This study explored the "lived experiences" of cisgender gay males and their college choice process. During individual interviews, study participants shared their experiences about their college decision-making processes, the variables important to their process, and if their sexual identity played a role in that decision-making process.…

Risk management and insurance (RMI) is facing a talent gap that is exacerbated by an increasing employer demand for technology-based skills. This research explores whether an undergraduate curriculum-based professional certificate influences college students' RMI career choices. Using a mixed-methods research approach, the researcher surveyed a…

Few family child care providers attain accreditation in the research state and little research existed as to why family childcare providers make the decision to participate or not in National Association for Family Child Care Accreditation (NAFCC). The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore perspectives and experiences of family…

Suburban school districts have experienced a racial and ethnic shift within the past 10 years. School districts that once were predominantly White have pivoted to a more diverse demographic. While we have seen the shifting of student demographics the same has not manifested within school leadership. This critical qualitative study sought to…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the relationship between career adaptability resources (Career Adapt-Abilities scale score and subscale scores) and the persistence rates among undecided students at a large, public four-year university in the Midwest of the United States of America. Data from the 2019 cohort of first-time,…

College-choice research typically analyzed students based on a single perspective of their identity rather than from an intersecting perspective. However, such research fails to account for the experience of people with intersecting identities determining their college options. This study explores (a) the factors that contributed to the…

This thesis investigates the choice between reflexive pronouns (e.g., "herself") and personal pronouns (e.g., "her") in the expression of subject coreference in English locative prepositional phrases. A persistent puzzle for syntactic theories of pronoun licensing, commonly known as binding theories, it has long been observed…

Research regarding the practice of leaders' mindfulness has increased over the past several years. Emphasis on principals' mindfulness practices helped educational leaders become stronger during these uncertain and stressful times. Specifically, researching how principals use mindfulness in a school setting advances educational leadership by…

The "surprisingly popular" method (SP) of aggregating individual judgments has shown promise in overcoming a weakness of other crowdsourcing methods--situations in which the majority is incorrect. This method relies on participants' estimates of other participants' judgments; when an option is chosen more often than the average…

Institutions have many unique cultures and organizational structures that can strengthen or inhibit the planning and implementation of initiatives to enhance data-informed decision-making, build supporting infrastructure, and align the necessary human resources. This chapter discusses different strategies for aligning resources and organizing…

One of the key findings of prospect theory is that people tend to treat potential gains differently to potential losses. Consistent with earlier findings across a range of areas, pilots were risk averse when faced with an uncertain situation involving monetary gains and risk seeking when faced with a monetary loss. Prospect theory has largely been…

With respect to framework presented in K. Shores and S. Loeb's article, I answer two questions: How well does the framework map onto a real-world situation marked by conflict over fair opportunity? What use might the framework be to decision makers? [For Kenneth Shores and Susanna Loeb's "Distributive Decisions in Education: Goals,…

Best practice guidelines recommend that eyewitness lineup administrators be blind to a suspect's identity, but no research has investigated whether the mere presence of a lineup administrator impacts eyewitness identification decisions. Informed by social facilitation theory, we predicted that the presence of an audience would differentially…

Eyewitness researchers recommend that "not present" and "don't know" response options should be presented with police lineups. Although it is important that witnesses--most of whom are unlikely to be familiar with the identification task--are fully cognizant of all response options available to them, an understanding of how…

Risk-based decision-making is widely considered to be the best means of presenting the science of climate change and for developing and presenting climate change evidence for policymaking. This paper examines some of the justifications provided by climate and decision scientists for their preferred approach, and argues that, although risk-based…