Search Results

open access

The Public Health Response to an Ebola Virus Epidemic: Effects on Agricultural Markets and Farmer Livelihoods in Koinadugu, Sierra Leone

Description: During the 2013/16 Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa, numerous restrictions were placed on the movement and public gathering of local people, regardless of if the area had active Ebola cases or not. Specifically, the district of Koinadugu, Sierra Leone, preemptively enforced movement regulations before there were any cases within the district. This research demonstrates that ongoing regulations on movement and public gathering affected the livelihoods of those involved in agricultural… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Beyer, Molly
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Identifying Community Access to Veterinary Services in Southern Dallas

Description: The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of Texas in Dallas, Texas offers an array of services and programs to residents in southern Dallas and other areas. However, interest in the state of access to veterinary care has been questioned for southern Dallas residents. In an area that faces certain compounding stressors, such as food deserts and transportation difficulties, a lack of access to veterinary care for pet owners is considered an additional possible stressor. Pet owners in … more
Date: August 2019
Creator: O'Neill, Skye J
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Culture of Giving at Blue Ridge Literacy: Who Donates and Why?

Description: As a nonprofit located in a nonprofit-dense region in Roanoke, Virginia, Blue Ridge Literacy is among many other organizations competing for similar funding. This qualitative research project explores the reasons why donors give, why they support Blue Ridge Literacy, and what they think their future priorities for giving might be. By examining data from 15 qualitative interviews, this research is able to examine what BRL donors care about and offer suggestions for donor engagement strategies.
Date: August 2019
Creator: Holladay, Stephanie
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Vickery Meadow Community Needs Assessment

Description: This study represents a community needs assessment conducted for Trans.lation Vickery Meadow, a community-based organization in a North Dallas community, Vickery Meadow. Vickery Meadow is a community where refugee resettlement agencies place incoming clients, and therefore, there is a focus on immigrants and refugees in this study. Using theoretical conceptions of development, immigration policy, and the refugee resettlement process, this project measured residential perceptions of Vickery Mead… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Jay, Sarah, 1986-
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Youth-led Environmental Awareness: Initiatives Towards a Jain Faith Community Empowerment

Description: This project employs participatory action research methods in efforts to create a community specific environmental curriculum for the high school age youth at the only Jain faith community in the North Texas region. Aligned with the community’s goals, the youth led in deciding, creating, and carrying out initiatives that were aimed at increasing the level of awareness about environmental issues amongst community members. The research done by the youth aimed at looking at environmental issues th… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Otterbine, Joseph R.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

What Is Needed to Enable a Cultural Shift in the Market Research Department at the Gangler Company?

Description: This thesis investigates how to create an environment for organizational change within the Market Research Department at the Gangler Company (a US-based consumer products company). I explore what is influencing the current cultural environment and which of those influencers can be shifted to encourage organizational change toward the “ideal” culture that the organization has identified. Using new institutionalism as the theoretical approach, I discuss the significance of institutional forces (s… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Davis, Brooke
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Toward Sustainable Community: Assessing Progress at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage

Description: Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, an intentional community of roughly 70 members in Northeastern Missouri, is working to create societal change through radical sustainable living practices and creation of a culture of eco-friendly and feminist norms. Members agree to abide by a set of ecological covenants and sustainability guidelines, committing to practices such as using only sustainably generated electricity, and no use or storage of personally owned vehicles on community property. Situated within … more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Jones, Kayla Brooke
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Assessment of a Hospice and Palliative Care Partnership Program

Description: This project attempts to describe how a hospice and palliative care partnership program works. Through the assessment of one such program, the researcher sought to find out the essential components of the partnership including how the two partner organizations interact and work together. Data was collected using various methods: document review of organization documents such as newsletters, annual or quarterly reports, brochures and other available literature e.g. materials on organizations’ we… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Munene, Grace N.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Caring for Cancer: Understanding the Access and Perceptions of Psychosocial Cancer Services in North Texas

