Psychology Commons^™

The Effects Of Decoding Instruction On Oral Reading Fluency For Older Students With Reading Delays, Gaige J. Johnson

Dissertations

Struggling older readers often have difficulty with early decoding skills (Tolman, 2005; Toste, Williams, & Capin, 2017). If they are unable to master decoding, they may have difficulty with more complex skills, such as passage reading fluency. The current study extends research on reading fluency for older students by evaluating the combined effects of a phonics procedure and a fluency-building strategy on their reading fluency. Participants were older students with below grade level reading performance who had deficits in oral reading fluency and decoding. Dependent variables were the number of correctly sorted word patterns and the number of correct words …

Black Graduate Students’ Experiences Of Stress And Coping, Shealyn J. Blanchard

Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences of Black graduate students related to stress and coping. Specifically, this study seeks to further examine the concept of cognitive appraisal and help-seeking intentions among Black graduate students. Research has indicated that Black graduate students face unique stressors related to race, in addition to general stress demands that can be experienced in graduate education programs. Regarding help-seeking, the literature has tended to focus on psychological help-seeking attitudes with African American populations and undergraduate students. This present study utilizes theories from stress and coping, as well as help-seeking and planned behavior, …

Hurting Leaders: The Lived Experiences Of African-American Clergy And Their Views, Attitudes, And Barriers To Help-Seeking, Bernice Suzette Patterson

Dissertations

The help-seeking tendencies of African-Americans, as a whole, have long been a source of confusion to the field of counseling. Moreover, in the available literature on help-seeking, in the African-American community there is an apparent deficit of information on the help-seeking habits of its clergy members. Current literature focuses primarily on African-American clergy and their roles in facilitating the development of professional counseling relationships for their parishioners rather than on their ability to seek out professional counseling relationships for themselves.

The focus of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of African-American clergy related to …

Personality And Religiosity: The Influence Of Normative Personality On Black Sunni Muslims' Religious Attitudes And Practices, Halim Khidher Naeem

Dissertations

There is a dearth of literature on Black Sunni Muslims in the field of psychology. More so, there is no literature specifically analyzing the influences upon Black religiosity. The literature has established that personality has significant influence upon religiosity. The literature also says that females are more religious than their male counterparts. The present study analyzed the influence of personality, gender and social class upon religiosity for Black Sunni Muslims. The following hypothesis was investigated: Personality, gender, and social class will affect religious attitudes and practices.

A canonical regression analysis using SPSS revealed that personality, gender and social class had …

Understanding The Dimensions Of Spirituality In Caucasian Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual College Students, Michele L. Mcgrady

Dissertations

Spiritual development is a critical task for college students, but there is a paucity of information about how college students understand the construct of spirituality. Historically, organized religion has been oppressive to the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) community. Furthermore, little is known about the spiritual understandings and spiritual experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual college students. This quantitative investigation sought to understand the underlying dimensions of spirituality for Caucasian LGB college students through the use of multidimensional scaling. Sixty Caucasian LGB college students were recruited through purposeful and snowball sampling. Findings indicate three dimensions of spirituality for this sample: …

The Relationship Between Spirituality And Personality, Kimberly C. Koessel

Dissertations

Current literature is lacking a theoretical framework for understanding spirituality within the context of psychological functioning. Despite empirical support for the potential psychological benefits of spirituality, conceptual differences underlying definitions and measurements of spirituality have impeded theory development. Additionally, very few studies have explored spirituality from a secular perspective. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the relationship between spirituality and personality within a population of undergraduate and graduate students. This research obtains sample data through a demographic questionnaire, a measure of humanistic spirituality, and an inventory of normal personality. Quantitative statistical analyses are employed to explore a variety …

A Qualitative Study Of Buddhist Informed Psychotherapists, Michael Sean Harris

Dissertations

The field of psychology has a history of distancing itself, if not outright dismissing, both religion and spirituality. In recent years, however, psychology has come to move more toward an embrace of religious and spiritual experience. Buddhism, often expressed as a philosophical system without regard to theistic or nontheistic underpinnings, has been integrated with psychological theory in recent scholarly literature. This dissertation is an exploratory study regarding howBuddhist psychological perspectives are applied in actual psychotherapeutic practice. A participant pool of ten psychotherapists who self-identified as utilizing Buddhism in their work was studied along a variety of dimensions. Demographic questionnaires, audiotaped …

Qualitative Inquiry Of Biased And Exemplary Practices Of White Supervisors In Multicultural Supervision, Brian D. Paul

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Lesbian Identity Development And Career Experiences, Mary Jo Thiel

Dissertations

This study used a qualitative research design to explore the experiences of lesbian women with respect to identity development and career issues.

Using the Stage Allocation Measure (SAM) (Cass, 1984), twenty lesbian women who were in the Synthesis Stage (Stage 6) of identity development were identified. In face-to-face, one and a half to two hour interviews, using a semi-structured interview guide developed by the researcher, respondents were asked open-ended questions about their coming out process and their career development .

Interviews were tape recorded and transcribed and the transcripts were analyzed using grounded theory coding techniques. Themes and patterns were …