College of Liberal Arts

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10877/17052

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Ask the Editor! Secrets to Success in Getting Past the Editor's Desk
(2024-04) Shields, Patricia M.
This presentation is part of a panel of journal editors sponsored by the Texas State Faculty Development Department in April of 2024. Between 40 and 80% of journal submissions are reject by the editor and do not go through the blind peer review process. This presentation discusses major problems that lead to desk rejects and ways to strengthen a submission so that it does move forward to peer review. A manuscript that does not align well with the journal’s mission is the most likely reason for a desk reject. Author’s should do their homework and get to know the journal they are targeting. The journal’s website is a good resource. The presentation also discusses issues around the abstract, introduction, sources used, methodology, and overall quality of the submission that taken as a whole can lead to a desk reject. I use examples from the journal I have edited since 2001-- Armed Forces & Society an interdisciplinary and international journal with a 1.4 impact factor ranked in both sociology and political science.
The Write Team: Publishing Partnerships Between Faculty and Students
(2023-11-09) Shields, Patricia M.; Vandiver, Donna
This workshop on publishing with students sponsored by the Texas State University Faculty Advancement Center. At Texas State, teaching and research are two of the most important things we do in our community. Often, we work to combine these two pillars to provide both quality teaching and research. One way to do this is publishing research with students. As with everything in teaching and research, publishing with students presents amazing opportunities as well as challenges to navigate. This session contains tips and recommendations for partnering with students on publishing research and becoming the write team.
How Afghanistan Influenced the Content of Armed Forces & Society: An Editor’s Reflection on Trends in the Literature
(2023-12-14) Shields, Patricia M.
This paper is a presentation for the Military-Civilian Transition Research Forum from the Military-Civilian Transition Office of the Defense Support Services Center, The United States Department of Defense. Using the lenses of the postmodern or post-Cold War military, this presentation reflects on how the articles in the Armed Forces & Society journal were influenced by the Afghanistan War. The postmodern military relies more heavily on volunteers, is more likely to engage in unconventional missions, and more likely to use multinational forces. The multiple deployments and brutal nature of the war led to a large increase in health/mental health articles and contributed to changes in the scope of the military family and Veterans’ literature. The depth and complexity of the reserve and contractor literature changed significantly. The presentation concludes with additional, non-Afghanistan related trends in the literature. There is a growing literature resting on the intersection of military and police functions. They range from the convergence of military and police functions to the crime of veterans and active duty, incarcerated veterans and Veterans employed by police and prisons. The military’s involvement in natural disasters including COVID and climate related disasters has a growing international literature. The greater level of threat has led to conscription many to Europe counties, which in turn resulted in a new literature on models of recruitment.
Academic Publishing in Military Studies: Insight and Tips from an Experience Editor
(2023-10) Shields, Patricia M.
This workshop on publishing in military studies employs the insights of Pat Shields who has edited the academic journal Armed Forces & Society for 23 years. It covers the manuscript review process, the editor’s big picture perspective, tips on general acceptance emphasizing getting past the editor’s desk, publishing book reviews, and things to do to improve acceptance early on and during the revise and resubmit stage.
How the Afghanistan War Influenced the Content of Armed Forces and Society: An Editor's 20-year Reflection
(2023-10) Shields, Patricia M.
This is a powerpoint presentation of a presentation at the 2023 conference of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces & Society. It introduces a special issue on the Afghanistan War in the journal Armed Forces & Society. The presenter, Pat Shields, edited the journal over the 20 year duration of the war. This presentation examines how the war changed the character of the content of Armed Forces & Society. Key findings are linked to the heavy use of multiple deployments. This caused new types of stress for the service members and their families. These stresses carried into their role as veterans and can be viewed in the dramatic increase in health and mental health related articles. In addition, the smaller All-volunteer force needed to be supplemented with reserve forces and contractors. The journal’s content reflected these developments. The “small war” and multilateral nature of the Afghanistan war also led to different kinds of personnel and management challenges.
Jane Addams and the Nobel Art of Peaceweaving
(2023-03) Shields, Patricia M.; Soeters, Joseph
This presentation explores ”Peaceweaving”, Jane Addams notion of positive peace. Peaceweaving entails building the fabric of peace by emphasizing relationships. These positive relationships are built by working on practical problems, avoiding rigid moralisms/moral chauvinism, embracing perplexity, engaging people widely with sympathetic understanding while recognizing that progress is measured by the welfare of the vulnerable. This concept is imbedded in Addams’s feminist pragmatism. We apply pragmatism and her notion of peaceweaving to contemporary UN peacekeeping operations.
