Browsing by Subject "Identification"
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Item The "Autism epidemic" and Texas public schools : economic, educational, and ethical considerations for public school superintendents(2015-05) Brummet, Brent McKendree; Olivárez, Rubén; Pazey, Barbara; Sharpe, Edwin; Scheffler, Mark; Canada, GloriaThe purported existence of an “autism epidemic" has been vociferously debated both in the popular media and in academic research. One oft-cited study suggests that newly identified diagnoses of autism have increased 30% over the preceding decade to the point of potentially afflicting as many as 1 in 68 students (Centers for Disease Control, 2014). This influx merits close evaluation given existing research which postulates the existence of relationships between rates of ASD identification and ethnic and socioeconomic factors (Bhasin & Schendel, 2007). This potential disparity, coupled with ongoing budgetary constraints, the inherent ambiguity of existing litigation, and changing demographic projections, presents a number of financial, legal, and ethical impediments for public school superintendents in their ongoing efforts to ensure the efficacy and equity of services for students with ASD. Accordingly, this study analyzed the existence of any potential correlations between rates of ASD identification (expressed as a percentage of enrolled students whose primary Texas Education Agency special education eligibility criteria is "AU" or autism) and other ethnic and socioeconomic subpopulations evaluated in Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS) data. Prospective correlations were examined at both the campus level for each respective elementary campus in the case study district and at the district level for each Texas public school district which participated in a due process hearing predicated by an “AU” eligibility (or lack thereof) for the 2006-2007 through 2013-2014 academic years. Research questions were analyzed using the Pearson Product Moment Correlation and Spearman's ρ Rank Order Correlation Coefficients. The magnitude of practical effect size was determined using the Cohen's d algorithm. This study returned the following selected results: 1. A statistically and practically significant positive relationship exists between percentage of campus "AU" enrollment and the percentage of campus enrollment for the White subpopulation. 2. Statistically and practically significant negative relationships exist between percentage of campus "AU" enrollment and the percentage of campus enrollment for the Hispanic and African-American subpopulations respectively. 3. Statistically and practically significant negative relationships exist between percentage of campus "AU" enrollment and the percentage of campus enrollment for the Economically Disadvantaged and At Risk subpopulations respectively.Item The double-edged sword of corporate social responsibility campaigns : examining the effects of congruence and identification in product-failure and moral crises(2011-08) Kim, Yoojung; Choi, Sejung MarinaAs consumer expectations of corporate values and ethics increase, more and more companies are engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. While CSR in general is believed to play a positive role in consumer behavior, the implications of CSR in diverse situations that involve firms has not been studied in great detail. Specifically, little is known about how CSR activities influence consumer judgments in corporate crisis settings such as product-harm and ethical-misdeeds. Thus, in this dissertation, a series of experimental studies uncover the potential role of previous CSR engagement when a company is faced with a corporate crisis, and examine its impact on a consumer’s evaluation of the company. For a systematic and comprehensive understanding of this issue, two types of negative attributes in corporate scandals are distinguished: incompetence versus immorality. The results of the first experimental study suggest that prior CSR initiatives can more effectively protect consumer evaluation of the company when the company is faced with a competence-related negative event than a morality-related negative event. In addition, when the cause of CSR is directly congruent with the issue of the negative event, consumer responses were more negative than when there is no issue congruence between CSR and the negative event. The most interesting aspect is that the issue congruence effects were more negative for an immoral event versus an incompetent event. In other words, when a firm’s moral crisis is associated with a cause in a previously involved CSR initiative, consumers perceive that the firm’s intention of CSR initiative involvement was the least sincere and altruistic. The second study of this dissertation examines how consumer-company identification can protect the company from a corporate crisis in the context of an incompetent versus an immoral crisis situation. The findings of this study reveal that consumers strongly identified with the company perceive the company’s negative information less seriously than weak identifiers with the company regardless of the negative type – incompetence or immorality. Finally, the detailed theoretical and managerial implications of the dissertation and the role of CSR initiatives