Suboptimal public policy formulation and implementation often result from traditional representative democratic practices. Increasing government fragmentation, eroding trust among policy actors, and an increasingly complex policy making environment contribute to this problem. Collaborative decision making is considered to be a pragmatic alternative by its advocates. The purpose of this research was to explore the claim that process dynamics lead participants to prefer collaborative approaches to decision making among local and regional transportation plans in a western state. The conceptual framework was the diversity, interdependence, and authentic dialogue (DIAD) theory-based model of collaboration in decision making. The research questions focused on collaboration participants' perspectives of public decision making, variability of views among collaboration groups, and preferences for collaborative approaches to public decision making. This study employed Q methodology and a 45-statement Q sample about public decision making structured with a 2 X 3 Fisherian research design. Fifty-four Q sorts were collected from two groups of DIAD theory-based collaborative participants and one group of collaborative support professionals. Ten first-order factors were identified among these three groups and used in a second-order factor analysis to identify the higher order views of collaborative, personal-public, and professional-public decision making. Key findings were that study participants support collaborative approaches to public decision making. Study results provide collaboration facilitators with insight into participant views of decision making. The implications for social change are the generation of the deliberative capacity fundamental for democratic societies and increasing civic capacity-building.

Crisis communication systems (CCS) in educational settings have been challenged by mass casualty events including shootings, natural disasters, and health outbreaks in the United States. The U.S. federal government and the U.S. Department of Education have created safety and security instructions to manage these complex and diverse security issues, yet they do not address the role of school leaders within a CCS. Using complex adaptive systems as the theoretical construct, the purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine CCSs utilized by school leaders within a single public school district in the United States. The research questions are focused on the influence of components in a CCS, CCS influence on safety and security, and the school leader's role. Data were collected through interviews with 20 school principals and assistant principals of the school district. Interview data were inductively coded and subjected to thematic analysis. Findings indicate that approximately 40% of interviewees believe that communication behavior was the most critical component in a CCS. Methods of communication are varied and include a combination of technologies and behaviors. In addition, the majority of participants reported that internal decision making used by human agents in a CCS influences safety and security in an educational environment. The positive social change implications stemming from this study include recommendations to the school district to enhance communication systems with both human and nonhuman methods, which may contribute to creating safer educational settings for students, faculty, and communities.

Health care disparities are U.S. national public health concerns that disproportionately affect minority populations. The focus of published studies on the health of larger immigrant populations from Europe, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean has revealed a knowledge gap on the health of African and other minority immigrants. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore disparities in access to maternal and child health (MCH) care as well as the causes and effects of such disparities to care-seeking experiences of recent African immigrants. Andersen's behavioral model of health services use provided the theoretical lenses to interpret study findings. Eleven recent African immigrant mothers living in metropolitan Boston, Massachusetts, participated in semistructured questions that generated data used in this study. NVivo 11 was used to manage data, which enabled convenient use of Colaizzi's data analysis technique to identify themes and subthemes that were synthesized into final findings. Study results indicated that although participants used MCH care services, factors such as racial/ethnic discrimination, insurance differences, immigration, and socioeconomic status marred the process of seeking care, with notable access disparities that negatively affect MCH care experiences. The field of health for African immigrants is ripe for research. Other researchers could replicate this study elsewhere in the United States and other traditional immigrant-destination countries. Study findings could benefit health care providers, public health professionals, researchers, and immigrant populations. Actions for sustainable positive social change may result in the form of improved health care access and health outcomes for minority immigrants in the United States and beyond.

