Browsing by Subject "culture"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
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    The Aesthetic Dimensions of U.S. and South Korean Responses to Web Home Pages: A Cross-Cultural Comparison
    (2011-01) Faiola, Anthony; Ho, Chin-Chang; Tarrant, Mark D.; MacDorman, Karl F.
    Culturally influenced preferences in website aesthetics is a topic often neglected by scholars in human-computer interaction. Kim, Lee, and Choi (2003) identified aesthetic design factors of web home pages that elicited particular responses in South Korean web users based on 13 secondary emotional dimensions. This study extends Kim et al.'s work to U.S. participants, comparing the original South Korean findings with U.S. findings. Results show that U.S. participants reliably applied translations of the emotional adjectives used in the South Korean study to the home pages. However, factor analysis revealed that the aesthetic perceptions of U.S. and South Korean participants formed different aesthetic dimensions composed of different sets of emotional adjectives, suggesting that U.S. and South Korean people perceive the aesthetics of home pages differently. These results indicate that website aesthetics can vary significantly between cultures.
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    Consumer responses to hedonic food products: Healthy cake or indulgent cake? Could dialecticism be the answer?
    (Elsevier, 2018-10) Jakubanecs, Alex; Fedorikhin, Alexander; Iversen, Nina M.; Kelley School of Business - Indianapolis
    Marketing of indulgent food products with healthy claims (e.g., healthy cake) is challenging, and studies explaining consumer responses to such products are limited. This research addresses this limitation by focusing on an unexamined driver of responses to vice food products marketed as more healthy—dialectical thinking. Three experimental studies using samples from online panels show that dialecticism has a positive effect on consumers' evaluations of such products when primed within a predominantly non-dialectical culture, across cultures with different levels of dialecticism, and as an individual difference. In all three studies experienced discomfort mediates this effect. This research contributes to extant literature by (1) identifying the role of dialecticism in mitigating consumers' aversion to vice food products with healthy claims, (2) confirming the effects of dialecticism at both cultural and individual levels, and (3) highlighting the managerial relevance of dialecticism.
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    Cultural tourism investment and resident quality of life : a case study of Indianapolis, Indiana
    (2013-12-10) Gullion, Christopher Scott; Hji-Avgoustis, Sotiris; Fu, Yao-Yi; Lee, Soonhwan
    This thesis will explore issues concerning cultural tourism investment and resident quality of life in the Midwestern city of Indianapolis, Indiana. It is important to understand from a cultural tourism perspective how further attempts to grow and invest in tourism will affect resident perception of quality of life and future cultural tourism investment. To achieve this goal, data from the 2012 Indianapolis Quality of Life survey was statistically analyzed to specifically examine how residents' perceived quality of life affects cultural tourism investment. This allows for the study of what city-service attributes (i.e. safety, attractions, transportation, et cetera) identify as potential indicators of whether residents' perception of quality of life affects cultural tourism investment and if there were any correlations between demographic factors of age, gender, ethnicity, and household income with the perception that investing in cultural events and attractions for tourists is good for residents. Results indicated that several key city-service attributes identify as potential indicators of whether residents' perception of quality of life in Indianapolis affects residents' perceptions that investing in cultural tourism for tourists is good for residents. In addition, several key city-service attributes identified as potential indicators of residents' perception of quality of life in Indianapolis excluding perceptions of cultural tourism investment. Finally, results indicated that demographic factors of gender, age, ethnicity, and income were not significant when it came to affecting the perception that investing in cultural events and attractions for tourists is good for residents.
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    Curriculum Studies and Indigenous Global Contexts of Culture, Power, and Equity
    (Oxford Research Encyclopedia, 2021-02-23) Kazembe, Lasana D.
    For historically marginalized groups that continue to experience and struggle against hegemony and deculturalization, education is typically accompanied by suspicion of, critique of, and resistance to imposed modes, systems, and thought forms. It is, therefore, typical for dominant groups to ignore and/or regard as inferior the collective histories, heritages, cultures, customs, and epistemologies of subject groups. Deculturalization projects are fueled and framed by two broad, far-reaching impulses. The first impulse is characterized by the denial, deemphasis, dismissal, and attempted destruction of indigenous knowledge and methods by dominant groups across space and time. The second impulse is the effort by marginalized groups to recover, reclaim, and recenter ways of knowing, perceiving, creating, and utilizing indigenous knowledge, methods, symbols, and epistemologies. Deculturalization projects in education persist across various global contexts, as do struggles by global actors to reclaim their histories, affirm their humanity, and reinscribe indigenous ways of being, seeing, and flourishing within diverse educational and cultural contexts. The epistemologies, worldview, and existential challenges of historically marginalized groups (e.g., First Nations, African/African American, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific) operate as sites and tools of struggle against imperialism and dominant modes of seeing, being, and making meaning in the world. Multicultural groups resist deculturalization in their ongoing efforts to apprehend, interrogate, and situate their unique cultural ways of being as pedagogies of protracted resistance and praxes of liberation.
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    Emerging Adult Religiosity and Spirituality: Linking Beliefs, Values, and Ethical Decision-Making
    (MDPI, 2018) Herzog, Patricia Snell; Beadle, De Andre’ T.; Lilly Family School of Philanthropy
    This paper challenges the “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) category as a methodological artifact caused by interacting two closed-ended survey items into binary combinations. Employing a theoretically rich approach, this study maps the multiple ways in which the religious and the spiritual combine for emerging adults. Results indicate that most emerging adults have a tacit sense of morality, displaying limited cognitive access to how moral reasoning relates to religious and spiritual orientations. This longitudinal study investigates efforts to raise moral awareness through: exposure to diverse religious and spiritual orientations, personal reflection, and collective discussion. Relative to control groups, emerging adults in this study display increases in moral awareness. We combine the results of these studies to formulate a theoretical framework for the ways in which beliefs, values, and ethical decision-making connect in expressing plural combinations of religiosity and spirituality. The implication is that direct attention to religiosity and spirituality — not avoidance of — appears to facilitate ethical decision-making.
