Digital Commons Network^™

The Correlation Of Trauma-Informed Classrooms Without Support Infrastructure And Teacher Burnout, Sunshine O'Connor

University Honors Theses

This thesis examines the impact of Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) implementation in classrooms on teacher burnout, specifically focusing on settings with insufficient support infrastructure. While TIC is recognized as beneficial for all students, not just students affected by trauma, a synthesis of scholarly literature highlights the significant challenges faced by educators when proper resources, training, and institutional backing are lacking. Existing research indicates that teachers implementing TIC in inadequately supported environments report higher levels of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and overall burnout. These challenges appear most acute for teachers in schools with limited professional development, insufficient mental health resources, and weak administrative …

We Are Still Here: Intersectional Collaborations In Research, Practice, And Resistance Among Mfp Scholars, Antonia R.G. Alvarez, Sameena Azhar, Tyrone M. Parchment, Judith Perrigo, Anne S. J. Farina, Tania Paredes, Jonathan P. Edwards, Susan Klumpner

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

As Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) scholars, we formed meaningful connections as academics, students, and friends. Throughout this reflective article, we explore the profound impact of our intersectional and critical race-informed scholarship on our professional practice and pedagogy while highlighting the ways that collaborating on this work enriched our journeys as scholars of color. These collaborations have expanded our perspectives and fostered new ways of thinking about the unique health and mental health experiences of ethnoracial communities. Through these partnerships, we have advanced diverse scientific literature and addressed critical gaps within the existing canon of …

Effect Of Ipv On Latino Children's Perspectives Of Fatherhood, Elizabeth Berks

University Honors Theses

Intimate partner violence (IPV) can be found in many cultures throughout the world, with varying levels of acceptability, victimization, and perpetration. Approximately one in five couples report experiencing at least one instance of IPV in a given year. Women are victims of IPV more frequently than men, and experience more severe injuries. 20% of women report a lifetime history of physical IPV victimization by their current or past partners. Further, women are also ten times more likely to be killed due to IPV than men are. Presently, empirical research literature surrounding the dynamics and impacts of IPV is heavily focused …

Factors Associated With Applying To Graduate/Professional Degrees For Students Engaged In Undergraduate Research Experiences At Minority Serving Institutions, Lourdes E. Echegoyen, Kala M. Mehta, Karsten Hueffer, Jacob D. Kagey, Thomas E. Keller, Kathleen M. Morgan, Stephen B. Aley, Chi-Ah Chun, Payam Sheikhattari, Amy Wagler

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Introduction:

This study investigates the impact of undergraduate research experiences on applications to graduate and professional programs, particularly for underrepresented minority students at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs).

Methods:

The study analyzes data collected at 10 MSIs participating in the NIH BUILD program to understand the relationship between research participation (in formal programs vs. informal research), student demographics, science self-efficacy, GPA, and application to advanced degree programs.

Results:

Results indicate that undergraduate research participation, especially in formal programs for extended periods of time, positively influences applications to graduate/professional programs, with similar outcomes observed across underrepresented minority and non-minority students.Discussion

Findings indicate …

Evaluation Of Social Worker Knowledge Of Human Trafficking At The Oregon State Hospital: A Qualitative And Quantitative Analysis Of Education, Training, And Victim Identification, Jamie Sue Pryde

Dissertations and Theses

The prevalence of human trafficking continues to increase worldwide, and the implementation of human trafficking education and victim identification within institutions is slow to catch up. The Oregon State Hospital is a psychiatric in-patient hospital that currently does not provide human trafficking education or a screening tool for staff and does not know how to provide treatment to trafficked victims. Interviews were conducted with employed social workers at the Oregon State Hospital to obtain a baseline understanding of their previous education, training, and knowledge of human trafficking to aid in the creation of a trafficking screening tool. Results indicate participants …

The Relationship Between Perceived Stress, Psychological Distress And Thwarted Belongingness Among Military Service Members, Isaac Greenblatt

University Honors Theses

Suicide remains a leading cause of death among members of the military, with psychological distress, perceived stress and thwarted belongingness emerging as key variables which impact this behavior. This thesis aimed to investigate the relationship between perceived stress, psychological distress and thwarted belongingness in a population of Active Duty Army Service Members (ADASM) at baseline and longitudinally. The Resilience-Supportive Leadership Training (RESULT) dataset was originally collected to assess the effectiveness of an intervention in the military. However, this thesis is a secondary data analysis of this dataset, including 273 ADASM participants. The K6 psychological distress test was used to measure …

Access To Healthcare For Rural Transgender Adults In The United States, Devon Smith