in crises are discussed.Item Identification beyond the symbolic frame : Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and the rhetorical logics of objects(2012-08) King, Matt R.; Walker, Jeffrey, 1949-; Bremen, Brian A.Rhetorics of identification traditionally address two questions: how does rhetoric work, who or what is involved in rhetorical relations, and how do these relations unfold and proceed, and how can and should we conduct ourselves in light of this state of things, what modes of engagement and response do we have available? Rhetoricians have drawn substantially on Kenneth Burke’s work on symbolic action in answering these questions, but this emphasis on the symbolic does not exhaust the range and nature of rhetorical relations, and other modes of relationality thus warrant our attention. My work aims to consider how our understanding of identification shifts when we move beyond the symbolic frame, when we attend to rhetorical relations without grounding our inquiry in considerations of representation, interpretation, understanding, dialectics, and epistemology. Drawing on conversations in nonrational rhetorics, object-oriented ontology, postmodernism and postmodern literature, digital rhetorics, writing studies, and video game studies, I attend to the material, affective, and singular nature of rhetorical relations. I also consider the modes of engagement this understanding of identification makes available with reference to writing pedagogy and the work of authors Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace.Item Identification in Posthumanist Rhetoric: Trauma and Empathy(2012-11-21) Larsen, Amy Marie 1984-Posthumanist rhetoric is informed by developments in the sciences and the humanities which suggest that mind and body are not distinct from each other and, therefore, claims of humans? superiority over other animals based on cognitive differences may not be justified. Posthumanist rhetoric, then, seeks to re-imagine the human and its relationship to the world. Though ?post-? implies after, like other ?post-? terms, posthumanism also coexists with humanism. This dissertation develops a concept of posthumanist rhetoric as questioning humanist assumptions about subjectivity while remaining entangled in them. The destabilization of the human subject means that new identifications between humans and nonhumans are possible, and the ethical implications of the rhetorical strategies used to build them have yet to be worked out. Identification, a key aim of rhetoric in the theory of Kenneth Burke and others, can persuade an audience to value others. However, it can also obscure the realities of who does and does not benefit from particular arguments, particularly when animal suffering is framed as human-like trauma with psychological and cultural as well as physical effects. I argue that a posthumanist practice of rhetoric demonstrates ways of circumventing this problem by persuading readers not only to care about others, but also to understand that our ability to comprehend another?s subjectivity is limited and that acknowledging these limitations is a method of caring. his dissertation locates instances of resistance to and/or deployment of posthumanist critique in recent works of literature; identifies language commonly used in appeals that create identifications between humans and animals; and analyzes the implications of these rhetorical strategies. To that end, I have selected texts about human and animal suffering that engage particular themes of identification that recur in posthumanist rhetoric. The chapters pair texts that develop each theme differently. Most undermine human superiority as a species, but many reify the importance of certain qualities of the liberal humanist subject by granting them to nonhumans. The points of identification created between humans and nonhumans will inform how we re-imagine the human subject to account for our connections, and therefore our responsibilities, to other beings.Item Identification of force coefficients in flexible rotor-bearing systems - enhancements and further validations(Texas A&M University, 2005-11-01) Balantrapu, Achuta Kishore Rama KrishnaRotor-bearing system characteristics, such as natural frequencies, mode shapes, stiffness and damping coefficients, are essential to diagnose and correct vibration problems during system operation. Of the above characteristics, accurate identification of bearing force parameters, i.e. stiffness and damping coefficients, is one of the most difficult to achieve. Field identification by imbalance response measurements is a simple and often reliable way to determine synchronous speed force coefficients. An enhanced method to estimate bearing support force coefficients in flexible rotor-bearing systems is detailed. The estimation is carried out from measurements obtained near bearing locations from two linearly independent imbalance tests. An earlier approach assumed rotordynamic measurements at the bearing locations, which is very difficult to realize in practice. The enhanced method relaxes this constraint and develops the procedure to estimate bearing coefficients from measurements near the bearing locations. An application of the method is presented for a test rotor mounted on two-lobe hydrodynamic bearings. Imbalance response measurements