Search Results

open access

Megachurches and Economic Development: A Theoretical Understanding of Church Involvement at the Local Level

Description: Why do megachurches participate in economic development, and who benefits from their participation? Frumkin's framework for understanding nonprofit and voluntary action and extra-role behavior are theories tested to answer these questions. My research employs a mixed-methods research design conducted in two phases. In phase one, I analyze 42 responses to an online survey to provide data about the prevalence and nature of economic development activities offered by megachurches in the Dallas-For… more
Date: December 2015
Creator: English, Ashley E.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Adoption, Management, and Performance of Local Government Investment Pools: A Comparative Analysis of State Practices

Description: This dissertation examines the factors influencing a state’s decision to adopt a local government investment pool (LGIP), the institutional arrangements used in managing them, and the effect of the institutional types on LGIP performance. The dissertation extends the policy adoption theory with insights from investment theory to demonstrate that management credibility influences the likelihood of a state’s LGIP adoption. The study finds that the quality of financial management, the quality of p… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Nukpezah, Julius Atsu
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Exploring Volunteer Management in the Public Sector: What are the Challenges in Managing Volunteers in Local Government?

Description: To effectively provide services to citizens, local governments have had to be creative. One approach has been the creation of volunteer programs to meet demands and expanding needs. Volunteer programs hold promise for creating meaningful engagement opportunities for citizens. However, limited organizational capacity, inadequate volunteer management practices, and difficulties in maintaining volunteer retention are concerns plaguing local government volunteer programs. Volunteer programs are oft… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Sillah, Aminata A
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Effective Public Service Collaboration: The Role of Leadership and Nonprofit Organizations in Homeless Services

Description: This dissertation investigates factors that facilitate effective collaboration of networks functioning within the context of a federal homeless policy—the HEARTH Act of 2009. While the federal legislation encourages networked collaboration to address the incidence of homelessness, not all networks are effective in achieving their intended purpose. Using a nationwide sample of homeless networks, this research explores the role that nonprofit organizations play in the collaborative process and … more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Valero, Jesus N
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Organizational Learning Capacity As a Predictor of Individuals’ Tendency Towards Improvisation in Nonprofit Organizations in Saudi Arabia

Description: The study is undertaken for a more compressive understanding for organizational theory and its applicability to tendency towards improvisation during emergency times among individuals in Non Profit Organizations (NPOs) in Saudi Arabia. The analysis involved an examination of direct effect of learning on tendency towards improvisation and possible mediating effects between organizational learning and tendency towards improvisation among individuals in NPOs, while controlling for key demographic … more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Alhumaid, Saleh Mohammad
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

User Acceptance of Technology: an Empirical Examination of Factors Leading to Adoption of Decision Support Technologies for Emergency Management

Description: This study examines factors that influence the intent to use and actual use of decision support software (DSS) technology by emergency management officials to facilitate disaster response management. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology popularized by scholars from the field of information sciences (IS) for the private sector is adapted and extended to examine technology use in the public sector, specifically by emergency managers. An e-survey was sent to 1, 452 city and count… more
Date: August 2013
Creator: Jennings, Eliot A.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Collaborative Roles of Nonprofits in Climate Change Adaptation Strategies: Institutional Collective Action Framework

Description: The dissertation examines factors influencing nonprofit organizations' contribution to collaborative governance for climate change adaptation and nonprofit roles in the collaboration. Why an organization collaborates with others has long been a concern of scholars. However, in a majority of empirical studies, collaboration has been considered as a dichotomous concept. To fill the gap, this study considers organizations' contribution to collaboration, i.e., collaboration level in terms of power,… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Ryu, Ji Sun
Partner: UNT Libraries

Sources of Household Resilience during the 2018/2019 Saudi Floods

Description: This research studied the relationship between social capital and household resilience. In particular, how bonding and bridging relationships affect household resilience was the question selected to illustrate this relationship between social capital and household resilience. Moreover, how the vulnerability of household impacts household resilience was also empirically examined. Social capital theory and vulnerability paradigm studies were used to discover explanations for why and how social co… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Alshammari, Abdullah Fahad
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Interlocal Competition and Local Fiscal Health