University Honors Theses

Urban and rural healthcare differ significantly in the amount of facilities, providers and kinds of specialty care that are offered in each environment. The United States is split into urban and rural counties in any given region, and based on those population sizes, are the allocation of healthcare resources for residents. In rural areas in the U.S., transgender adults lack access to gender-affirming care and encounter a lack of gender-affirming care providers due to workforce shortages, discrimination, and a lack of cultural competency. To determine if these residents lacked access to care compared with their urban counterparts, I performed a …

Generative Ai For College Students: A Collaboratively Developed Online Microcourse On Genai In The College Classroom, Amber Willenborg, Tessa Withorn

Communications in Information Literacy

Academic libraries have taken a variety of approaches to addressing the opportunities and challenges of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in higher education. For universities that have no standard policy around GenAI, instructors are left with little guidance on how to teach students about GenAI in the classroom and may have varying levels of comfort with GenAI and its applications. To address the need for more instruction around GenAI, a team of librarians and university writing center and digital media suite staff took an innovative approach to teaching AI literacy by creating a six-lesson microcourse in their learning management system all …

Contemporary Echoes From The Progressive Era: A Historical Reclamation Project Of Caroline Pratt And Her Play-Based Pedagogy, Charleen Lynn Kepner

University Honors Theses

Caroline Pratt is the early childhood educator most never heard of. Pratt was a progressive era educator and reformer in 1900s New York City. Pratt developed a play based theory of education. She opened City & Country School in 1914 and her school is still operating utilizing many of the methods Pratt developed. Using first hand field research, archival research, and scholarly articles, I examine how Pratt developed her methods and how modern educators can use them today. The study of Pratt's work and her school reveal a pragmatic approach to learning that educators today can adopt. In conclusion, play …

"We're Not Gonna Take It": The Parents' Music Resource Center And Reformist Tendencies In American Society, Nathaniel Todd Belcik

Dissertations and Theses

The Parent's Music Resource Center is a cultural curiosity that few historians have examined. Started by Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, the wives of prominent politicians, they advocated for a warning label on music with explicit lyrics and achieved their goal within only a few years of their creation. This thesis aims to contextualize the PMRC within a broader context of middle-to-upper class reformist movements. Many have argued that the PMRC falls on the conservative end of the political spectrum. Yet, a more complete story can be told by situating the organization within a reformist tendency in American history, thus …

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet May 2025, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The May 2025 monthly packet includes the agenda, appendices, and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments given in the meeting held May 5, 2025.

Comparing Mentored Research Experiences For Undergraduates Across Institutional Contexts, Jazzmine K. Waugh, Sanya M. Surya, Mackenzie Gray, Thomas E. Keller

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Mentored undergraduate research experiences (UREs) can play a critical role in developing science identity and skills, especially for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. This study investigates science identity and responsibility for scientific roles among scholars in a program aiming to diversify the biomedical workforce. Scholars were placed in UREs at either their home institution (a minority-serving institution [MSI]) or at a research-intensive medical institution with a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). Methods: We analyze data from surveys administered annually to the scholars. We first compare changes in science identity for scholars placed at the MSI and the CTSA …

Introducing 'Society Work': The Professionalization And Localization Of Chinese Social Work In A New Era, Ke Cui, Timothy Sim, Chenxi Huang, Bowen Mcbeath

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study focuses on current discussions around the newly-built Society Work Department in China. It argues that ‘society work’ helps to clarify the internationally recognized concept of ‘social work’ and this institutional reform promotes development of the social work profession and discipline, it also helps to decolonize social work in China.

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet April 2025, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The April 2025 monthly packet includes the agenda, appendices, and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments given in the meeting held April 7, 2025.

Inciting Action By Analyzing Pachirat, Rhi N. Soto

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

The book Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat explores “the politics of sight”, or the intentional invisibilizing or transparentizing of repugnant acts in order to encourage or limit them, through the case study of a beef slaughter house in Omaha, NE. While also utilizing the politics of sight, Pachirat hopes for great political and social change concerning the immoral acts that happen at meat plants through a radical act of transparency: a narrative ethnography. Writers with similar goals of great change in social and political issues can make use of Pachirat’s techniques, which …

Issue Cover Art: Homecoming Collage, Rhi N. Soto

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

This piece is a found poem/collage made from different magazine cut-outs glued onto red construction paper. What inspired its creation is the book Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. In this book, Gyasi describes colonialism's over 400-year impact on the continent of Africa, the Indigenous people to those lands, and their ancestors. She does this by writing a historical fiction story of a family that started in what is now considered current-day Ghana, taking place from the mid-1700s to the early 2000s. The family starts with the mother of two sisters, Maame, who leaves her first daughter (Effia) while her village …

"I Know Who I Am": Draw-And-Tell Conversations With Gender-Creative Children, Eline Leemans Lenne

Dissertations and Theses

A growing number of children identify in various gender-creative ways, likely due to broader social awareness and affirmation of transgenderism. Gender-creative children face higher risks for adverse social, academic, mental health, and healthcare outcomes compared to non-transgender peers. Support from loved ones along with guidance from pediatric providers can mitigate poor outcomes and ensure that gender-creative children live healthy and happy lives. Young gender-creative children's perspectives about the aforementioned topics are markedly absent from the literature, which instead highlights adolescent and adult proxy perspectives.