Gauging Research: Uncovering Democratic Norms as we Bridge the Worlds of Practice and Scholarship
(2023-03) Shields, Patricia M.; Rangarajan, Nandhini; Casula, Mattia
This paper introduces the Gauging research purpose and shows its relevance for public administration. It also demonstrates how the frameworks of the gauging purpose can be used to infuse democratic processes into applied research in public administration.
Microtopographic Controls on Erosion and Deposition of a Rilled Hillslope in Eastern Tennessee, USA
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2022-03-09) Li, Yingkui; Lu, Xiaoyu; Washington-Allen, Robert; Li, Yanan
Topography plays an important role in shaping the patterns of sediment erosion and deposition of different landscapes. Studies have investigated the role of topography at basin scales, whereas little work has been conducted on hillslopes, partially due to the lack of high-resolution topographic data. We monitored detailed topographic changes of a rilled hillslope in the southeastern United States using terrestrial laser scanning and investigated the influences of various microtopographic factors on erosion and deposition. The results suggest that the contributing area is the most important factor for both rill erosion and deposition. Rills with large contributing areas tend to have high erosion and deposition. Slope is positively related to erosion but negatively related to deposition. Roughness, on the other hand, is positively related to deposition but negatively related to erosion. Higher erosion and lower deposition likely occur on north-facing aspects, possibly because of higher soil moisture resulting from less received solar insolation. Similarly, soil moisture is likely higher in areas with higher terrain wetness index values, leading to higher erosion. This work provides important insight into the sediment dynamic and its microtopographic controls on hillslopes.
Does Gender Climate Influence Climate Change? The Multidimensionality of Gender Equality and Its Countervailing Effects on the Carbon Intensity of Well-Being
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021-04-02) Ergas, Christina; Greiner, Patrick; McGee, Julius Alexander; Clement, Matthew Thomas
The carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB) (a ratio measuring the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of life expectancy at birth) is an increasingly popular way to measure the ecological efficiency of nations. Although research demonstrates that economic development typically reduces this efficiency, little research has explored the extent to which social equality improves it. This study uses panel data for 70 nations between 1995 and 2013 to assess how various aspects of gender equality affect the ecological efficiency of nations. We estimate a series of Prais-Winsten regression models with panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) to assess how increases in the percentage of women in parliament, expected years of education for women, and the percentage of women in the labor force independently affect CIWB. Our findings indicate that across all nations, increases in the percentage of women in parliament and expected years of schooling reduce CIWB; however, increases in the percentage of women in the labor force increase CIWB. Our results further show that the relationship between different dimensions of gender equality and CIWB differs between more developed and less developed nations. Finally, we find that increases in the number of women in parliament and women’s education attenuate the relationship between women’s labor force participation and CIWB. We discuss the variation in our results by reviewing relevant eco-gender literatures and feminist economics.
COVID-19: Evidenced Health Disparity
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021-08-05) Iyanda, Ayodeji E.; Boakye, Kwadwo; Lu, Yongmei
Health disparity is an unacceptable, unjust, or inequitable difference in health outcomes among different groups of people that affects access to optimal health care, as well as deterring it. Health disparity adversely affects disadvantaged subpopulations due to a higher incidence and prevalence of a particular disease or ill health. Existing health disparity determines whether a disease outbreak such as coronavirus disease 2019, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), will significantly impact a group or a region. Hence, health disparity assessment has become one of the focuses of many agencies, public health practitioners, and other social scientists. Successful elimination of health disparity at all levels requires pragmatic approaches through an intersectionality framework and robust data science.
Explore Associations between Subjective Well-Being and Eco-Logical Footprints with Fixed Effects Panel Regressions
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021-09-03) Wu, Xiu; Zhang, Jinting; Zhang, Daojun
As environmental degradations constantly and directly threaten human well-being, it is imperative to explore the environmental impacts on people’s happy life. This research investigates the association between subjective well-being (SWB) and ecological footprints (EF) through space-time fixed effects panel regressions. EF, as a vital indicator of environmentally sustainable development, plays a vital role in ecological balance. SWB determines the subjective quality of life for humanity. EF-related factors and socio-economic indexes referring to GDP, urbanization rate, income, education, health, political stability, and political voice accountability in 101 countries were captured. Compared with ordinary least square (OLS), stepwise regression (SR) and fixed effects panel regression models (FEPR) exhibited good fitness regardless of the cross-section or longitudinal models due to R2 beyond 0.9. The finding also discloses that EF and health were positively significant to SWB, while income was negatively significant to SWB. EF was an invert u-shaped link to SWB, which met the assumption of EKC. This research provided a model-driven quantitative method to address environmental impacts on people’s quality life of happiness, and opened shared doors for further research of carbon balance and circular economy.