Description: A sizeable literature documents patterns of competition between local governments in metropolitan regions, while also exploring variation in such local government financial attributes as efficiency, budget size, fiscal disparity, and service equity, which are frequently bound together under the concept of fiscal health. However, the concept of fiscal health is broader and more sophisticated than any one fiscal measure, and empirical studies tend to focus only on multi-purpose governments. This … more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Park, Hyunggun
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Local Government Fiscal Stress and Financial Coping Strategies Following Disasters

Description: This dissertation analyzes how local governments adapt to the fiscal stress of major disasters. Unifying theories of fiscal stress with emergency management theories, the dissertation presents a model of what influences local governments coping strategy use following disasters. Using new survey data and secondary financial data on cities, counties, and school districts that experienced Hurricane Harvey, findings show that local governments adapt in a variety of ways; of 137 local governments th… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Winkler, Julie Georgina
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Examining the Psychological Resiliency of Latino Immigrants in Five Texas Cities: Policy, Economics, and Politics – The Case of the Latino Community

Description: This dissertation examines the impact of city-level characteristics (immigration-friendliness index, unemployment rate, and the percentage of Democrat Party votes) on the psychological resiliency of Latino immigrants. In the light of increased attention on the immigrant issue throughout the world, this study aims to develop our understanding of the factors that have the effect on the resiliency of immigrant populations. This dissertation examines these different characteristics by examining fiv… more
Date: December 2019
Creator: Icer, Mehmet Mustafa
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Examining the Impact of Community Policing on Public Attitudes toward Fear of Terrorism, Resilience, and Satisfaction with Police in the Face of New Terrorism

Description: This dissertation examines the impact of citizen's perception of community policing on public attitudes toward fear of terrorism, resilience for a future terrorist attack, and satisfaction with the police in the face of new terrorism. In particular, considering the changing nature of terrorism in recent years as a response to the centralized homeland security efforts, this dissertation attempts to develop our understanding about the extent to which community policing could be a strategy in deal… more
Date: December 2019
Creator: Ayazma, Tayfun
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Housing and Jobs: Investigating the Geographic Variance of Housing Vouchers in Metropolitan Regions

Description: The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the primary public agency responsible for providing housing subsidies to low-income households. The Home Choice Voucher Program (HCVP) is currently the most significant housing subsidy. The voucher can be transferred to any location where the landlord is registered with the local housing agency to participate in the program. The mobility of the voucher is designed to decrease concentrations of low-income households in areas that lack economic, … more
Date: July 2023
Creator: Britton, Honore Emanuel
Partner: UNT Libraries

Investigation of Existing and New Human Resource Practices on Public Health Employee Retention during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Saudi Arabia

Description: This research investigates existing and new HR practices that have impacted public health employee retention in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 pandemic. It builds on social support theory and social exchange theory to better understand the relationships between HR practices and retention, and uses quantitative methods to examine the hypotheses based on a conceptual framework. While OLS regression is employed to analyze the relationships between HR practices and retention, path analysis (boots… more
This item is restricted from view until August 1, 2025.
Date: July 2023
Creator: Alattas, Mohsen Mohammad A
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Investigation of the Impact of Social Vulnerability Research on the Practice of Emergency Management

Description: This dissertation examines the extent to which social vulnerability, as studied by researchers across multiple disciplines, has influenced the practice of emergency management at the local level. This study addresses two major research questions to accomplish this goal. First, how do local emergency managers perceive and define social vulnerability? Second, what strategies do local emergency managers employ to reach and meet the needs of socially vulnerable populations? Semi-structured intervie… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Williams, Brian Don
Partner: UNT Libraries

Procurement of Smart City Technologies: Smart City or Smart Governance?

