The purpose of this study was three fold: 1) to determine if false consensus
effects would be found for estimates of sexual behaviors, 2) to determine the directional
accuracy of consensus estimates for subscribers and nonsubscribers and 3) to determine if
the degree of accuracy of those estimates was influenced...
Sex on television has nearly doubled since 1998 while sexual risk and responsibly messages have decreased. During this time frame, television watching has become one of the most popular pastimes in the United States, especially among Black/African Americans. Black youth are more likely to report higher levels of satisfaction with...
Approximately half of the 6.4 million pregnancies occurring each year in the
United States are unintended (Finer & Henshaw, 2006). Unintended pregnancies, defined
as pregnancies not wanted at the time conception occurs, regardless of contraceptive use
(Chandra, Martinez, Mosher, Abma, & Jones, 2005) can have serious repercussions on
women, children,...
Research regarding factors that promote high-quality implementation of school-based prevention programs has increased markedly over the past decade as it has become increasingly recognized that evidence-based programs are often not well implemented. Whole-school interventions may be particularly complex to implement because they are intended to involve all school personnel and...
In the U.S., childhood overweight and obesity has grown to epidemic levels. The National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) found that nationwide, approximately 32% of children 10–17 years old are identified as overweight, over half of them (nearly 17%) are obese. This is a concern because these rates continue to...
The purpose of this study was to explore the possible relationship among fashion media, the social responsibility agenda of the Audubon Society, and the use of birds in millinery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both the content analysis method and the historic method were used to gain...
We describe a series of novel computational models, CERENKOV (Computational Elucidation of the REgulatory NonKOding Variome) and its successors CERENKOV2, CERENKOV3, and Convolutional CERENKOV3, for discriminating regulatory single nucleotide polymorphisms (rSNPs) from non-regulatory SNPs within non-coding genetic loci. The CERENKOV models are designed for recognizing rSNPs in the context of...
This dissertation primarily uses observations made during the 2005 Kashmir earthquake relief effort and available disaster literature to address problems that impede effective and efficient disaster preparedness and response. Three manuscripts form the body of the dissertation. The manuscripts are thematically linked through the Emergency Management Cycle. Each manuscript examines...