Predict Health Care Accessibility for Texas Medicaid Gap
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021-09-15) Zhang, Jinting; Wu, Xiu
Medicaid is a unique approach in ensuring the below poverty population obtains free insurance coverage under federal and state provisions in the United States. Twelve states without expanded Medicaid caused two million people who were under the poverty line into health insecurity. Principal Component-based logistical regression (PCA-LA) is used to consider health status (HS) as a dependent variable and fourteen social-economic indexes as independent variables. Four composite components incorporated health conditions (i.e., “no regular source of care” (NRC), “last check-up more than a year ago” (LCT)), demographic impacts (i.e., four categorized adults (AS)), education (ED), and marital status (MS). Compared to the unadjusted LA, direct adjusted LA, and PCA-unadjusted LA three methods, the PCA-LA approach exhibited objective and reasonable outcomes in presenting an odd ratio (OR). They included that health condition is positively significant to HS due to beyond one OR, and negatively significant to ED, AS, and MS. This paper provided quantitative evidence for the Medicaid gap in Texas to extend Medicaid, exposed healthcare geographical inequity, offered a sight for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to improve the Medicaid program and make political justice for the Medicaid gap.
Assessment of Ensemble Models for Groundwater Potential Modeling and Prediction in a Karst Watershed
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021-09-16) Farzin, Mohsen; Avand, Mohammadtaghi; Ahmadzadeh, Hassan; Zelenakova, Martina; Tiefenbacher, John
Due to numerous droughts in recent years, the amount of surface water in arid and semi-arid regions has decreased significantly, so reliance on groundwater to meet local and regional demands has increased. The Kabgian watershed is a karst watershed in southwestern Iran that provides a significant proportion of drinking and agriculture water supplies in the area. This study identified areas with karst groundwater potential using a combination of machine learning and statistical models, including entropy-SVM-LN, entropy-SVM-SG, and entropy-SVM-RBF. To do this, 384 karst springs were identified and mapped. Sixteen factors that are related to karst potential were identified from a review of the literature, and these were compiled for the study area. The 384 locations were randomly separated into two categories for training (269 location) and validation (115 location) datasets to be used in the modeling process. The ROC curve was used to evaluate the modeling results. The models used, in general, were good at determining the location of karst groundwater potential. The evaluation showed that the E-SVM-RBF model had an area under the curve of 0.92, indicating that it was most accurate estimator of groundwater potential among the ensemble models. Evaluation of the relative importance of each of the 16 factors revealed that land use, a vector ruggedness measure, curvature, and topography roughness index were the most important explainers of the presence of karst groundwater in the study area. It was also found that the factors affecting the presence of karst springs are significantly different from non-karst springs.
Using the Change Point Model (CPM) Framework to Identify Windows for Water Resource Management Action in the Lower Colorado River Basin of Texas, USA
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021-12-22) Lavy, Brendan L.; Weaver, Russell; Hagelman, Ronald R.
In water-stressed river basins with growing urban populations, conflicts over water resources have emerged between urban and agricultural interests, as managerial interventions occur with little warning and tend to favor urban over agricultural water uses. This research documents changes in water use along an urban-to-agricultural gradient to examine whether it is possible to leverage temporal fluctuations in key quantitative data indicators to detect periods in which we could expect substantive managerial interventions in water resource management. We employ the change point model (CPM) framework to locate shifts in water use, climate-related indicators, lake and river characteristics, and agricultural trends across urban and agricultural counties in the lower Colorado River basin of Texas. Three distinctive groupings of change points appear. Increasing water use by urban counties and a shift in local climate conditions characterize the first period. Declines in agricultural counties’ water use and crop production define the second. Drops in lake levels, lower river discharge, and an extended drought mark the third. We interpret the results relative to documented managerial intervention events and show that managerial interventions occur during and after significant change points. We conclude that the CPM framework may be used to monitor the optimal timing of managerial interventions and their effects to avoid negative outcomes.
The Texas State Donated Skeletal Collection at the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021-12-27) Gocha, Timothy P.; Mavroudas, Sophia; Wescott, Daniel J.
The Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State (FACTS) began accepting whole-body donations for scientific research and educational purposes under the Texas Anatomical Gift Act in 2008. Research conducted with donated whole bodies involves studies in taphonomy and human decomposition, including reconstructing the postmortem interval. Following decomposition, the skeletal elements of all donors are collected, cleaned, and permanently curated into the Texas State Donated Skeletal Collection (TXSTDSC), which is used for teaching and research by faculty and students at Texas State but is also open to external researchers. To date, FACTS has received 710 donors. Fifty-eight percent of donors are male and 42% are female. Donor ages range from 21 weeks’ gestation to 103 years old at the time of death, with a mean of 66 years, and a median of 68 years. Based on self-identified or family-identified ancestry, 90% of donors are White, 4.5% are Hispanic, 3% are Black, less than 2% are of mixed ancestry, and less than 1% are Asian or Native American. Information collected about each donor includes geographic/residential history; occupational history; socioeconomic status; anthropometrics; parity status; alcohol, tobacco, and drug use history; mobility status; an overall health questionnaire; cause and manner of death.
