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QUALITY OF LIFE: ASSESSING THE MULTI-FACETED WORLD OF COMMUNITY COURT
No full textThe rise of problem-solving courts in the American criminal justice system has paved a way for a collaborative, rehabilitative approach to addressing crime. Community courts have since emerged as a criminal justice response to enhance quality of life. By definition, a community court embraces a holistic approach by tending to the participant from all aspects of their life. This includes the collaboration of criminal justice actors, such as judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and law enforcement, with outside entities such as mental health professionals, social service providers, and community organizations. The process of community court embodies a very different approach from the traditional court system. While there are many successful aspects to community courts, research has shown a lack of focus on recidivism reductions within community court participants, as well as the use of inconsistent study methodology.
This research examines the importance, efficacy, and impact of community courts through a program evaluation and gap analysis of an established community court. This research also addresses the key issues that are often the sources for the lack of community court research.
This study found that when implemented correctly, the community court displays model adherence to the recommended community court principals as well as the policies and procedures as outline in the manual. Promising results were discovered, including the creation of a service provider room, the utilization of a validated risk and needs assessment tool, and the collaboration present between the community court team and the social service and treatment providers. The community court also displayed an of the needs of its participants with the service provider offerings they currently provide.
Some challenges were also noted, including negative preliminary findings. Challenges found include a need for improved data collection procedures, an enhancement in ensuring that participants understand the program structure and continue to follow-up with case plan, and the development of a way to track and follow-up with community court participants. These findings offer an important look into the community court model and open the door for future research.Washington State University, Criminal Justic
THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA DISCLOSURE ON INVESTORS AND EMPLOYEES
No full textThesis (Ph.D.), Accounting, Washington State UniversityThe increased presence of companies and their top executives on social media has influences on a wide variety of stakeholders. My dissertation examines the effect of social media disclosure on investors’ decision-making and employees’ whistleblowing decisions. For investors, social media is a new disclosure channel with disclosure unique in style and content to other traditional channels. One unique content is the top executives’ self-presentation on their personal social media accounts. My first study examines how investors react to CEO’s self-presentation strategy (ingratiation versus self-promotion) via his or her personal social media account and causal attribution for negative financial results (internal versus external). Consistent with expectancy violations theory, I find that for an ingratiating CEO, an internal attribution leads to higher perceived warmth, competence, and credibility than an external attribution. In contrast, for a self-promoting CEO, an external attribution leads to higher perceived competence and credibility than an internal attribution, while the perceived warmth does not differ between internal and external attribution. In addition, investors’ perceptions of the CEO’s competence and credibility mediate the effect of self-presentation strategy and attribution on investors’ investment decisions.
For employees, organizations and their leaders can strategically use social media practice to increase employees’ organizational identification and use formal social media policy to regulate employees’ social media activities. My second study aims to investigate the impact of corporate social media strategy (identity practice versus sales promotion) and social media policy (enabling versus constraining) on employee whistleblowing decisions regarding two social media cases. I find that for the information leaking case, identity practice strategy leads to higher whistleblowing intention difference between traditional hotlines and social media channels when the policy is constraining but not when the policy is enabling. However, this effect is only for female participants instead of male. For the online venting case, I find that female participants have higher differences between reporting channels when compared to male participants.
My study adds to social media literature in accounting and provides practical implications for companies and leaders who are interested in incorporating social media as one of their communication channels.Washington State University, Accountin
THE BOUNDARIES OF WASTE, WANT, AND REUSE: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF THRIFT STORE SHOPPING AND DUMPSTER DIVING IN WASHINGTON STATE
No full textThesis (Ph.D.), Sociology, Washington State UniversityBeing a consumer in the contemporary United States is a complicated endeavor. As consumption choices have been linked with issues from declining stocks of natural resources to grievous harm to workers and resource-based communities, an increasing proportion of Americans seek to make “ethical” consumer choices. These ethical consumers buy or avoid specific products to promote social or environmental goals, and perceive these choices as reflecting morality. Yet many ethical consumption choices (e.g., solar panels, organic food) are financially out-of-reach for many, particularly working-class households. How do lower-status people use consumer choices to navigate the complex terrain that maligns mainstream consumption and values socially and environmentally reflective consumption? This dissertation examines thrift store shopping and dumpster diving as two cases of consumption that are both environmentally significant and stigmatized. These cases are theoretically significant because they widen the gaze of studies of consumption to consider the intersection of consumption and waste, allowing me to shed light on how identity and social-inequality are processes related as much to waste as to consumption. Further, because these practices reach beyond the realm of elite ethical consumption (i.e., buying organic produce), I am able to discuss how the process of creating distinction is related more to discourse and practice than to any particular item. Specifically, using the case of thrift shopping, I demonstrate how people in different social strata convey distinction within a marginalized consumption space. In the case of dumpster diving, I discuss the process of meaning-making undertaken by a marginalized group. First, I show how economically-constrained dumpster divers, despite adopting a politicized worldview, are hesitant to adopt a political explanation for their consumption habits. From this observation I argue that mainstream political imaginaries rooted in a neo-liberal logic might not resonate with marginalized groups. Next, I show how the stigma of dumpster diving is mitigated not by making appeals to dominant moral frameworks, but by rejecting familiar cultural narratives of what is decent or acceptable behavior. I advance the concept of “active defiance” to capture this pattern. This dissertation has important implications for understanding identity, distinction, and the political imaginaries of marginalized groups.Washington State University, Sociolog
A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF PRINCIPAL PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND PROFESSIONAL LEARNING
No full textThesis (Ed.D.), Educational Leadership, Washington State UniversityVariables that positively impact student learning are abundant. The effectiveness of school leadership is one variable that supports positive student learning. Given this, support for elevating the effectiveness of school leadership is important as school principal’s influence these outcomes through instructional leadership. This qualitative study explored how 11 school principals described the conditions that support or inhibit their professional relationships and their professional learning in a district on a journey of organizational change. This study focused on the perceptions and experiences principals engaged in improving their instructional leadership skills by using a newly introduced principal coaching/evaluation model. This study was guided by the following research questions: (a) How do principals describe their professional relationships with supervisors? (b) What conditions do principals suggest support their professional learning? (c) What conditions do principals suggest develop communities of practice?
