California Senate Bill 826: Implications On Female Executive Compensation And Representation, Elizabeth Ann Dion

Honors Theses and Capstones

In 2018, the State of California passed Senate Bill 826, requiring that all public companies headquartered within the state have at least one female on the board of directors. Prior literature has identified a significant connection between female board representation and the impact on female executives and their pay. The prominence of female leaders has been shown to enable fellow females to pursue leadership positions. In addition, prior studies have found that female board members have encouraged an increase in female executives, and an increase in female executive pay has been identified due to the role of the board in …

Personal Intelligence And Student Employees, Miah Munro

Honors Theses and Capstones

Personal intelligence involves the capacity of individuals to accurately reason about personality and personality-related information that is related to themselves and others (Mayer, 2008). One setting that may particularly benefit from research on personal intelligence is the workplace. To understand employees’ logic, Peters and colleagues (2021) employed a narrative evaluation tool adapted from Allen (2017) to assess the perceived sophistication employees’ use to describe an interaction they had with a difficult or challenging coworker. They found that judges could reliably detect variations in the sophistication employees used, and that it was related, r = .43, p < .001, to a measure of personal intelligence. Their results were intriguing, but more confidence regarding their findings could be added through replication and extension of the work. Previous findings were replicated, which makes for a more compelling case that personal intelligence is detectable in employees and is related to what we think of as personal intelligence. Understanding personal intelligence in the workplace can enhance the capabilities of the human resource professionals to select personnel, which will ultimately improve their hiring process.

Narratives About The Role Of Recreation, Place Attachment, And Community Attachment And Their Effects On Youth Future Orientation In New Hampshire, Hannah Joy Falcone

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Mindfulness And Pain Regulation: The Role Of Acceptance And Commitment Therapy For Individuals With Chronic Pain, Ariana C. White

Honors Theses and Capstones

Chronic pain is a significant and widely prevalent health condition which requires comprehensive care to address the many facets contributing to symptomatology. In 2016, 20% of American adults (about 50 million) reported experiencing chronic pain, of which 7.4% indicated that chronic pain frequently limited their life and participation in activities within the past 3 months (CDC, 2018). As a result, many individuals with chronic pain turn to opioid-based medication for pain relief, but long-term use of opioids actually increases pain sensation (Tobin, 2019). Moreover, opioid medication is unable to target underlying mental health components which emerge as part of chronic …

Answering Topical Information Needs Using Neural Entity-Oriented Information Retrieval And Extraction, Shubham Chatterjee

Doctoral Dissertations

In the modern world, search engines are an integral part of human lives. The field of Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with finding material (usually documents) of an unstructured nature (usually text) that satisfies an information need (query) from within large collections (usually stored on computers). The search engine then displays a ranked list of results relevant to our query. Traditional document retrieval algorithms match a query to a document using the overlap of words in both. However, the last decade has seen the focus shifting to leveraging the rich semantic information available in the form of entities. Entities are …

Neighborhood Disorder And Adolescent Psychological Distress: Effects Of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, Social Support, And Self Concept, Jean Bessette

Doctoral Dissertations

Sociological research on mental health is often guided by the stress process framework. A key tenet of this paradigm is the proposition that both exposure and vulnerability to social stressors arise from one’s placement in the social structure; those with lower social status face greater exposure and/or greater vulnerability to stressors that detrimentally impact their psychological wellbeing. A consequential social stressor is the neighborhood context in which one resides. Past research has suggested a disadvantageous effect of greater neighborhood physical and social disorder on youth mental health. This research employs the stress process framework to examine how the effects of …

Essays On The Economics Of Vaccination, Andrew Evans Whitaker

Doctoral Dissertations

I examine vaccination behavior during a measles outbreak. By abandoning the rationalexpectations framework, I develop a model of vaccine behavior which recreates empirically observed vaccine hesitancy, as well as vaccination spikes during an outbreak. I use an agent-based model to simulate disease spread and agent behavior in a measles outbreak, in which rational agents minimize their expected costs by choosing their vaccination state. I allow some agents to instead use a heuristic, and others to have misinformation regarding vaccine risks, and finds that both reduce welfare. Including a social network has an ambiguous effect, as using more relevant local data …

Implementation Of A Standardized Suicide Risk Screening Tool: An Improvement Project In A University Counseling Center, Clint Emmett