For women in recovery from complex trauma and substance abuse, the lack of posttreatment family reunification services such as family engagement, service delivery, and aftercare planning increase the likelihood of parental relapse and children reentering foster care. A primary caregiver's continued relapse can lead to longer out of home placement for minor children and a loss of parental rights, with a negative impact on both children and parents. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to examine the lived experiences of women in recovery, their sobriety practices, and how they reunified their families. The theoretical framework was Herman's trauma and recovery model. The research question focused on gaining a broader understanding of the complexities of substance abuse recovery among single-parenting women with trauma histories and their efforts to achieve and sustain family reunification. Data were obtained from interviews of 10 participants using an audio recording device and open-ended interview questions. Five themes emerged through analysis using open and axial coding: (a) choosing to remain sober, (b) cultivating and connecting, (c) trust and discovery, (d) trauma histories, and (e) aftercare and maintenance. Results indicated a possible connection between foster care recidivism and outdated aftercare services and practices. Improved aftercare practices could increase sustainability of reunified families and decrease the likelihood of relapse among caregivers in recovery. This study impacts social change by informing policy makers on state and federal levels of the needs of recovering parents and their families.

Conflict in higher education is inevitable and theoretically driven processes in conflict resolution can be employed to help in managing conflict or mediating issues. Students often are not a part of the well thought-out process that may exists in certain institutions, and the way in which conflict is handled could lack theoretical support. In conflict resolution theory, the process to resolve a conflict is often just as important as the outcome. Students may not be fully satisfied with the outcome of a mediation process when a conflict arises. However, if the mediation session was facilitated properly and a student's input is recognized, then this may lead to overall satisfaction and empowerment of the student throughout the process. The relationship and reputation of a university can be salvaged with the appropriate conflict resolution approach and limits negative publicity by students. This study conducted a detailed assessment of the conflict resolution processes and systems of two universities. The study adopted a qualitative case study approach, conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with key university personnel as well as examined the current systems that are in place in the respective institutions. In addition, the researcher recommended a theoretically-supported system for handling student disputes/issues that takes the real-world challenges of these institutions into account. Theories from the fields of mediation and conflict resolution were applied in the context of the higher education setting to help support the process.

Peter L. Berger's conception of agency in his earliest writings (c.1954-1960) is logically and empirically inadequate. At the root of this inadequacy is an idealism that prevents him from providing a compelling account of actual empirical agency. Chapter 1 asserts that Berger's earlier works warrant analysis. Chapter 2 discusses Berger's earliest influences, particularly Max Weber and The Swedish Lund School of motif research. Chapter 3 identifies a unique commitment to Christian Humanism at the base of Berger's conception of agency. Chapter 4 clarifies how Berger's Christian humanism interacts with his Weberian, and Parsonian-inspired functional analysis of the American religious establishment. The thesis concludes (Chapter 5) by identifying more specifically how and why Berger's Christian humanism undermines his attempt to empirically ground human agency.

Over the last several decades there has been a debate among social scientists on whether the United States has become, or is in the process of being, politically polarized. These conversations started with discussion of the “culture wars,” moved to the discussion of selective exposure and media outrage, and currently involve concerns about online radicalization and the spread of online misinformation. Throughout these themes one characteristic has remained constant: a lack of systematic evidence despite anecdotes and feelings of animosity between the two parties. Today researchers are beginning to shift from operationalizing political polarization as growing divides in attitudes towards policy issues towards a focus on political animosity. Scholars attempting to understand the origins of affective polarization have looked at the effect of political identity, out-group perceptions, and the diffusion of moral and emotional content in social media networks. In the current study I build on this literature using a panel of longitudinal data Twitter users to examine whether there is an association between following prominent partisan Twitter accounts and the expression of emotional valence through Tweeting or Retweeting. I take a relational approach to analysis by examining how this relationship varies between networks of Twitter users and under different historical circumstances. I argue that this relational approach is necessary for understanding how political polarization is unfolding in the country and that the lack of a relational approach may explain why political polarization has been downplayed in systematic studies. This study finds that the amount of political polarization on Twitter is dependent both on cultural and historical context. It makes contributions to the literature on political polarization in the United States, research methodology, and has implications for reducing radicalization in online spaces.

