued practice implications.

abstract: The purpose of this study is to explore the way mindfulness informs how leaders make sense of and navigate paradoxical tensions that arise in their organizations. This study employs a qualitative research methodology, based on synchronous, semi- structured, in-depth interviews of leaders who hold a personal mindfulness practice. Qualitative interviews illuminate how leaders’ communication about paradoxical tensions (e.g., through metaphorical language) reflects the way they experience those tensions. Findings extend the constitutive approach to paradox by demonstrating the way mindfulness informs awareness, emotion, pausing, and self-care. Specifically, this study (1) empirically illustrates how higher-level, dialogic more-than responses to paradox may be used to accomplish both-and responses to paradox, (2) evidences the way discursive consciousness of emotion may generatively inform paradox management, (3) suggests the appropriateness and use of a new paradox management strategy that I term ‘mindful dis/engagement’, and (4) highlights self-care as an others-centered leadership capability. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2019

This dissertation advances previous research on the journalistic interpretive community by placing news at the center of a community's construction of place. By focusing on the construction of Iowa City, Iowa's "Southeast Side" - neighborhoods home to predominantly newly arrived black residents from Chicago and other urban areas - this study identifies dominant news characterizations of the Southeast Side that mark the place as a "ghetto" or "inner city." Beyond providing information about community issues and social conditions from southeastern neighborhoods, the term Southeast Side performed a singular ideological purpose: to identify and maintain dominant community values throughout the rest of Iowa City. Racialized and stereotyped news narratives of urban people, places, and problems in a place called the Southeast Side created an ideological boundary between those in and outside the Southeast Side. Such a boundary subjugated the Southeast Side's cultural diversity and its people, presenting them as being counter to Midwestern values and a threat to notions of a safe, white and historically homogeneous community. Indeed, the creation of Southeast Side was just as much about creating an "inner city" as it was about constructing notions of Iowa City itself. Through mental mapping, this project then compares dominant news characterizations to those made by Southeast Side residents, journalists, and public officials. In the end, this study explores cultural meanings that emerged from examining the similarities or differences between the place-making of residents, journalists, and news sources. This study reveals place-making as a fundamental role of the journalistic community and identifies another ideological function of the press in that they assign power and meanings by describing news by where it happens. Journalists and media scholars have long talked about the press as improving community journalism to meet the notion of the public sphere. Yet, this dissertation is not another such study that only encourages journalists to alter how they report on local news and communities. Instead, this study suggests that journalists and scholars recognize the cultural power of journalistic place-making and the challenge to their authority to do so by residents from a particular place.

Since the 1990s, the number of U.S. students enrolled in university-level Chinese language classes has grown exponentially. Learning Chinese has become increasingly important to those students’ academic studies, professional success, and personal development. However, despite these students’ eagerness to master Chinese, they face an inevitable challenge to their progress: developing reading fluency and comprehension skills in Chinese. A common experience among those students is that learning to read in Chinese is labor-intensive and frustrating, and it takes much longer than the time they would have to spend on learning to read in alphabetic languages such as Spanish, French, and German. In response to this issue, a small but growing body of research has started to investigate the ways American learners view and comprehend Chinese texts. To contribute to this line of research, the present study examined the process of reading Chinese as a second language (L2 Chinese reading). In particular, this study looked closely into the following key questions: (1) What strategies did L2 Chinese readers use when reading a Chinese expository text? (2) What difficulties did they encounter and how did they solve these problems? (3) What factors influenced their reading process? (4) When, how and why did they shift to thinking in their native language, English? To describe these readers’ approaches to text comprehension and also to understand their own perceptions, this study adopted a few qualitative research methods, including think-aloud reports, recall protocols, post-reading interviews, semi-structured interviews and background surveys. Participants of this study were five American students enrolled in intermediate- and advanced-level Chinese language classes at a Midwest U.S. university. Data collected from these participants were analyzed qualitatively through both an intuitive, holistic approach and a structured, systematic approach. A qualitative data analysis software—NVivo 12—was used to facilitate the coding and analysis process. Results of the study show that L2 (Chinese) reading is primarily a language-based, cognitive-constrained, and individualized process that involves multiple interactive factors. Those factors include but are not limited to linguistic, psychological, textual, environmental, and background factors. In addition, regarding the use of the native language in L2 reading, results of the study show that readers’ L2 language proficiency influences the frequency and effectiveness of their use of their native language. The ways of using the native language also differed across readers with different L2 language proficiencies and reading styles. These results have implications for theories of L2 reading in general and theories of L2 Chinese reading in particular. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are also discussed at the end of the dissertation.