Texas in Transition: Considering the Production of Grapes, Wine, and Place
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2022-10-19) Myles, Colleen C.; Townsend, Christi G.; Collins, Kourtney
Given the state’s growing prominence in the United States wine industry, paired with its relative obscurity, we explore the cultural and environmental transformation of the state of Texas from the perspective of the b(l)ooming wine industry. Using a qualitative, narrative approach, focused on the two largest and most productive appellations in the state, we form a framework for understanding the historical and contemporary context for wine in Texas. Through participant observation and targeted interviews with growers, winemakers, and other wine industry insiders, we uncover how wine has become a major part of the regional identity of the Texas Hill Country and High Plains. We find that, even though the best wines made in Texas are made from lesser known and harder to market varietals, Texans have embraced the wine (culture) produced in their state. Though, as elsewhere, the industry in Texas is complex and multifaceted, it is still evolving, and industry actors are focusing on making a high quality, tasty product in order to compete with other wine industry giants. Although growers in the Hill Country and High Plains face various challenges, these circumstances demand creativity. However, the challenging circumstances and accompanying creativity are precisely what drive the unique tastes of Texas wines, a reality the Texas wine industry has begun to embrace.
The Road to City Manager: A Balancing Act for Women near the Top
(Initiative for Gender Equity in the Public Sector, 2022-10-18) Wayman, Ashley; Shields, Patricia M.
This Blog entry about women in city government was written by Ashley Wayman, a graduate of the Texas State MPA Program and Patricia Shields, her professor. The Blog discusses Ashley’s research at Texas State into reasons there are so few women city managers. It spotlights Ashley’s experience. She surveyed women assistant city managers and department directors in Texas to learn their experiences. Ashley did this in part because she aspired to be a city manager herself. She has subsequently taken on the position of City Administrator for the City of Rollingwood and is planning her wedding. This blog also examined how her research has influenced how she approaches her job as city administrator and the challenges she sees as her personal life changes. The blog is part of a large blog series by the Initiative for Gender Equity in the Public Sector that highlights authors who contributed to The Handbook on Gender and Public Administration, edited by Patricia Shields and Nicole Elias.
Handbook of Gender and Public Administration: A BookTalk
(2022-09-22) Shields, Patricia M.; Elias, Nicole M.
This BookTalk, sponsored by the American Society for Public Administration, provides a fresh focus on how gender and public administration influence and interact with each other. It introduces the Handbook on Gender and Public Administration edited by Patricia Shields and Nicole Elias. This innovative handbook brings together leading scholars to explore the emerging contexts of gender and public administration including gender equity, masculinity, intersectionality and beyond binary conceptions of gender. The 27 chapters provide an in-depth analysis of the history, theory and context of gender equity alongside the intersection of gender and traditional public administration topics such as budgeting, personnel, organizations, ethics, performance and representative democracy. Furthermore, it investigates gender dynamics in international, governmental, non-profit, policy and academic contexts, highlights the progress made, and identifies the ongoing challenges.
Scholarly Publishing in Military Sciences: Insights from an Experienced Editor
(2022-10) Shields, Patricia M.
This is a workshop on scholarly publishing in military sciences presented at the 2022 Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society - Canada. It focuses on publication in Armed Forces & Society, the journal that the Pat Shields (presenter) has edited since 2001. It includes a discussion of the manuscript review process, the editor's perspective, getting past the editor's desk, the scope of Armed Forces & Society articles, general tips on quality, things to consider before submission and at the revise and resubmit stage, personal keys to success, how to enhance discoverability after publication and a list of resources on the topic. Armed Forces & Society can be found at this website: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/afs
Peaceweaving and Positive Peace
(2022-10-05) Shields, Patricia M.
This presentation is part of Texas State Philosophy Dialogue Series week on Peaceweaving. It defines and refines the definition of peaceweaving. The concept originated with Jane Addams and her work at Hull House in Chicago (1889 - 1935) as well as her leadership in the women's peace movement before and after World War I. The concept is linked to the pragmatism of John Dewey, participatory democracy and social ethics. It links to contemporary notions of positive peace. Peaceweaving involves – building the fabric of peace by emphasizing relationships. These positive relationships are built by working on practical problems, avoiding rigid moralisms, embracing perplexity, engaging people widely with sympathetic understanding while recognizing that progress is measured by the welfare of the vulnerable.

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