In this participatory arts-based study anchored by a constructivist epistemology and informed by post-structuralist, queer, and …

Disrupting The Abuse-Prison Nexus: The Gendered Violence Of Prosecution And Abolitionist Feminist Approaches To Social Care Work, Sid P. Jordan, Emily Thuma, Aylaliyah Assefa Birru, Deirdre Wilson, Romarilyn Ralston, Norma Cumpian, Joseph Hankins

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

The vast majority of people in U.S. women’s prisons are survivors of interpersonal violence, a pattern that organizers and advocates have referred to as the abuse-to-prison pipeline. This article critically examines criminal prosecution from the perspectives of survivors of interpersonal violence who faced long prison sentences in California. In-depth interviews and group discussions were generated through a participatory process at a gathering to launch the University of California Sentencing Project, a partnership with the community-based organization California Coalition for Women Prisoners. The twenty-two formerly incarcerated participants had collectively spent more than 300 years imprisoned. Drawing on their lived experiences spanning …

Pdxscholar Multi-Year Annual Report (2022-2024), Julia Stone, Sherry Buchanan, Bertrand Robinson, Stacey Schlatter, Carolee Harrison

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

We are excited to share our 2022-2024 PDXScholar Multi-Year Annual Report. This multi-year report covers the period between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2024. PDXScholar, Portland State University's institutional repository, provides access to the scholarly and creative output of PSU faculty, students, and staff. In this report, we aim to highlight PDXScholar’s growth and impact through readership data, new content and collections, and feedback from our users.

Organizational Supports For Promoting Evidence Use In Private Child Welfare Agencies, Crystal Collins-Camargo, Emmeline Chuang, Bowen Mcbeath

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

There is minimal literature about the organizational supports that private child welfare agencies have in place to pursue positive outcomes for the children and families they serve. This study drew upon the perspectives of 27 senior managers of fourteen nonprofit child and family serving agencies in six U.S. states to examine the extent to which agencies employed organizational supports for evidence use. We identified four types of organizational supports: technical and knowledge management infrastructure, leadership and strategic alignment, and linkage and exchange efforts. Managers described whether and how they used these supports to facilitate evidence-informed decision-making and practice. Managers also …

Cost Comparison Of Congregate, Motel, And Village-Type Shelters For People Experiencing Homelessness, Jacen Greene, Todd Ferry, Emily Leickly, Franklin H. Spurbeck

Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative Publications and Presentations

Village and motel shelters exemplify the expanding field of “alternative” shelters for people experiencing homelessness, largely defined in contrast to “traditional” congregate shelters. Little research compares the financial costs of alternative and traditional shelter models. The research team analyzed cost data for 13 alternative shelters (six villages and seven motel shelters) and nine traditional congregate shelters in Portland, Oregon. Costs were assessed per “unit” (i.e. shelter bed or motel room) to account for differences in shelter sizes. Village shelters had the highest per-unit set-up costs ($99,630), followed by motel shelters ($88,462), while congregate shelters had the lowest ($43,692). Congregate shelters …

Explaining The Variance In Cardiovascular Health Indicators Among Asian Americans: A Comparison Of Demographic, Socioeconomic, And Ethnicity, Lalaine Sevillano, Adrian Matias Bacong, Dale Dagar Maglalang

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

BACKGROUND

The Asian American (AA) population is the fastest-growing major racial or ethnic group in the U.S. Typically treated as a monolith in research, disaggregated data show disproportionate cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden among certain AA ethnic groups. This analysis aimed to identify which factors explain variance in cardiovascular health among AA ethnic groups.