for various imbalance magnitudes are obtained near bearing locations and also at rotor mid-span. At shaft speeds around the bending critical speed, the displacements at the rotor mid-span are an order of magnitude larger than the shaft displacements at the bearing locations. The enhanced identification procedure renders satisfactory force coefficients in the rotational speed range between 1,000 rpm and 4,000 rpm. The amount of imbalance mass needed to conduct the tests and to obtain reliable shaft displacement measurements influences slightly the magnitude of the identified force coefficients. The effect of increasing the number of rotor sub-elements in the finite-element modeling of the shaft is noted. Sensitivity of the method and derived parameters to noise in the measurements is also quantified.Item Individual Reactions to Failure in Virtual Teams(2012-02-14) Diaz, IsmaelThis project examines the relationship between team identification and collaboration configuration and how they affect attributions to failure. In a sample of 110 participants, we examined reactions to failure. We manipulated perceptions of similarity among participants and a confederate of the study, we also manipulated collaboration configuration. We found that the collaboration configuration manipulation effected attributions; attributions about teammate failure in the collocated condition were more situational than attributions in the distributed condition, which were more dispositional. This finding supports the notion that collaboration configuration is important for understanding reactions to teammate failure.Item Managing multiple (dis)identifications : questioning the desirability and utility of identification in volunteer work(2016-05) Ford, Jacob Stuart; Treem, Jeffrey W.; Browning, Larry D; Stephens, Keri K; Berkelaar Van Pelt, Brenda L; Garner, Johny TInterest in organizational identification continues to expand alongside the growing options for organizational and member relationships. This dissertation examines the identification processes of volunteer workers at a non-profit organization and identifies the varied ways individuals aligned with or distanced themselves from different aspects of the organization. Drawing on data from interviews and observations of work at an animal shelter in the Southern U.S., this research reveals how individuals’ identifications were espoused and enacted in communication. The diverse and dynamic nature of the identifications of these workers, and the role of communication in the processes identified, challenge three common scholarly assumptions concerning identification and organizations. First, identification is typically perceived as a monolithic construct, meaning that most studies view an individuals’ relationship to work within an organization through a lens of organizational identification. The present study provides empirical support for the existence of multiple identifications within a singular organization, and considers the communicative distinctions between these identifications. Second, though research has also largely assumed that the opposite of identification is an absence of identification this dissertation argues that greater attention should be paid to disidentification as a distinct communicative process that describes how individuals actively construct identities separate from an organizational target. The final assumption in the literature presupposes that organizational identification leads to organizational benefits and should be sought by both organizations and individual workers. The findings of this work indicate that in a non-profit context it may not always be advantageous for members to develop organizational identification. Furthermore, the communication of the animal shelter workers revealed that the ability of individuals to hold multiple identifications or switch among identifications provided them a means to endure undesirable work conditions. By demonstrating the diverse and dynamic nature of identification among workers in a non-profit context, this work provides scholars a lens with which to broaden our understanding of identification as a communicative construct and invites scholars to explore (dis)identification in varied, and novel organizational forms.Item The purposes of workplace benefits : a qualitative study of workers’ perceptions of work perks in tech and non-tech industries(2016-05) Schneider, Claire Marie; Berkelaar, Brenda; Treem, Jeffery WThe following study examines how tech workers justify work perk implementation as a standard practice across the tech industry and how workers struggle to resist the draw of work perks that act as control mechanisms. Participants (n=19) who identified themselves as “cool” tech industry, “traditional” tech industry, and “non-tech” industry were interviewed using a semi-structured protocol concerning their work perk usage. A thematic analysis was conducted to examine an array of evidence-based patterns. Two themes emerged using an abductive approach to coding the data. The first theme examined how organizations use work perks to signal industry and occupational identification. The second theme considered how participants were willing to pay a price for seemingly free work perks. The themes contributed to academic understanding and application of