Undergraduate Honors Theses

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The collection includes honors theses submitted to the Honors College by Ball State University undergraduate students in partial fulfillment of degree requirements.

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    Adapting Leonard Park to a post-pandemic world
    (2023-05) Ellett, Christina; Merrill, Jeremy
    Everyone is aware of how the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted our world. We have seen this in our professional lives, our education, and our private lives. With the rise of remote work and the utilization of the internet with its vast communication abilities, more and more people have turned away from offices and classrooms and towards their homes. In response to the pandemic outdoor spaces have also shifted. Businesses and restaurants extended their buildings toward sidewalks, streets, and parking lots to continue through the pandemic. During the height of the pandemic, there was a surge in park visitation and people began to see the value of outdoor spaces. With all of this in mind, this proposal will summarize how adapting Leonard Park in Speedway, Indiana will meet the needs and opportunities of the post-pandemic world. This entails addressing the direct effects of the pandemic itself and the existing issues and opportunities of the site and its surroundings.
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    Speech practice for school-aged children: the Monday Mystery with Lucy and Daniel
    (2023-05) Zoglio, Isabella; Landis, Kara
    Children have their own movie in their minds. The images they create, the stories they ponder on, and the scenarios illustrated within their minds are so wonderfully unique to each individual. However, these wonderful thoughts, emotions, and desires, may be concealed with the cloud of doubt. Children are scared, sad, worried, or have doubt about elements of their lives. Over the span of a few months, I challenged myself to put myself in the shoes of 7-year-old me. A creative, bubbly, eager to learn individual who colored her own notebook covers and wrote her own story book about snakes in the second grade. Behind the callouses on my hands gained from my Crayola markers, and the creases on my forehead due to the immense concentration while reading my books, I had a cloud over my head for a chunk of my childhood. As much as this little girl loved to read, anxiety came to surface about how I formed my words, especially those words that contained one simple letter, L. 22-year-old me took into consideration my love for art, and my struggle in speech, to create a storybook for those who love to read, yet have similar struggles that I did. Masking such a huge insecurity of mind through the things I loved may help other children in ways I wish I needed.
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    Persuading juries through cognitive and affective matching
    (2023-05) Zent, Madisen; Luttrell, Andrew
    The United States has a jury system that allows people to be judged criminally or civilly by their peers. This system is supposed to promote fairness and allow truth to prevail. Jury persuasion has been extensively researched as attorneys make a career presenting their cases in a more persuading manner. This current research examined if cognitive and affective matching could be a useful jury persuasion technique. Students from Ball State University participated in research about the effectiveness of cognitive or affective persuasion in a criminal case. First, the participants were assessed on their orientation as either relatively cognitive or relatively affective. Then, participants were randomly assigned to read case briefs with either cognitive or affective messaging. Finally, participants were assessed on how persuaded they were by the argument. The hypothesis that emotion-based arguments will be more influential than fact-based ones for more affectively oriented jurors and that fact-based arguments will be more influential than emotion-based ones for more cognitively oriented jurors was not supported by the results of this research. Limitations of small sample size and the hypothetical set up of the research may have contributed to the lack of significant interactions found, so further research is necessary.
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    Mental health in college students: a statistical analysis
    (2023-05) Wyse, Amy; Nesson, Erik
    Mental health affects a majority of college students, and over time, the number of mental health issues in college students has increased. Adequate mental health among college students is crucial as it affects students’ academic success, which in turn affects the success and economics of collegiate institutions. This study investigates mental health in college students in the United States to examine how college students’ mental health has changed across time and compares to other populations as well as document associations between college student mental health and demographic characteristics. A series of difference in means tests and multiple regression analyses use the 2021, 2020, and 2019 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) to analyze these questions. Results find that college students experience between 2.8 and 3.2 additional bad mental health days than non-college students on a 30-day basis. The mean number of bad mental health days in a 30-day basis is 7.16 days, female students experience between 2.9 and 4.1 additional bad mental health days than male students, and white students experience between 0.86 and 1.7 additional bad mental health days than non-white students. Finally, I find that mental health levels were worse in 2021 than 2019 at a statistically significant level but were better in 2020 at a non-statistically significant level. These findings highlight the need to increase mental health support on college campuses as well as acquire more detailed data to analyze the impact of mental health on students during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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    An English translation of “Le Chastoiement des Dames” by Robert de Blois: courtly conduct books and what they assume about medieval women
    (2023-05) Williams, Jaidyn; Thorington, Ellen
    For my senior honors thesis, I wrote a translation of the thirteenth century courtesy text Le Chastoiement des Dames by Robert de Blois, from the original Old French to modern English. This text deals with proper courtly conduct for women, through the lens of finding love. Providing 756 lines of advice, Robert instructs women on how to present themselves, behave themselves, and approach social situations with men. To contextualize my translation, I also wrote an essay discussing medieval courtesy texts and their significance to women. Looking at the Chastoiement, as well as some other similar texts, I discussed how perception of women influenced them, and how that came to change.