Description: This dissertation argues that the core of building smart cities is through the procurement and implementation of smart city technologies (SCTs) by either individual (i.e., smart city) or collaborative endeavors (i.e., smart governance). Given that urbanization problems (e.g., air pollution) usually spill over city boundaries, building smart cities as silos may not solve these problems. Therefore, utilizing smart governance in SCT procurement and implementation should be a better approach. Consi… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Tao, Jie
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Connected and Benevolent: The Positive Impact of Social Connections in Reducing Economic Concerns for Volunteering

Description: This dissertation attempts to answer how social and economic mechanisms operate in individual, community and state levels to impact volunteering. Both social processes and economic factors significantly impact the amount of volunteering. However, researchers have a tendency to explain volunteering only by one of these factors. As both theories are equally important in explaining volunteerism, the development of a coherent theory is necessary to combine economic and social theories. This dissert… more
Date: May 2018
Creator: Baktir, Yusuf
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Impact of Surveillance Technology on the Behaviors of Municipal Police Departments

Description: Citizen complaints about inappropriate use of force indicate negative police-public relations, unresponsive police services, and the unresponsiveness of police management to citizens' concerns. However, the effective delivery of key policing services depends on the performance of individual police officers. Surveillance technology can monitor and control the behavior of officers, ensuring that police officers provide high quality policing services that meet the needs of citizens. Examples of su… more
Date: December 2009
Creator: Ulkemen, Sinan
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Needs and Membership in Terrorist Organizations

Description: One key to reducing terrorism may be to understand why individuals join terror groups, and to find ways to meet their needs through alternatives to discourage membership in terrorist organizations. The study introduces the hierarchy of needs framework to capture all previous pieces of explanations on why individuals join terror groups under one big umbrella, in order to see the big picture. It does not do a meta-analysis, but rather tests the framework. This study is designed to find out what p… more
Date: December 2009
Creator: Ekici, Siddik
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Understanding and preventing police use of excessive force: An analysis of attitudes toward police job satisfaction and human rights laws.

Description: Although governments try to create strict policies and regulations to prevent abuses, use of excessive force is still a problem for almost every country including Turkey. This study is intended to help Turkish National Police administrators to understand and prevent police use of excessive force. Studies on police brutality categorize three factors that explain why police officers use excessive force; these are individual, situational and organizational. In addition to brutality theories, job s… more
Date: December 2009
Creator: Akdogan, Huseyin
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Civic Roles of Neighborhood Associations in Seoul, Korea: Implications for Urban Governance

Description: This dissertation answers three research questions: "What differences and similarities exist among neighborhood associations in the United States, Japan, and Seoul, South Korea?," "What are the civic roles of neighborhood associations in apartment complexes in Seoul, South Korea?," and "What factors promote neighborhood associations to play civic roles in urban governance?" To answer the first question, this research analyzes the purposes, governance structures, roles, and legal substance of ne… more
Date: May 2017
Creator: Kim, Jung Wook
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Age Friendly Cities: The Bureaucratic Responsiveness Effects on Age Friendly Policy Adoption

Description: Challenging a long-held attachment to the medical model, this research develops a cultural model placing local governments at the center of policy making and refocusing policy attention on mobility, housing, the built environment and services. To examine the phenomenon of age friendly policy adoption by cities and the magnitude of adoption, a 21-question web-based survey was administered to a sample of 1,050 cities from the U.S. Census having a population over 10,000 and having at least 14% of … more
Date: May 2017
Creator: Keyes, Laura Marie
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Citizen Involvement and Law Enforcement: Does Coproduction Affect Organizational Efficiency and Organizational Effectiveness?

Description: Citizen involvement in the production and delivery of public service has been a long time topic of interest and controversial debate among scholars. Essentially, the belief has been that if citizens are actively involved in the process, public organizations and communities benefit in numerous ways that will ultimately lead to increased citizen satisfaction. The purpose of this research is to explore the relationship between citizen involvement in the production of public safety and security and… more
Date: August 2009
Creator: Gultekin, Sebahattin
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Reform and change in police education: Examining the variations in the top-down and bottom-up structures in the process of implementation.

Description: This study examines the variations in the practice of implementation in different implementation structures using the case of police education reforms that were undertaken by the Turkish National Police (TNP) in 2001 and 2003. Differentiations and similarities in the top-down and bottom-up structures while practicing the process of implementation were investigated in this study. First, the study provides a comprehensive understanding of the process of implementation and structure of implementa… more
Date: August 2009
Creator: Kapti, Alican
Partner: UNT Libraries
Back to Top of Screen