College for Design and Social Inquiry

This thesis provides a comprehensive review of the evolution of Robert Agnew’s
General Strain Theory of Delinquency, and tests his 2002 extension using two
subsamples from the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Juveniles between
12 and 17, and “emerging” adults that are 18 years old. Including an “emerging” adult
subsample makes this analysis one of the first full tests of adults. Additionally, this
analysis is the first partial test of Agnew’s 2013 extension of General Strain Theory.
Overall, the results of the analysis lend support to Agnew’s 2002 extension. Measures of
strain are revealed to significantly effect measures of negative emotionality and low selfconstraint,
and measures of negative emotionality and low self-constraint significantly
affect delinquency/deviance and illicit substance use. A major limitation to the thesis is
that there is no negative emotionality measure of anger, which is Agnew’s (1985; 1992)
key measures of negative emotionality.

Disparity in sentence length has long been a topic of discussion (Spohn, 2009).
Though most research is aimed at disparity due to race, few studies utilize sex as a focal
point (Crow & Kunselman, 2009; Embry & Lyons, 2012; Gavin, 2014; Hartley, Kwak,
Park & Min-Sik Lee, 2011; Hasset-Walker, Lateano, Di Benedetto, 2014; Messing, 2008;
Steffensmeier, Ulmer & Kramer, 1998). The focus of this study is to examine the effect
of sex on sentence length, controlling for characteristics derived from the evil woman
hypothesis, chivalry hypothesis, and focal concerns theory, to discuss the potential
paternalism of the criminal justice system, which may cause potential sentence disparities
(Daly, 1989; Nagel & Hagen, 1983; Steffensmeir, Ulmer, & Kramer, 1998). The findings
indicate that women always receive a reduced sentence compared to male offenders,
regardless of the crime type of past criminal offenses. The statistically significant results
indicate that there is a need to review the criminal justice system and implement new
polices such as judicial review to help stymie the differing sentences given (Spohn, 2009). If not, offenders will continue to receive differing sentences, based solely on
extra-legal factors, such as the sex of the offender.

This dissertation analyzes administrative discretion in public policy implementation in application of a new framework of integrative approach to administrative discretion developed from deficiencies of the citizen participation, representative bureaucracy, and private-interest groups democracy frameworks. The new framework holds that public agencies use discretion to integrate in decision making views of elected authorities, private-interest groups, public-interest groups, and other groups that seek to influence implementation. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy is used as the case study, and the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) is the implementation setting. The dissertation answers the following question: How integrative of group views was DOE’s discretionary decision making in the implementation of NCLB? This research applies a structured content analysis method that consists of content analysis and a content analysis schedule (see Jauch, Osborn, & Martin, 1980). Using a Likert question, the dissertation developed six integration levels of DOE’s discretionary decision making from not at all integrative to extremely integrative and found that most decisions were very integrative.

For years, scholars have investigated the effectiveness of aid dollars. Some
scholars measure aid effectiveness at the country level in terms of achieving good
governance, promoting democratic accountability, accomplishing growth goals, or
attaining macroeconomic goals. This study looks at the aid flowing through nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs). It posits that effective aid consists of resources and
processes that promote sustainability. It attempts to uncover the meaning of
sustainability for the NGOs and recipients that are involved in agriculture while
surveying how the aid process works. It looks at NGOs and recipients, resource flow, and
activities, and sought to understand the elements that could render aid more or less
effective in achieving sustainability in agricultural sectors. This study uses a qualitative
case study research strategy that focused on developing theory/hypotheses grounded in
the data and the literature (Agranoff, Radin, & Perry, 1991). This approach is adopted because (a) the
meaning and promotion of sustainability is a complex topic, (b) aid effectiveness is a
multi-faceted puzzle, (c) NGOs represent a diverse group, (d) the collaborative process is
complicated, and (e) the context (Haiti) is a challenging place. It uses a data triangulation
process (Denzin, 1989, 1997) by combining different types of data and sources (personal
interviews, observations, and documentation) to arrive at a convergent understanding of
the elements that are more or less likely to influence the NGO aid process in the
promotion of sustainability in agriculture.
This study finds that most NGOs and recipients focus on one or two dimensions
of sustainability (economic or environmental); the social or cultural dimensions are
somewhat neglected. I also find that funding and funding horizons are two of the major
issues that impede the promotion of sustainability in addition to communication and
collaboration in the design of the plans, execution, and follow-up. Recipient education,
paternalistic attitude, and poverty levels also play a major role in promoting
sustainability.