Description: It is estimated that nearly 14.5 million Americans are living with cancer today. A commonly overlooked component to quality cancer care, as defined by the Institute of Medicine, is the role of psychological and social support. Better known as psychosocial support, these needs reflect a broad spectrum of obstacles or assets in an individual’s personal life that may help or hinder their healing experience. Some psychosocial examples include coping skills, transportation to medical appointments, o… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Quirk, Lisa Erin
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Southeast Denton Neighborhood Needs Assessment for Program Evaluation and Development

Description: The intersection of race and space in one neighborhood in Denton, Texas, a college town situated within the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, reflects the lack of economic opportunities caused by a legacy of racial spatialization. SED, formally known as Solomon Hill, was once a predominately Black enclave; however, the city's population growth has fueled the expansion of the downtown area into neighborhood, transforming it into a hotspot for new investment. As the city rebrands itself in the… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Bell, K.D.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Awareness, Inclusivity, and Action in Western Historical Museums

Description: Dominant narratives in western historical museums often evoke a nostalgia for a Western Frontier that did not actually exist in the United States. Many Western historical museums, in particular, preserve nostalgia of an imagined Western Frontier through narratives of white masculine heroism, by featuring objects and artifacts symbolizing American exceptionalism and conquest, and by developing a sensory experience in exhibits to recreate an idealized time in history. As our understandings of his… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Brown, Sonia Renee
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"What kind of system have we built?": A Qualitative Analysis of the Asylum-Seeking System for Gender-Based Asylum Seekers in the United States

Description: Many asylum seekers have experienced trauma that causes them to flee their home country. A large portion of asylum seekers are women and are fleeing gender-based violence or experiencing it while fleeing. Due to this trauma, the researcher and the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas, a non-profit legal and social services organization, developed a research project to examine how trauma-informed,the asylum-seeking system is in the United States, specifically for those who are fleeing gender-b… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Byth, Janice Kay
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Participatory Community-Based Needs Assessment of the Somali Bantu Refugee Community in Nairobi, Kenya

Description: The situation of Somali Bantu refugees has been studied in the USA and, to a lesser degree, in the refugee camps of Kakuma and Dadaab, but not in self-settled urban contexts in East Africa. This qualitative study, a needs assessment of the Somali Bantu refugee community in Nairobi, Kenya, contributes towards filling that gap in the literature. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews with both Somali Bantu refugees and staff of refugee-serving NGOs in Nairobi provided rich ethnogr… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Rossbach, Daniel
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Bodies of Evidence: A Qualitative Analysis of the Lived Experiences of Female Central American and Mexican Asylum Seekers in Dallas

Description: This work addresses the experiences of female asylum seekers from Central and Mexico currently living in Dallas, TX. The main purpose is to analyze how these women engage in the gendered processes of both migrating to and accessing legal resources and protection within the United States. As the women move through male-dominated spaces in their home country, the borderlands, and the asylum court they must challenge the patriarchal institutions that attempt to silence their narratives and crimina… more
Date: May 2017
Creator: Kober, Ryan K.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Missed Opportunities: Strategies for Challenging Anti-Trans Stigma in Health Care

Description: Despite advancements in research on sexual morphology as well as increasing interdisciplinary theory on gender, medicine continues to perpetuate anti-transgender stigma in health care. Research on this topic has typically lacked perspectives from health professionals, who operate in and contribute to the environments in which patients seek care. In collaboration with Dallas non-profit Trans Pride Initiative, this study seeks to begin filling this research gap, relying on a sexual stigma framewo… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Jimenez, Kathryn Nicole
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"The Opposite of Addiction is Connection": Next-of-Kin Narratives in Overdose Fatality Reviews

Description: This study used ethnographic and qualitative research methods to provide data-driven support for the use of next-of-kin interviews to enhance overdose fatality review (OFR) datasets. This study's community of practice is a group of substance-use professionals that use OFRs to share confidential data and monitor Lucas County, Ohio substance use trends. To analyze OFR data collection, un-silo information, and understand how to include next-of-kin (NOK) interviews in the dataset, this study used r… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Fournier, Lindsay Olivia-Rose
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Science and Politics in Forest Management