The study took place in a single district. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with school principals. What emerged were tensions represented as themes, resulting from deep organizational change taking place within an organization moving to become a more mature organization, focused on building systems and structures. The importance of trust, differentiated professional development, and time served as themes that represented the tensions among principals.Washington State University, Educational LeadershipBy student request, this dissertation cannot be exposed to search engines and is, therefore, only accessible to Washington State University users
THE EFFECTS OF NICOTINICS ON THE DEVELOPING CEREBELLUM
No full textThesis (Ph.D.), Neuroscience, Washington State UniversityCerebellar injury or exposure to toxicants during development heightens the risk for neurodevelopmental disorders. Since the cholinergic system is critical in neuronal migration and circuit formation, the rapidly developing cerebellum may be particularly sensitive to perturbation by perinatal exposure to nicotinic compounds, consequently increasing risk for cerebellar-associated neuropathologies. Although the deleterious impacts of smoking while pregnant, such as a reduction in cerebellar size in the offspring, is well-established, the mechanisms by which nicotine affects cerebellar development remain elusive. Chapters in this dissertation characterize how developing cerebellar cortex neurons are affected by the presence of nicotinic compounds acutely, and how chronic developmental exposure results in cerebellar anatomical, physiological and behavioral alterations. I demonstrated in Chapter 2 that migrating and post-migratory granule cells (mig- and GCs), and Purkinje cell (PCs) synaptic dynamics are highly sensitive to nicotine when applied to simulate in utero nicotine exposure. In Chapter 3, I showed that exogenous nicotine also blunts sensitivity of GCs to transient in vivo-like acetylcholine (ACh) release via nicotinic ACh receptor (nAChR) desensitization, and consequently similarly dampens downstream transcerebellar signaling evoked by ACh. Data from Chapters 2 and 3 indicate nicotine usurps endogenous cholinergic signaling in cerebellar cortex, causing a shift from strong pulsatile excitation, to a low grade tonic excitation. Results from Chapter 4 showed that in vivo neonatal nicotine exposure resulted in improved motor learning that persisted to at least adolescence, possibly due to enhanced GC signal throughput consequent to a reduction in GC tonic GABAAR inhibitory current. In Chapter 5, since numerous insecticides that we encounter on a daily basis are nicotine-based, and proximity to agricultural spray sites correlates with the incidence of cerebellar-associated neurodevelopmental disorders, I explored the impacts of a commonly-used neonicotinoid insecticide, imidacloprid on GCs in the developing cerebellum. Data from Chapter 5 demonstrated that imidacloprid affects GABAergic transmission from Golgi cells to GCs similar to nicotine, but less powerfully and more variably. Collectively, the findings in this dissertation suggest that nicotinic compounds hijack endogenous developmental signals, which will likely alter cerebellar development, and thus could account for adverse neurological and behavioral impacts of exposure to nicotinic compounds.Washington State University, NeuroscienceBy student request, this dissertation cannot be exposed to search engines and is, therefore, only accessible to Washington State University users
ENHANCED SINGLE AND MULTIPLE BAD DATA PROCESSING IN POWER SYSTEM STATIC STATE ESTIMATION
No full textThesis (Ph.D.), Electrical Engineering, Washington State UniversityAlthough the state estimator has been a regular application running in many utility control centers for over four decades, detection and identification of bad data (outliers) among the input measurements continues to be a difficult task. The widely adopted Weighted Least Square formulation of the power system static state estimation is known to be vulnerable to presence of bad data and even a single bad data can significantly impact the solution quality. Since the estimate of system state obtained from state estimation serves as starting point for many security and market related downstream applications that run within a control center, the problem of detection and identification of bad data is important.
It has been shown that the traditionally used methods of detection and/or identification of bad data in power system static state estimation suffer from drawbacks like failing to detect mild to medium bad data in leverage measurements and excessive false detection rates. The traditional approach to process multiple bad data has been successive elimination (of single bad data) and re-estimation. This approach is highly computationally intensive and time consuming. The problem of computationally intensive multiple bad data processing has an even greater bearing on the Linear State Estimator, which is expected to run every second or potentially at sub-second intervals in the control centers.
The work presented here focuses on the problem of multiple bad data processing in power system static state estimation in two ways. Firstly, use of Custom Thresholds is proposed for detection of bad data. The Custom Thresholds are shown to exhibit better false detection performance while being sensitive to mild bad data, even in leverage measurements. Secondly, a new algorithm is proposed to identify the culprit bad measurements. The proposed algorithm utilizes the very nature of bad data in different types of measurements, to accomplish the processing within few cycles of successive elimination and re-estimation. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed algorithm is validated through thousands of simulations on various standard test systems. The proposed algorithm can be easily integrated in any commercial Weighted Least Square power system static state estimation – linear or iterative.Washington State University, Electrical EngineeringBy student request, this dissertation cannot be exposed to search engines and is, therefore, only accessible to Washington State University users