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    The Genetic Portrait Project
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2014-04-11) Petranek, Stefan
    As new milestones in medicine, agriculture, and synthetic biology are reached through the study and manipulation of genes, scientific research is being translated into technology that is poised to have dramatic affects on each of us. This innovative project explores American sentiment toward genetics by asking individuals from a variety of cultural, educational, and socio-economic backgrounds to respond to the question: “How do you think genetics will affect the future?” Photographs and videos of the individual along with their written/drawn responses are made to document our culture’s current understanding of this timely subject.
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    Intersections: An Installation/Sculpture
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2014-04-11) Agha, Anila Quayyum
    With a New Frontiers Grant 2012-13, I explored intersections of culture & religion, dynamics and interpretations of space, as they thread through cultures and emerge as varied expressions that redefine themselves with the passage of time. In this piece a motif that represents certitude is explored to reveal its fluidity in Islamic sacred spaces and is meant to uncover the contradictory nature of intersections; which are simultaneously boundaries and also points of meeting. The Intersections project takes the seminal experience of exclusion as a woman from a space of community and creativity such as a Mosque and translates the complex expressions of both wonder and exclusion that have been my experience while growing up in Pakistan. The resultant wooden frieze emulates a pattern from the Alhambra, which was poised at the intersection of history, culture and art and was a place where Islamic and Western discourses, met and co-existed in harmony and served as a testament to the symbiosis of difference. This installation project substantiates this mutualism, exploring the binaries of public and private, light and shadow, and static and dynamic.
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    The Paradox of Respect and Risk: Six Lakota Adolescents Speak
    (2009-06-23T21:40:14Z) Isaacson, Mary J; Swenson, Melinda M.; Russell, Kathleen M.; Stiffler, Deborah; Zimmerman, Larry J.
    Adolescence is a time of turbulence as young people stretch parental boundaries, seeking where they fit in society. For many American Indian adolescents this time involves the initiation of dangerous high-risk behaviors. Potential causes posed for this are: loss of identity, loss of cultural values and traditions, lack of positive role modeling and feelings of hopelessness. Survey research has been the predominant method of data collection. Very few studies of Native American youth use storytelling, even though stories are a part of many Indian cultures. The primary purpose of this study was to describe the phenomena of respect and risk from the viewpoint of the Lakota adolescent. I employed hermeneutic phenomenology with photography to help the adolescents illuminate these somewhat abstract concepts. I recruited participants from a single reservation on the Northern Plains. I collected data through non-structured interviews and participant observation. I analyzed the data using hermeneutic phenomenology based on Gadamer. Ecological systems theory provided a framework to assist me in understanding the multiple dimensions present in the adolescent’s stories. The phenomena of respect and risk from the perspective of these Lakota adolescents revealed a paradox. Each can be either positive or negative, depending upon the circumstances or the context of the situation. This paradox became the pattern among the participants. The pattern is the rock (inyan) and the wind (tate). The rock and the wind are deeply interconnected, and the influence of one may impact the other. Three themes emerged from this pattern: role modeling (positive or negative), identity, and feeling valued. These themes are consistent with current research regarding adolescent high-risk behaviors. These stories are significant in that they are personal accounts by these adolescents. This study has implications in nursing education, nursing practice, and health policy. Nursing education must attend to teaching students to listen and to become comfortable working with other cultures. As nurses advocate for future programming, it is essential that the research that guides the policies and programming be community-based action research. As society becomes more diverse, nursing must embrace many perspectives, helping all to achieve the highest quality of health and well-being.
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    Placemaking Curricula in Teacher Preparation: Bridging State Standards and Local Expertise
    (Prescott College, 2022-05) Liu, Laura; IUPUC Education
    This study examined how placemaking curricula shaped teacher candidate (candidate) knowledge, dispositions, and skills to understand, appreciate, and sustain local diversity, as evidenced through candidate reflections and products created in an elementary teacher education course integrating civic science concepts and practices into elementary classrooms. This study explored how placemaking curricula engaged community stakeholders in meaningful shared inquiry on real-world challenges, while meeting state science education standards. Placemaking inquiry projects developed by candidates focused on soil and water conservation, and sustaining diversity in schoolyard spaces. Curricula engaged candidates in learning soil and water conservation techniques from local farmers and conservation leaders, then developing and sharing co-authored civic science children’s books on conservation topics aligned to grade-level standards. As further placemaking curricula, candidates partnered with elementary teachers and students to guide schoolyard observations, designs, and models constructed to sustain diverse abilities, cultures, and ecologies. Presentations to parents and peers celebrated shared insights.
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    A Study of the Rhetoric of the Early Sermons of St. Augustine
    (2012) Wall, John K.; Saak, Eric Leland; Lindseth, Erik L.; Davis, Thomas J. (Thomas Jeffery), 1958-
    This examination of the first five years of his preaching identifies key ways in which Augustine of Hippo transformed classical rhetoric into the pattern he would later outline in De doctrina christiana. This thesis argues that Augustine began his career as a priest giving sermons in line with the sophistic speeches he had taught before his conversion, but that by 396 he had "redeemed" his rhetoric to fit the new purposes of the Christian church. During these early years, Augustine reduced or removed the classical exordia and perorations in order to meld his sermons into the liturgy. He also humbled, but did not eliminate, his rhetorical polish as he shifted the main purpose of rhetoric from pleasing the elites to teaching the masses.