DNP Scholarly Projects

This article describes a quality improvement project undertaken at the University of Idaho Counseling and Testing Center (CTC). This quality improvement project describes the use of the Ask Suicide Questions (ASQ) screening tool to accurately assess the severity of suicide risk during an initial assessment or crisis visit. Clinicians were provided with education and demonstration of the ASQ and shown how to incorporate this tool into their practice. 86 eligible appointments were included in the project for analysis. Simple descriptive statistics were used to present the resulting data. Results indicate that 30.3% of eligible appointments were screened. 43.8% of clinicians …

Engaging Nurses In Public Policy, Carlene Ferrier

DNP Scholarly Projects

Background: Nurses have been engaged in public policy since the inception of the profession. Academicians and thought leaders recognize the importance of nurses engaging in public policy to improve health and healthcare. Nurses are also the largest healthcare group and the most trusted profession for twenty years, yet they are minimally represented in the state and federal legislature. Nurses possess a skill set that is directly transferable to the policy arena such as listening and communicating effectively, leading by inspiring a shared vision, applying evidence-based research, and collaborating and building relationships to achieve a common goal. Locally, the New Hampshire …

Implementation And Evaluation Of A Psychoeducation Training Program For Correctional Psychiatric Nurses, Katie Lyn Araja

DNP Scholarly Projects

This article describes a quality improvement project undertaken at a northeastern prison focusing on the psychiatric hospital unit. The project's primary aim is to implement training in nurse-led psychoeducation groups for psychiatric hospital unit nurses with the outcome of increasing confidence and competency through improved self-efficacy. The secondary aim of this project is to positively impact the psychiatric hospital unit nurses' intuition as a component of clinical decision-making through skill training that improves KSAs and care delivery to the highest level of the nurses' licensure. Participating nurses received pre and post-intervention surveys, including the Psychiatric Nurse Self-Efficacy Scales and the …

Tackling Burnout: Investing In Nurse Managers To Secure The Future Of Nursing, Enhance Manager Effectiveness, And Support High Quality Patient Care, Corey French

DNP Scholarly Projects

Background: Burnout is a widespread, pervasive issue the healthcare industry. Many efforts related to burnout reduction have been focused on front line caregivers but there is continued opportunity to address burnout in leadership. The global aim of this quality improvement project was to reduce burnout among the nursing leadership team at a large, academic medical center in the greater Boston area.

Problem Description: A preliminary survey was completed to assess for the presence of burnout within the leadership team. Results revealed that more than half of the nurse leaders surveyed were experiencing burnout at least 50% of the time. This …

Implementing A Health-Related Quality Of Life Assessment Tool In An Outpatient Hematology/Oncology Clinic: A Pilot Quality Improvement Project, Jennifer Holl

DNP Scholarly Projects

BACKGROUND: Although overall and disease-free survival remain the goals of cancer care, health-related quality of life (HRQOL) during and after treatment is increasingly acknowledged as vital to the patient’s outcomes. The purpose of this project was to identify and implement a valid, reliable HRQOL assessment tool into daily clinical practice in an outpatient hematology/oncology clinic at a 25-bed critical access hospital in rural New Hampshire.

METHODS: This project used a methodological design. Descriptive and inferential statistics, plus qualitative analysis were used to determine results. Three nurses and seven patients participated in this quality improvement project.

INTERVENTIONS: The interventions …

Did The Political Climate Exacerbate The Pandemic In The U.S.?, Brittany T. Morin, Joanna Gyory, Anthony F. Morin

Master's Theses and Capstones

The global pandemic that began in the United States in early 2020 continues to be a topic of controversy. The added aspect of affect polarization in the country’s political realm may have exacerbated the effects of COVID-19. In their published article in Nature Human Behaviour, Gollwitzer et. al. found that it was possible to link voting partisanship, physical distancing, and COVID-19 outcomes showing that a county’s partisanship might be used to predict the degree to which that county would socially distance and then, therefore, the rate of cases and fatalities in that error on a lagged timescale. This researcher attempted …

Using Machine Learning Techniques On Real-World Data To Understand The Characteristics Of The Manchester, Nh Health Care For The Homeless Patient Population For Risk Factor Identification And Intervention Improvement, Kyle Partridge Rasku

Master's Theses and Capstones

This thesis aims to use health care domain knowledge, statistical techniques, and machine learning methods to conduct an exploratory real-world evidence study of the characteristics of the Health Care for the Homeless of Manchester, NH (HCHM) clinics’ patients in collaboration with academic and clinic partners and the public and community health stakeholders supporting their work. By constructing and analyzing a multivariate feature set created from a sample of anonymized patient data from January 1, 2018, through December 31, 2019, I hope to use machine learning methods to accurately represent 2,265 HCHM clinic patients experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity during the …

