In this twenty-first century there is a disproportionate amount of African American males in special education in the U.S. This is a factor happening day by day affecting the achievement gap between Black and White students, especially males. The purpose of this study is to point out factors that contribute to the overrepresentation of African…

Since September 11, 2001, Western readers have been turning to bestselling texts written by or about Muslims in their need to learn more about Muslims. These texts promise an insider's view of predominantly Muslim countries and peoples and are informally influencing and educating many Western readers in their perceptions of Muslims because…

The purpose of the study was to explore the psychosocial aspects of weight and the daily-lived experiences of college students within the college environment. Two research questions guided this qualitative research: (a) How, and in what ways, does perception of weight influence identity development among college students before and during college;…

The main goal of this study was to expand understanding of a Korean-American community's cultural identities through storytelling and artmaking, which was conceptualized as "Visual Storying" in this study. Ethnic minority students in the United States often experience confusion or conflict between American and their heritage cultures.…

This dissertation investigates the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation and is motivated by exemplar-based approaches to grammar. The study uses syntactic priming experiments to test the effects of participants' exposure to subject-verb agreement variants. Experiments also manipulate the gender, social status, and individual…

The late 1800s have been noted as a major transitional period for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When the beleaguered pioneers first arrived in Utah they were isolated from the influence and expectations of the United States. During that time, leaders of the Church became influential in every aspect of life in Utah. By the end of…

Narratives or Discourses influence how identity is read to such a degree that they serve to equate certain identities or groups of people--African Americans, Latin@s, American Indians, immigrants and women to name a few--with intellectual and academic inferiority despite remarkable performances or significant accomplishments. This is especially…

For years, transgender activists and their allies have spoken out about the oppression that transgender and gender non-conforming people experience in relation to societal systems and institutions, due to policies and practices that do not acknowledge non-binary experiences of gender, that do not recognize that one's gender may change over time or…

Female adult learners, the fastest growing subpopulation in community colleges, face challenges navigating domestic, professional, and academic roles and take time off from school to reconcile issues with multiple role navigation; thus, their education is disjointed and staggered, creating barriers to persistence. This interpretive design…

This study will explore the constructed image of deaf people in the American society as drawn through analyses of discursive structures in articles on cochlear implantation in major U.S. newspapers published between 2006-2009. To analyze discursive structures of newspaper articles, the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) will be…

There is a lack of qualitative research that has sought to uncover the lived experiences of students who identify as heterosexual/cisgender (i.e., non-LGBT) but have at least one parent who identifies as LGBQ. This phenomenological analysis aimed to uncover common themes for students who have gone through their educational journey with this…

This study investigated attitudes toward gay men and lesbians among collegiate varsity athletes and recreational sport club participants, including an investigation of differences in attitudes across competitive levels, team and individual sport divisions, sport by sport comparisons, gender, grade level, race, contact with gay men and lesbians and…

This work aims to understand real-world factors shaping behaviors and attitudes towards location-sharing social networks (LSSN), especially as to why people avoid or abandon this technology, or limit their usage. Based on interview-based qualitative research and survey-based exploratory quantitative research, I hypothesize conceptual models…

This qualitative study examines Civics teachers' perceptions of working with immigrant students in a new gateway state. By analyzing collective case studies of six teachers in central North Carolina, from different types of schools and with different professional backgrounds, this study is positioned to make recommendations for social studies…

"First-generation college student" is a category ubiquitous in higher education literature due to the social mobility this group has the potential of deriving from educational attainment. However, the first category is comprised of a diverse group of students who do not share any other common research construct, such as race/ethnicity,…