The most important asset of any organization is its people (Danish & Usman,
2010). Whatever the market segment, they are the driving force behind creating and
delivering on the organization’s strategic and financial objectives. The ability to attract,
retain and motivate the necessary workforce, through use of financial rewards, is a main
determinant in the degree to which these objectives are met (Fong & Tosi, 2007; Gomez-
Mejia & Balkin, 1992b; Newman, Gerhart, & Milkovich, 2016). While there are many
approaches to pay strategy, a key aspect, and the focus of this dissertation, is the market
positioning of cash compensation. Specifically examined was the stated policy narrative
of market positioning compared to actual pay practice.
While compensation practices in the private sector have received significant
research attention, much less focus has been given to pay in academia. This work seeks
to address this apparent gap and extend our knowledge in this area. Utilizing faculty pay at Florida’s ten major public universities, this dissertation analyzes consistency between
the narrative and practice at the levels of university, department, rank, size and region.
The findings demonstrated a significant difference between pay and university but
inconsistencies across all levels with the stated narrative. Additionally, the results
indicate a widening gap between actual pay and the market average between the 2005-
2006 academic year to present.

The term profession is found throughout the scholarly literature; despite frequent
use of the term, there exists little or no means of providing a common conception of the
term. Consequently, calls for increasing professionalization of public administration
appear to be premature. Therefore, this dissertation utilizes inductive research to generate
theory, which synthesizes the inchoate concept of the professional public administrator.
The motivation to pursue this line of inquiry stems from a personal need to weigh
in on the perennial debate about what skills, knowledge, and information should be
communicated to future generations of public administration thinkers and practitioners.
To that end, this research will provide a theoretical framework grounded in the literature,
which federates the term professional and the professional concept in such a way that
purposeful debates can be had. It is, as will be shown, an attempt to link understanding
and interpretation.

Community-oriented policing implementation has been examined under the
context of large agencies whereas the literature on smaller agencies has ultimately been
lagging behind The purpose of this study is therefore to examine the degree of
community policing implementation within these smaller agencies, controlling for
characteristics derived from the theory of social disorganization, to gather further insight
into what variables may be impacting crimes rates Pearson correlation and OLS
regression analysis is employed to obtain the necessary results The findings indicate that
although community-policing implementation does not significantly impact or explain
the variation of crime rates in small cities, the statistically significant results of particular
social disorganization characteristics should be an indicator of the need to incorporate
theory with practice

This dissertation examines task specialization in the public administration
profession through studying the job tasks that a public procurement practitioner
performs, manages, and both performs and manages. The purpose of this
dissertation was to establish a baseline to benchmark what these practitioners
actually do on their jobs. Factor analysis was used to study a data set of 2,549
respondents that were administered a survey by the Universal Public
Procurement Certification Council (UPPCC) in 2012. The research question to be
answered involved addressing what job tasks public procurement practitioners
perform, manage, and both perform and manage. Hypotheses were examined
that predicted task specialization existing within public procurement to the extent
that practitioners in more senior job positions display more task specialization
and that practitioners from larger organizations also display more task specialization. A review of literature discusses the alternative perspectives on
what constitutes professionalism in the public sector. The reasons for focusing on
public procurement professionalism were subsequently presented through the
literature. The various views of what entails professionalism in public
administration were discussed as to responsibility (Stivers, 1994), sociological
issues (Simon, 1947), constitutional issues (Lowi, 1995; Rohr, 1986), technical
specialization and empirical rigor (Parsons, 1939), as means of contextualizing
the nature of public administrators’ roles and responsibilities in conjunction with
the job tasks that are executed.
Factor analysis was conducted on 75 job tasks in order to identify
relationships between practitioner job tasks for the purposes of finding out what it
is that public procurement practitioners actually do for their work. The job tasks
found to share relationships may be grouped together for further inquiry into the
nature of the relationships between job tasks and overarching competency areas
of related job tasks. Additionally, factor analyses were conducted to identify
relationships between job tasks in public procurement and control variables such
as organization size and job position, which were predicted to impact whether or
not practitioners perform, manage, both perform and manage, or do neither, for
each of the job tasks surveyed.