Increasing Awareness Of Personal Harm Reduction Interventions In The Clinical Setting: A Quality Improvement Project, Shawn Theberge

DNP Scholarly Projects

Abstract

The ever-rising concern for safety in the healthcare setting has become increasingly prevalent and levels of hostility and violence more publicly visible. Over the last decade both patients and clinicians have been targeted in healthcare facilities at record levels. These incidents have created an environment of not only risk but increased anxiety and feelings of uncertainty for most clinical personnel. The study will initially measure clinician’s viewpoint of the clinical setting that they work in; and over the span of the project, track and evaluate the effects of the interventions on clinicians’ overall feelings and perceptions. The expected outcome …

Implementation Of Oncology Standardized Scheduling Bundle Impacting Staff Productivity And Patient Satisfaction, Carolyn Brausch

DNP Scholarly Projects

BACKGROUND: Patients having timelyaccess to healthcare services is the entryway to quality of care and patient safety. Timely access is essential in cancer treatment and often requires complex scheduling requiring multiple, highly coordinated, time sensitive appointments. To facilitate optimal clinical care, timely appointment scheduling must be patient-centered. With the heavy scheduling workload growing at the the Cancer Network at Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin and recognition of timely scheduling as a quality indicator, the need to examine the workflow and improve the process became apparent.

METHODS: The goal of the quality improvement project was to provide patients with …

Enhancing Clinicians' Knowledge In The Use Of The Beck Depression Inventory Tool In Outpatient Setting: A Quality Improvement Project, Olabisi Oshikanlu

DNP Scholarly Projects

Abstract

The paper outlines a quality improvement project to improve clinicians' knowledge in using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) within an outpatient setting, known as the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) team. The BDI is among the standard depression screening instruments used. The primary care version of the tool is preferred because it discriminates somatic symptoms that may overlap with other clinical conditions. Clinician knowledge and skills are critical to ensure appropriate scoring and interpretation of the scores. In this quality improvement (QI) project, the clinicians completed questionnaires to determine their BDI-related knowledge before (pre-test) and four weeks after (post-test) the …

How The Media Frames Mental Health And Social Media: A Case Study Of The Facebook Whistleblower, Megan Switzgable

Honors Theses and Capstones

In September 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, leaked confidential documents surrounding internal research performed at the company, revealing that Facebook knew the negative impact Instagram had on the mental health of teenagers. In this paper, I study how the media frames the relationship between mental health, teenagers, and social media when discussing the leaked documents. In order to do this, I perform a critical discourse analysis of thirty print media articles written about the Facebook Whistleblower, focusing on how the
articles present gender, mental health, and the positive and negative uses of social media. I also look at …

Knowledge Gaps: Addressing The Need For Palliative Care Education For University Nursing Students, Odin Todd Bickford

Honors Theses and Capstones

This study aimed to analyze undergraduate nursing students’ primary palliative care knowledge to determine if there is a need for further palliative care education in undergraduate, pre-licensure curriculums. To make this determination, this study utilized the Undergraduate Nursing Palliative Care Knowledge Survey (UNPCKS), created by Dr. Andra Davis and Dr. Megan Lippe, a 27-question survey that addresses the 6 domains of holistic palliative care; i) holistic, patient-centered care (Whole person care), ii) collaborative (Interprofessional), iii) understanding of primary palliative care as a resource and how to support patients/families (Advocacy and Knowledge of Primary Palliative Care), iv) the importance of understanding …

Perinatal Patient Education On Substance Use Risk Factors In The Age Of The Opioid Crisis, Rebecca Ane Leary, Alyssa O'Brien

Honors Theses and Capstones

From 2014 to 2016, NH ranked first for fentanyl and all opioid-related overdose deaths per capita in the United States (Moore et al., 2021). In 2016 the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (NH DHHS) found that there are many repercussions of this opioid crisis including overdose deaths, child and elder abuse, and newborns experiencing withdrawal. In utero substance exposure places a child at a higher risk for developmental, behavioral, and physical health concerns. To address this gap, a secondary data analysis using NH Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) data from 2013 to 2020 was conducted. PRAMS …

Literary Fiction And Sympathy: How Reading Makes You A Better Person, Emma Rose Wick

Honors Theses and Capstones

I argue in this thesis that literary fiction enhances our ability to sympathize with others as a result of observing—and thereby coming to feel for—the perspectives of the characters by engaging in mental perspective-taking. As a result, we become able to sympathize with an array of individuals whose experiences are unlike our own, and which we may never understand otherwise. I argue that the ability to sympathize with others is valuable for the sake of being a morally good person, and for having an overall good character. This has value in and of itself, particularly from an Aristotelian perspective. I …

