Browsing by Author "Dannenberg, Clare"

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    Cumberland Plateau Health District 2009-2010 Flu Season Vaccine Study: Final Report
    Marmagas, Susan West; Dannenberg, Clare; Hausman, Bernice L.; Anthony, Elizabeth; Boyer, Stacy Bingham; Fortenberry, Lauren; Lawrence, Heidi (Virginia Tech, 2011-08-31)
    The Cumberland Plateau Health District of the Virginia Department of Health commissioned a team of faculty at Virginia Tech in 2011 to conduct a small pilot study of seasonal flu and H1N1 vaccination practices in Far Southwest Virginia. The study was conducted between February and July 2011. The purpose of the study was two-fold: Understand the reasons why two specific populations (parents of elementary school-aged children and 18-25 year olds) chose to vaccinate or not vaccinate for H1N1 and seasonal flu in 2009-10, and Identify the contributing factors (e.g. logistical barriers, intentional reasons, or parental disengagement) that led to a decision to either vaccinate or not vaccinate. The study was conducted in a small rural county with a significant portion of the population living below the poverty line. The area ranks low in Virginia for health outcomes with more than one quarter of residents reporting to be in poor or fair health in nationally tracked county health statistics. The study had three components: a survey of 86 family units in two elementary schools, indepth in-person follow-up interviews with nine families, and a survey of 158 18-25 year-olds in two educational institutions in the region.
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    Effects of Voice Quality and Face Information on Infants' Speech Perception in Noise
    Versele, Jessica (Virginia Tech, 2009-05-04)
    A recent study by Polka, Rvachew, and Molnar (2008) found that 6- to 8-month-old infants do not discriminate a simple native consonant-vowel contrast when familiarized to it in the presence of distraction noise (i.e., recordings of crickets and birds chirping), even when testing was conducted in quiet. Because the distraction noise did not overlap with the phonemes' frequencies, failure to encode the familiarization phoneme could be due more to a disruption in infant attention than to direct masking effects. Given that infants learn speech under natural conditions involving noise and distraction, it is important to identify factors that may 'protect' their speech perception under non-ideal listening conditions. The current study investigated three possible factors: speech register, face information, and speaker gender. Six-month-old infants watched a video of a female speaker producing a native phoneme in either an adult-directed or infant-directed manner accompanied by the same background noise as in Polka et al. (2008). After habituation, infants were tested with alternating trials of the familiar phoneme and a novel phoneme in quiet. Phoneme discrimination was measured by recording infants' heart rate and looking times during familiar and novel trials. Discrimination was poor in infants who viewed a female speaker using adult-directed speech but was significantly improved (as seen in both dependent measures of attention) when the female speaker used infant-directed speech. Results indicate that common factors in the typical environment of infants can promote speech perception abilities in noise.
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    Troubling Literacy in the "Contact Zone" of a Rural High School English Class
    Groenke, Susan Lee (Virginia Tech, 2000-11-10)
    This dissertation examines how multiple, hybridized literacy practices exist in the "contact zone" of the classroom, a "social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple, with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today" (Pratt, 2002, p. 4). The rural high school English class under study here operates as such a "contact zone," as the teacher and students engage in conflicted negotiation, rather than assimilation or acculturation, when multiple literacy practices vie for recognition. Fieldnotes collected during two months of participant observation, collected artifacts in the form of student written texts, teacher syllabi and school documents, i.e., student handbooks, as well as interviews with three male students, one female student, one teacher, one special education aide, and a school principal provided the data for this study. Findings make problematic the beliefs that 1) literacy is a homogenous, static, singular either/or phenomenon, i.e., official school literacy or unofficial, and that 2) classrooms represent homogeneous, unified communities of obedient students who share literacy practices. Rather, classrooms, as "contact zones," can represent heterogeneous groups of students whose literacy practices are hybrid and intercultural, grafting together often reactionary, oppressive sociopolitical intentions with officially sanctioned literacy goals. This inquiry raises questions about literacy as only a local social practice, as well as literacy pedagogical discourses that students do not simply assimilate or acculturate, but contest, appropriate, resist, and use to harass and oppress others, even as they accomplish school literacy assignments.