METHODS

We analyzed pooled 2010-2018 National Health Interview Survey cross-sectional data from Chinese, Asian Indian, Filipino, and Other Asian adults in the U.S. Coronary heart disease, heart attack, and stroke were the CVD outcomes of interest. Covariates included sociodemographic characteristics, CVD-related health behaviors (e.g., smoking tobacco, physical …

Dimensions Of Organizational And Personal Evidence Use By Senior Managers In Private Child Welfare Agencies, Crystal Collins-Camargo, Emmeline Chuang, Bowen Mcbeath, Aian Mendoza

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Scholars know little about how human service agency leaders use evidence to improve organizational performance. We draw on interviews with 27 private child welfare administrators in six states to examine how senior leaders use evidence, the types of evidence they use, and specific organizational processes established to support evidence use. Results suggest evidence use in private agencies takes diverse forms, including the analysis of internal data, the use of external research, and evidence-based interventions. We identify actions taken by senior leaders to promote various types of evidence use, including modeling, requiring evidence use in decision-making, establishing performance measures, and developing …

"Our Vision Is That Black Mothers And Birthing People, Fathers, And Partners Are Safe, Honored, And Respected Throughout Pregnancy And Parenthood": Black Birth Workers' Agenda For Black Maternal Health In Oregon, Sarah Marguerite Applin

University Honors Theses

Black women and Birthing People (BWBP) face disproportionate rates of mortality within the United States healthcare system. BWBP are three times more likely to suffer a pregnancy-related death than White women. Therefore, addressing and consulting with BWBP about the birthing experience that BWBP sustains when they are bearing children is imperative. The inclusion and application of this key knowledge and understanding should be emphasized and at the root of further development toward reproductive justice. This participatory story was led by Dr. Roberta Hunte. Interviews and focus groups with Black birth workers, birthing people, and public health professionals were conducted in …

The Dementia Care Partner Hub: An Innovative Approach To Addressing Unmet Social And Health Needs, Sherril Gelmon, Jenn Reed, Walter D. Dawson

OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

The well‐being of care partners of people living with dementia, who are family, friends, or neighbors and often unpaid, is often not addressed explicitly in clinical dementia care. Care partners, especially those from systematically marginalized communities, experience substantial unmet social and behavioral needs. We reviewed role model programs and conducted focus groups and interviews with care partners and representatives of community organizations and government agencies. We developed the concept of a Dementia Care Partner Hub as a “one‐stop shop” to connect dementia care partners and service providers with information and resources, meeting a need that is not currently addressed in …

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet February 2025, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The February 3, 2025 monthly packet includes the agenda, appendices, and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments from the meeting held February 3, 2025.

Youth Experiences Of Participation, Inclusion, And Influence Within A Youth-Serving Organization Implementing Participatory Processes, Rhen M. Miles

Dissertations and Theses

The youth development field has undergone shifts and reconstructions in how youth are conceived, impacting the approaches of youth-serving programs attempting to facilitate learning, growth, and engagement. Evolving views inform how policymakers, funders, and youth-serving agencies perceive and relate with youth. In turn, these dynamics influence how youth learn to think about themselves, others, and the world. Dominant discourse regarding youth development has been shifting from a deficit-based to an asset-based lens, with the proliferation of Positive Youth Development (PYD) frameworks, which seek to cultivate internal strengths and positive developmental outcomes rather than just prevent negative behaviors and outcomes. Despite …

Performance Methodologies In Suicide Prevention Research: Queerness, Colonization, And Co-Performative Witnessing In Indigenous Community, Antonia R. G. Alvarez

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Performance methodologies take many forms—performative writing, poetic transcription, and co-performative witnessing, to name only a few—and can be both process and product, differentiating and unifying a group between and across differences. As a social work researcher committed to decolonial, liberatory methodologies that make and bring meaning to the communities I work with, performance methodologies fill a gap that other qualitative research methods can only begin to approach. This project is an exploration in performance methodologies and Critical Suicidology through the lens of social work research, with a case study derived from a performance documenting suicide prevention research with Native Hawaiians. …

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet January 2025, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The January 6, 2025 monthly packet includes the agenda, appendices, and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments from the meeting held January 6, 2025.

Health Checks For Autistic Adults: Study Protocol For A Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial, Jeremy R. Parr, Helen Taylor, Colin Wilson, Clare Scarlett, Sarah Al-Asmori, Carole Buckley, Sally-Ann Cooper, Cristina Fernandez-Garcia, Tracy Finch, Rhianna Lees, Nicholas Lennox, Hannah Merrick, Sebastian Moss, Christina Nicolaidis, Malcolm Osbourne, Dora M. Raymaker, Tomos Robinson, Anna Urbanowicz, James M. S. Wason, Barry Ingham

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background Autistic people commonly have physical and mental health conditions. They also frequently experience barriers to accessing healthcare, contributing to problems identifying and treating health conditions. These factors may lead to increased and earlier morbidity and lower average life expectancy for autistic people. Health checks specifically designed for autistic people, incorporating adjustments to healthcare, may help to overcome these barriers and reduce health inequalities. This trial aims to investigate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of a primary care health check for autistic adults and explore factors related to implementation such as acceptability and feasibility of delivery. The trial is co-designed and …