Purpose: This national, county-level study examines the relationship between food availability and access, and health outcomes (mortality, diabetes, and obesity rates) in both metro and non-metro areas. Methods: This is a secondary, cross-sectional analysis using Food Environment Atlas and CDC data. Linear regression models estimate relationships…

Globalization is a contemporary industry that crosses academia, commerce, and governments. The hope of globalization is also the darkness of present economic woes and the homogenizing of cultures and traditions. The author's inquiry is about the historical principles of "reason" that enable "seeing," thinking, and acting as if…

The author's academic interest in how shopping relates to adult learning goes back several years, to the author's Ph.D. program. Concerns are wide ranging, from social and material inequities manifest in unfair labor conditions for producers, to environmental degradation, to the tendency to favor economic viability single-mindedly over ecological…

This paper reports on a comprehensive corpus-based study of regional and stylistic variation in the distribution of the English present perfect. The data represents ten English varieties of both the Inner Circle and Outer Circle, covering four major text types: conversation, news reportage, academic and fictional writing. The results are discussed…

Sensemaking tasks are challenging and typically involve collecting, organizing and understanding information. Sensemaking often involves a handoff where a subsequent recipient picks up work done by a provider. Sensemaking handoffs are very challenging because handoffs introduce discontinuity in sensemaking. This dissertation attempts to explore…

This study investigated the effects of peer training intervention on social interactions of two participants with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and four typically developing peers. A multiple probe (Horner & Baer, 1978) across tasks, replicated across participants design, was used to evaluate these effects. Prior to data collection, a task…

This article examines the influence of community context and land use on the monthly odds of first birth in a society in the midst of dramatic fertility transition. The theoretical framework guiding our work predicts that proximity to nonfamily services should delay first births by creating opportunities for competing nonfamily activities and…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated potential explanations for sparse lexical-semantic representations in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing peers. The role of auditory perception, phonological working memory, and lexical competition were investigated. Method: Participants included 32 children…

This dissertation examines the relationship between the structural, phonemic properties of vowel inventories and their acoustic phonetic realization, with particular focus on the adequacy of Dispersion Theory, which maintains that inventories are structured so as to maximize perceptual contrast between their component vowels. In order to assess…

Choosing a college is one of the first important decisions that many young adults undertake. Popular media suggests how students should find an appropriate college based on traditional practices (Hallet, 2008; Kulman, 2007), yet, many aspects of the reality experienced by new kinds of students and colleges is largely ignored in the college choice…

Everyone is in the midst of an explosion in the popularity of knitting. Shifting the traditional stereotype of what a knitter should be, the youth of today have taken up knitting as a tactile and embodied form of connectivity. In a rapidly changing and unpredictable world, characterized by, among other factors, the unprecedented expansion of…

In this study we assessed the behavioral presentation of social anxiety in Cornelia de Lange syndrome (CdLS) using a contrast group of Cri du Chat syndrome (CdCS). Behaviors indicative of social anxiety were recorded in twelve children with CdLS (mean age = 11.00; SD = 5.15) and twelve children with CdCS (8.20; SD = 2.86) during social…

A central dilemma in developmental psychology has been to combine general concepts with research of the individual child in all her complexity in everyday life activities. Psychologists such as Riegel, Bronfenbrenner, Burman, Morss, Hedegaard, and Walkerdine have criticized research approaches that study child development from a functional view.…

Perceiving another person's actions changes the spatial perspective people use to describe objects in a scene, possibly because seeing human action induces people to map the actions, including their spatial context, to their own body and motor representations [Lozano, S. C., Hard, B. M., & Tversky, B. (2007). Putting action in perspective.…

The possibility of extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF EMF) causing a number of medical conditions and common symptoms remains a concern and presents somewhat of a quandary to health educators in view of conflicting results. This study investigated the relationship of a number of EMF sources to reported symptoms in an attempt to,…