Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

Browse

Filters

2017 - 201912020 - 20241

Settings

Subject: search.filters.subject.Content analysis

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Developing and Measuring Latent Constructs in Text
    (2024) Hoyle, Alexander Miserlis; Resnik, Philip; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Constructs---like inflation, populism, or paranoia---are of fundamental concern to social science. Constructs are the vocabulary over which theory operates, and so a central activity is the development and measurement of latent constructs from observable data. Although the social sciences comprise fields with different epistemological norms, they share a concern for valid operationalizations that transparently map between data and measure. Economists at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, follow a hundred-page handbook to sample the egg prices that constitute the Consumer Price Index; Clinical psychologists rely on suites of psychometric tests to diagnose schizophrenia. In many fields, this observable data takes the form of language: as a social phenomenon, language data can encode many of the latent social constructs that people care about. Commensurate with both increasing sophistication in language technologies and amounts of available data, there has thus emerged a "text-as-data" paradigm aimed at "amplifying and augmenting" the analyses that compose research. At the same time, Natural Language Processing (NLP), the field from which analysis tools originate, has often remained separate from real-world problems and guiding theories---as least when it comes to social science. Instead, it focuses on atomized tasks under the assumption that progress on low-level language aspects will generalize to higher-level problems that involve overlapping elements. This dissertation focuses on NLP methods and evaluations that facilitate the development and measurement of latent constructs from natural language, while remaining sensitive to social sciences' need for interpretability and validity.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "The voice of duty is the voice of God": The spatial manifestation of the religious duty of health in Seventh-day Adventism
    (2017) Burtch, Nathan R.; Geores, Martha; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The Seventh-day Adventists are a millennial Christian denomination that traces its lineage to the Millerites of the mid-nineteenth century. Among the various theological differences espoused by Adventism is a predilection towards healthful living and providing healthcare services to those in need; a religious duty of health. This research studies the intersection of religious behavior, health, and space within Adventism. A content analysis of the writings of Ellen G. White, a particularly important voice in the creation of Adventism, demonstrates that healthful practice is a religious duty. This religious duty towards health can be categorized as both an individual and an institutional duty; adherents themselves have duties towards health, as well Adventist institutions have duties of healthcare provision. To understand how religious duty interacts with space, a model of spatialization of duty is constructed. Extending upon Lefebvre’s spatial triad, religious duty is theorized to meet with an individual’s agency of belief within a filter of space. Religious duty therefore manifests spatially through the construction of a dutyscape, or a landscape spatially constructed around duty. The terms religious space and sacred space are defined to clarify difference. Religious space is social space that establishes a connection between the physical and metaphysical realms, while sacred space is personal space in which the connection between the physical and metaphysical is experienced. Both types of space can manifest through a filter of space as dutyscapes. Adventist spaces of healing are assessed in the context of existing therapeutic landscapes literature and the model of the construction of dutyscapes. This research shows that the Adventist institutional duties of health manifest as a worldwide dutyscape of hospitals. Additionally, a content analysis of YouTube videos published by Adventist healthcare institutions, in conjunction with a narrative interview with an employee of Adventist HealthCare, demonstrates that these religious duties are still current to Adventist spaces of health. The spatial manifestation of these religious duties make Adventist hospitals religious spaces, and give the potential to create sacred spaces when individuals experience a connection with the metaphysical within the constructed spaces of care.