Drawing upon two forms of qualitative data—interviews with trustees and national trade association publication archival documents—and employing an abductive theory building strategy based on my analysis of higher education governance in the present day and historically, I perform an organizational etiology of U.S. higher education governing boards and governance. Studying governance in higher education lends itself to theory building, as governance lacks a strong basis of comparability, distinguishable from firm-based or other non-profit enterprise governance. Further, while governing boards are principal parties of authority, the shared governance framework almost universally privileges participation by a host of stakeholder parties. Further, the targets of governance, colleges and universities, are comparatively complex and ambiguous in terms of goals, priorities, purposes, products, and strategic interests, as well as in terms of operational, professional, hierarchical, and financial models of sustainability and advancement. I deconstruct governing boards, governance, and governing at several levels of consideration to find that explicit and ubiquitously understood organizational and work objectives and practices of governance conceal a state of organizing that necessitates considerable attention, deliberation, strategic action, and investment of resources by governing boards. It is the state of organizing itself that is a consummate and pervasive focus of attention and consideration. Governance and governing is an ongoing process or state of organizing characterized by a readiness to examine, address, and act upon boundaries of organization, profession, and work practices. As much as governing boards govern institutions, boards govern boundaries, and multiple kinds of boundaries at multiple levels of consideration at that. While boundary work implies work at the periphery, the boundary work of governance and governing boards is itself core to the organization and work performed. I dissect cognitive and practice-based dimensions of governing, ordering perceptions and explanations of the form of work being done by boards as professional organizations, and by tracing the broader culture and history of the field of governance, and show how boundaries and boundary work are a consuming strategic focus. Boards are enduring institutions with paradoxically unenduring boundaries. I find and describe how these boundaries share a set of traits and propensities indicative of a form of organizing without theoretical match or explanation: organizational amorphousness. I build the case for amorphousness throughout and, in the conclusion, explain how governing boards, the field of governance, and the work and practices of governing represent extreme cases of an evolved organizing predicated on dexterity and contingency. This form of organizing seemingly contradicts basic assumptions of organizing and begs the question as to what functions boards actually serve, as well as to what effect.

In this qualitative research study, I examine the literacy practices of five families who resided in a homeless shelter with attention to the complexity of literacy as it is taken up for fulfilling cultural and social goals within families, neighborhoods, and communities. Literacy is complicated through the lens of literacy sponsorship (Brandt, 2001) to suggest the differential access people have to literacy and the power sponsors have to sanction particular forms of literacy while dismissing existing literacies that families use in their everyday lives, but are undervalued in schools and the marketplace. Data collected from parent interviews and a family literacy program at the shelter shape the counterportraits (Meyer, 2010) intended to challenge the official portrait of homelessness. The analytical tool of dialogical narrative analysis (Frank, 2012) aided my identification of stories in the interviews that illustrated how parents perceived their lives before coming to the shelter, at the shelter, and how their lives would change beyond their stay at the shelter. The notion of "capital D" Discourses (Gee, 2005) supported my examination of how the parents engaged in overlapping Discourses that allowed them to contest deficit perspectives pervasive in the official portrait. The resulting counterportraits suggest that the official portrait is largely dismissive of the social problems associated with stark inequality in U.S. society. Complicating the role of literacy within this larger context of inequality is necessary to understand the wide gulf between the official portrait and the counterportraits represented in this report.

Man-made objects are an expression of both the social organisation in which they were produced and the communicative context in which they appear and are used. In this respect, they represent easily accessible material, which is highly suitable for and useful in reconstructing the social structures in organisations and opening up latent structures of meaning for analysis. Nevertheless the analysis of physical materials has tended to live a shadow existence. This paper presents a hermeneutic method of analysing artefacts in organisations. The basic concept centres on the reconstructing of the processes of meaning and organising in social systems. After providing a brief introduction to the methodological principles, the paper goes on to discuss this method in greater detail. Concrete examples of the study of specific materials in an organisational analysis context are used to ground the interpretation of artefacts in the overall organisational analysis context. The paper closes with a discussion of the possibilities and limitations of this kind of analysis. (authors' abstract) / Series: ["p_series_typename_S48" not defined]

Research indicates that the Latina/o population is growing in the United States, and more Latina/os are attending college, many do not continue their education beyond the undergraduate level, much less beyond the Master's level. Latinas in particular continue to be underrepresented in professional roles due to the small number of Latinas who obtain doctoral degrees. Although many Latinas do not continue their education or drop-out throughout their graduate schooling, some Latinas do thrive forward and are academically successful. This study aimed at identifying elements that fostered resiliency in academically successful Latina doctoral students, as well as identifying challenges or barriers that some Latinas experience. Findings indicate some support for Bernard's resiliency theory, while also providing implications for advocacy for Latina doctoral students.

A cohesive organizational culture has been linked to positive outcomes in child-serving agencies, such as improved child-level outcomes and positive organizational climate (Glisson & Green, 2006; Glisson & Hemmelgarm, 1998; Glisson & James, 2002; Hemmelgarn, Glisson, & James, 2006). Although isolated studies of organizational culture have been conducted in individual agencies (child welfare and juvenile justice), no study has examined the organization culture of successful, holistic systems of care that involve the coordination of multiple agencies, such as child welfare, juvenile justice, mental health and education. Data collected from the three system-of-care sites selected for participation in Case Studies of System Implementation was analyzed for themes using the Atlas.ti qualitative software package. The analysis was conducted through the framework of Schein's model of organizational culture. For each site, examples of artifacts, values, and assumptions were identified. The artifacts at sites were closely related to the articulated values of the organizations. Findings also suggest that there are underlying components to the organizational culture of system of care, including system of care values and principles, collaboration, willingness to change, and leadership. Results also showed that local context affects organizational culture. Suggestions for future exploration into these hypotheses are provided.