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Household Member Arrest And Adolescent Hopelessness: The Mediating Role Of Future Expectations, Caroline Victoria Begley, Elizabeth Inez Johnson Ph.D, Tanner Kilpatrick M.S

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Academic Work Ethic In Middle School Students: Extending Scale Research And Investigating Construct Validity, Emily Pendergrast Taylor

Doctoral Dissertations

This three-study dissertation was designed to: 1) extend the research on Parkhurst’s (2013) Academic Work Ethic-Student (AWE-S) scale, 2) develop and analyze reliability of the Academic Work Ethic-Teacher (AWE-T) scale, and 3) expound on the construct validity of academic work ethic by comparing AWE-S and AWE-T scores to external factors (i.e., grades, perceived support, and parental work ethic) and Grit (Duckworth, 2007), a similar construct. Research was conducted in both rural and urban middle schools in Tennessee and included student, teacher, and parent participants.

Both scales were found to have high reliability coefficients and stable factor structures. Student scale (AWE-S) …

Family Environment Variables And Adjustment Outcomes In Appalachian Youth: The Moderating Role Of Participation In Extracurricular Activities, Rebecca Lee Shorter

Masters Theses

Objective: Poor family functioning and parenting practices are often linked to poor adjustment outcomes for children and adolescents. We examined the association between relational and contextual family environment variables and adjustment outcomes in an understudied sample of rural Appalachian youth. Also examined was whether extracurricular involvement moderated the relationship between these variables. Method: Participants were 367 adolescents from multiple high schools (grades 9-12) in an Appalachian region of rural East Tennessee. Self-report measures were used to assess internalizing and externalizing problems, family relationships, extracurricular activity, and health risk behaviors; truancy data was collected from academic records. Results: As expected, family …

Observing Parenting In The Context Of Maternal Borderline Personality Disorder And Adolescent Symptomatology, Rebecca Meredith Mahan

Masters Theses

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe and chronic disorder characterized by a distorted sense of self, fear of abandonment, and difficulties forming and maintaining relationships. Two empirically supported developmental antecedents of offspring borderline features include invalidating parenting practices and maternal BPD. Recent research found that parental psychological control is one type of invalidating parenting behavior that is related to maternal borderline symptoms. The current study observed maternal psychologically controlling behaviors among a sample of 56 adolescents ages 14-18 and their mothers, who were divided into groups of those diagnosed with BPD (n = 28) and those who did …