This dissertation examines how different United States Department of the Interior
(USDOI) employees’ perceive fairness and support for diversity. The USDOI is an
agency with numerous STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) employees
who have the opportunity to influence future generations through their STEM internship.
Specifically, this dissertation examines the relationship between: (1) the perceived
fairness of performance appraisals and the empowerment index, demographic
characteristics, satisfaction, accountability and recognition; and (2) the perceived support
(or lack thereof) of departmental programs and supervisors to foster diversity in the
workforce and the empowerment index and demographic characteristics.
This dissertation accomplishes several things. First, it provides a review of
literature relating to gender diversity. Second, it provides a brief history of organizations
that were created and acts/executive orders that were passed in order to support women in their fight against gender discrimination. Fourth, it provides a review of the USDOI’s
recruitment, promotion, and employment policies. Finally, it presents an analysis of how
USDOI employees’ perceptions of diversity differ by gender.
This inquiry utilizes a theoretical framework based on Thomas and Ely’s (1996)
and Selden and Selden’s (2001) four diversity paradigms; “discrimination and fairness,”
“access and legitimacy,” “learning and effectiveness,” and “valuing and integrating.”
These paradigms suggest that the true benefits of diversity can only be realized in the
valuing and integrating paradigm where employees’ individual differences are used for
the betterment of the organization.
It is found that women tend not to perceive that their organization supports
diversity. It is also found that the empowerment index, federal tenure, pay category,
satisfaction, accountability and recognition are important in explaining employees’
perceptions of fairness and that the empowerment index, federal tenure, supervisory
status, gender, and minority status are important in explaining employees’ perceptions of
support for diversity.

Addressing the current homeland security challenges requires scholars,
practitioners, elected officials, and community partners working in unison to mitigate the
hazards confronting first responders. Built on public choice theory, this research
addressed a specific component of the emergency preparedness matrix: the most
preferred fire service organizational design. The fire department organizational designs in
this study included a Florida county, city, and independent special control fire district
(ISFCD) that serve residents on a full-time platform. The concurrent embedded
methodology used attempted to unearth which organizational design achieves economies
of scale based on quarterly emergency service calls: the centralized county model or the
decentralized city/ISFCD models. This study was an inquiry into the centralization versus
decentralization argument, with emphases on fire service scale economies and inter-local
service agreements Using multiple linear regression modeling accompanied by face-to-face
interviews with the respective fire chiefs, this research showed that the county and
ISFCD achieve scale economies over 44 quarters, fiscal years 2004-2014. Moreover, the
interviews uncovered that response times were the driving factor behind instituting
voluntary inter-local service agreements between the three fire departments. Other
positive benefits from the service agreements include an increase in personnel and scene
safety, dispatch center protocol enhancements, multi-company/jurisdictional training,
overtime savings on large-scale disaster incidents, and trust building.
The implications of this research for the scholarly and practitioner community
include a better understanding of the technical and allocative efficiencies within the fire
service arena. Melding public choice theory with strands of inter-local service agreement
literature provides policymakers and scholars with a template for uncovering the fire
service production/provision narrative. Though the centralization-decentralization
argument is not solved within the research scope presented, the future narrative as
uncovered in the research requires a citizenry inclusion. The future public choice
prescriptions regarding fire service consolidation requires not only statistical modeling,
but a normative democratic ethos tone incorporating multiple stakeholders with the
citizens’ concerns at the forefront.