organizational identification theory and unobtrusive control.Item Statistical Methods for the Analysis of Mass Spectrometry-based Proteomics Data(2012-07-16) Wang, XuanProteomics serves an important role at the systems-level in understanding of biological functioning. Mass spectrometry proteomics has become the tool of choice for identifying and quantifying the proteome of an organism. In the most widely used bottom-up approach to MS-based high-throughput quantitative proteomics, complex mixtures of proteins are first subjected to enzymatic cleavage, the resulting peptide products are separated based on chemical or physical properties and then analyzed using a mass spectrometer. The three fundamental challenges in the analysis of bottom-up MS-based proteomics are as follows: (i) Identifying the proteins that are present in a sample, (ii) Aligning different samples on elution (retention) time, mass, peak area (intensity) and etc, (iii) Quantifying the abundance levels of the identified proteins after alignment. Each of these challenges requires knowledge of the biological and technological context that give rise to the observed data, as well as the application of sound statistical principles for estimation and inference. In this dissertation, we present a set of statistical methods in bottom-up proteomics towards protein identification, alignment and quantification. We describe a fully Bayesian hierarchical modeling approach to peptide and protein identification on the basis of MS/MS fragmentation patterns in a unified framework. Our major contribution is to allow for dependence among the list of top candidate PSMs, which we accomplish with a Bayesian multiple component mixture model incorporating decoy search results and joint estimation of the accuracy of a list of peptide identifications for each MS/MS fragmentation spectrum. We also propose an objective criteria for the evaluation of the False Discovery Rate (FDR) associated with a list of identifications at both peptide level, which results in more accurate FDR estimates than existing methods like PeptideProphet. Several alignment algorithms have been developed using different warping functions. However, all the existing alignment approaches suffer from a useful metric for scoring an alignment between two data sets and hence lack a quantitative score for how good an alignment is. Our alignment approach uses "Anchor points" found to align all the individual scan in the target sample and provides a framework to quantify the alignment, that is, assigning a p-value to a set of aligned LC-MS runs to assess the correctness of alignment. After alignment using our algorithm, the p-values from Wilcoxon signed-rank test on elution (retention) time, M/Z, peak area successfully turn into non-significant values. Quantitative mass spectrometry-based proteomics involves statistical inference on protein abundance, based on the intensities of each protein's associated spectral peaks. However, typical mass spectrometry-based proteomics data sets have substantial proportions of missing observations, due at least in part to censoring of low intensities. This complicates intensity-based differential expression analysis. We outline a statistical method for protein differential expression, based on a simple Binomial likelihood. By modeling peak intensities as binary, in terms of "presence / absence", we enable the selection of proteins not typically amendable to quantitative analysis; e.g., "one-state" proteins that are present in one condition but absent in another. In addition, we present an analysis protocol that combines quantitative and presence / absence analysis of a given data set in a principled way, resulting in a single list of selected proteins with a single associated FDR.Item That?s Why I Don?t like You: An Investigation of Intergroup Disidentification in a Socialization Context(2014-06-12) Gardner, Richard GThis study takes a social identity perspective to explain intergroup relationships within organizations. Specifically, I investigate how newcomers to an organization are socialized to an organization and why the sources of socialization can affect newcomers? perceptions of their workgroup and other workgroups in the organization. Newcomers to organizations often face uncertainty in their new organization and receive information about organizational norms, rules, and procedures from various sources such as coworkers, supervisors, or organizational attempts to provide a socialization program. I propose that newcomers that receive socialization from proximal sources such as coworkers and supervisors will be more likely to disidentify from other workgroups within the organization. Additionally, I propose various individual-level moderators to this relationship. Subsequently, intergroup disidentification can result in various attitudinal and behavioral outcomes such as intergroup conflict, ingroup favoritism, outgroup derogation, interpersonal deviance, and intentions to leave the organization. To test my hypotheses I conducted a lab experiment to test socialization sources? effects on intergroup disidentification and also the effects on ingroup/outgroup perceptions. I also conducted a field study to further test hypotheses related to intergroup behaviors as well as individual?s reactions to intergroup disidentification.