US sociology has historically denied slavery and colonialism as demanding of sociological study. The roots of this can be examined at the turn of the twentieth century in the early years of the institutionalization of the discipline in American universities. The inattention stems from a white supremacist racial ontology that underpins US sociology in general (embedded in the category of modernity and the category of sociology itself). There are traces or identifiable ‘moments of silencing’ during the first ten years of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS), the discipline’s first professional journal in the US, in which early (white) sociologists hide the colonial and slavery-dependent material roots of modernity behind a “positivistic” philosophy of social science and a mix of the biologically and culturally inflected ideologies of scientific racism. The persistence of the notion of modernity as given and the unconscious positivist epistemology of mainstream US sociology causes it to stall in face of the paralyzing contradiction between a stated interest in addressing inequality and a simultaneous refusal to examine the issues of power and inequality in the conditions of its own founding.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of affect on privacy concerns and privacy behaviors. A considerable amount of research in the information systems field argues that privacy concerns, usually conceptualized as an evaluation of privacy risks, influence privacy behaviors. However, recent theoretical work shows that affect, a pre-cognitive evaluation, has a significant effect on preferences and choices in risky situations. Affect is contrasted with cognitive issues in privacy decision making and the role of affective versus cognitive-consequentialist factors is reviewed in privacy context. A causal model was developed to address how affect influences privacy concerns and privacy behaviors. The model of privacy risk proposed in this model argues that affect (or “feelings”) influences privacy behaviors directly as well as thru privacy concerns. To test the model, subjects were recruited using Mechanical Turk and paid for their participation. Affect, the key construct in this research, was measured using a word association technique as well as methods developed in the implicit attitudes research. Well-known scales were used to measure privacy concerns and behavioral intentions. Data was collected from subjects using a pretested privacy scenario. Data analysis suggests that, in line with published IS research, privacy concerns affect privacy behaviors. Affect has no impact on privacy concerns nor on privacy behaviors at the traditional 5% level of significance, though it is significant at the 10% level of significance. Improving the instruments used to measure affect, use of a large sample size to detect small effect sizes and more control over the instrument administration instead of an online survey are suggested for future research.

Although ERP systems have been depicted as a solution in many organizations, there are many negative reports on ERP success, benefits, and effect on user’s performance. Previous research noted that there is a lack of knowledge and awareness of ERP systems and their overall value to ERP organizations. ERP systems have been widely studied during the past decade, yet they often fail to deliver the intended benefits originally expected. One notable reason for their failures is the lack of understanding in users’ requirements. This dissertation study was designed to understand the relative importance of system quality (SQ), IQ (IQ), service quality (SVQ), and their influence on ERP users. The dependent variable individual impact (II) was used to represent the ERP success at the individual level of analysis. The research by Petter, DeLone, and McLean (2008) established the basis for this research. In addition, this study examined the moderating effect of users’ characteristics variables (age, gender, experience, and position) on the II variable. The study further compared the results of this research with Petter et al.’s (2008) research to test whether the overall findings of this research differ from their research. A web-based survey was used to collect data for this study. A number of ERP users from private and public sectors in the Middle East participated in this survey. The survey screening process provided 218 usable responses for further analysis. Using SPSS 23, the researcher determined the validity and reliability of the items. The result of the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) via principal component analysis (PCA) loaded SQ items on four components, IQ on three components, SVQ on one component, and II on one component. Following the EFA results, the researcher investigated the items’ reliability, internal consistency, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. Hypothetical relationships were examined using structural equation modeling (SEM) based on the partial least squares (PLS) technique. The moderating effect was examined using the multigroup analysis (MGA) method. This dissertation study contributed to the body of knowledge by highlighting the importance of SQ, IQ, and SVQ in impacting ERP users’ learnability, awareness/recall, decision effectiveness, and individual productivity in an ERP environment. The results of this research can be used by ERP vendors to deliver an integrated and customized ERP system to organizations based on region. This research bridged the gap in the literature on the need to conduct more ERP research in the Middle East. Understanding the relative importance of information systems (IS) success factors brings the attention of ERP organizations and vendors to focus their efforts on the leading issues perceived by end users. Assessing the level of IS impact from multiple users may help organizations to offer all types of training to develop better attitudes toward ERP systems. Organizations can also build a rigorous approach to assess the impacts of IS on ERP users’ performance and productivity. As a result, this could help in improving productivity, learnability, awareness, and decision effectiveness of the end users.