Description: In this thesis, I explore strategies used by the local timber industry to influence forest policy on the Black Hills National Forest. These strategies include leveraging political pressure, proposing alternative interpretations of existing laws, and first requesting and then rejecting scientific data. Discursive strategies used by the timber industry to influence US Forest Service policy are compared and contrasted with those used by the environmental movement. The paper explores when and why s… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Smith, Solomon C.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Building Resiliency: The Role of Faith-Based Organizations in the Trauma-Affected Community of Santa Fe, Texas

Description: On May 18, 2018, a shooter entered Santa Fe High School, killing eight students and two teachers. Using ethnographic methods, this research examines the role of faith, rituals, language, and symbols in the trauma-affected community during the response, recovery, and resiliency efforts as perceived by the Santa Fe community and those impacted by the tragedy. Qualitative data collected from 100 individuals ages of 17-84 illustrated how historical trauma, community culture, and faith-based organ… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Jordan, Mandy M
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Psychedelia in the United States: An Ethnographic Study of Naturalistic Psychedelic Use

Description: The client for this study, the Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education (ERIE), was interested in the use of anthropological methods to examine the experiences of people who use psychedelics beyond the clinical setting. Through collaborative discussions with the client, we decided that the central questions guiding this research are to understand the various reasons why people consume psychedelic substances across the United States as well as examine the self-reported influences of psyc… more
Date: December 2020
Creator: Seikel, Tristan S.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Understanding the Health Needs among Indigenous Mayan Communities of Lake Atitlan

Description: Considering the changes the Lake Atitlan, Guatemala region has undergone in the last several years, ODIM (Organization for the Development of the Indigenous Maya) seeks to understand the needs of the San Juan La Laguna and San Pablo La Laguna communities, and to provide competent, culturally-aligned care that is affordable to the Indigenous Maya of this region. Using mixed-methods approaches that incorporate interviews, surveys, graphic anthropology, and evaluation methods, this study investiga… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Koyuncuoglu, Leyla Maria
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Refugee Employment in Dallas, TX: Experiences and Barriers

Description: Changing national policies in recent years represent an unprecedented attack on refugee resettlement in the United States. In this period of political and social uncertainty, understanding the barriers to refugee economic integration is more critical than ever. Following a review of existing literature on refugee resettlement and economic integration, this research assesses experiences of refugee employment in Dallas, Texas—one of the cities that resettles the most new refugees nationwide—throu… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Orzech, Mark N.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Immersive Police Training: A User Experience Study of SurviVR

Description: Working with the public benefit corporation SURVIVR, I conducted a user experience study to determine how effective the Summer 2019 build of the virtual reality (VR) police training tool SurviVR was at meeting the product's goal of providing officers-in-training with realistic, immersive training experience. Two virtual training scenarios, entitled Active Shooter and Emotionally Disturbed Person (EDP), were the focal points of the study. At two of the product's pilot demonstration locations ove… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Medina, Melanie
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Meaning in Transition: An Ethnographic Study of the Cultural Construction of Health, Identity and Brands among Young Adults

Description: This study explored the lived experience of Gen Z adults in a liminal life-stage crisis where the symbolic meaning of health, identity and brands are in transition. Sixteen ethnographic in-home interviews with college students were conducted and analyzed using Geertz's interpretive and Turner's symbolic anthropology. A hermeneutic textual analysis was used to interpret three types of phenomenological data: text, pictures and collages. An "incubation" step was key in the creative interpretati… more
Date: December 2019
Creator: Taylor, Elizabeth Lee
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Navigating Polyamory and the Law

Description: My research explores what laws, such as laws surrounding immigration, child custody, and divorce, negatively affect polyamorous individuals in the U.S. and how people's perceptions of barriers differ along lines of gender-sexual-racial-class identities. My applied research is conducted for my client, a CNM-friendly attorney in D.C. I investigate the experience of polyamorous people that use lawyers they perceive as consensually non-monogamous (CNM)-friendly. I probe what it means to be "CNM-fri… more
Date: December 2020
Creator: Carnes, Emma
Partner: UNT Libraries
Back to Top of Screen