Building Awareness Around The New American Community In Concord N.H., Heather Mckinnon

M.S. in Leadership

The purpose of this Capstone is to create an opportunity to explore resettlement. The research seeks to understand the resettlement process in the context of exploring immigration in the United States Research will focus on Concord, N.H. This project was chosen as a result of my experiences working with the New American population as a home visitor and home-based manager for the Early Head Start program in Concord, N.H. Depending on demographic statistics, publications, and case studies, this data is both quantitative and qualitative in nature. The findings indicate that in order to advocate for new American populations, the community …

Motivation In Healthcare Personnel, Jessica Horton

M.S. in Leadership

The purpose of this research is to provide an overview of the unique individual motivating factors that play a role in healthcare personnel’s job satisfaction, engagement as well as explore the leading causes of burnout. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and presently, healthcare workers nationally and internationally, have been experiencing burnout. Determining what factors motivate and demotivate employees is equally critical in ensuring that these skilled healthcare individuals continue to provide high quality, effective, and productive healthcare services especially during a global pandemic. In this paper motivational theories are explained, evaluated, and explored. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods from …

Integrating Implicit Bias Education Into Cultural Diversity Training Via A Portable Web Page, Anne Durant

M. S. in Management

Implicit bias impacts healthcare access and treatment by coloring decisions and judgements unconsciously. Enhancing awareness of implicit bias requires acquiring self-awareness and awareness of others. The addition of implicit bias education to the cultural diversity annual required education at New Hampshire Hospital for nursing staff using a portable web page adds to the range of inclusiveness within the organizational culture. The web page’s variety of subject matter offers narratives, explanatory tools, free test sites to examine individual biases, and videos to exemplify why implicit bias education is relevant. Examination of unconscious biases are recommended by the Joint Commission to investigate …

Management’S Role In Telework Employee Engagement, Stephanie Read

M. S. in Management

This research breaks down the importance of management’s role in employee engagement in the virtual work environment by analyzing previously conducted academic literature. The academic literature highlights the factors that contribute to employee success while working from home, which is more prominent due to the global pandemic caused by COVID-19. The contributing factors are: mentorship, technological support, communication, age (stage of life), and burnout. Throughout the research conducted, a major focal point in how employee engagement relies on the importance of management influence and involvement.

Supporting The Oral Language Development Of Young Dual Language Learners: Perspectives Of El Teachers In Nh, Maria C. Chouinard

Honors Theses and Capstones

Demographic shifts in the US over the last two decades have increased the diversity gap between teachers and their students. The majority of multilingual children entering US public schools face the challenge of learning academic content in not just one, but two languages. Despite many of the positive effects of being bilingual, Dual Language Learners (DLLs) often face more challenges in education achievement and opportunities than their monolingual English-speaking peers. A key factor of this challenge is the fact that DLLs tend to have monolingual English-speaking peers, and teachers have been shown to play a critical role in student learning. …

The Mediating Role Of Parental Context And Social Support On The Relationship Between Polyvictimization And Juvenile Delinquency: A Longitudinal Study, Kristen Graham

Master's Theses and Capstones

Polyvictimization and non-victimization adversity in adolescence is a prevalent and evolving issue that poses many implications for families, teachers, policymakers, and others. This study sought to examine whether polyvictimization and adversity longitudinally predict later delinquency, and the possible mediating role of parental context and social support on this relationship. Data was collected as part of the THV survey and the NatSCEV II and yielded a final sample of 791 youths ages 10-20. Poisson regression analyses and structural equation modeling were conducted. Results demonstrated that over and above the impact of demographics, delinquency at Time 1, and community disorder, experiencing composite …

Improving Patient Safety In The Post-Anesthesia Care Unit By Identifying Nurses’ Perceived Barriers To The Implementation Of Barcode Medication Administration, Colleen Gauvin

Master's Theses and Capstones

Background: In the landmark report To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System published by the Institute of Medicine in 1999, it was estimated that 98,000 Americans die annually due to medical mistakes (Institute of Medicine et al., 2000). Since then, major advancements have been made to improve patient safety in the United States relating to safe medication administration. Barcode medication administration (BCMA) is a technology that was designed to help decrease medication errors by automating the five rights of medication administration (Thompson et al., 2018). BCMA was first utilized at a Veteran Affairs (VA) Medical Center in …

Promoting Postpartum Knowledge And Support Through The Provision Of Educational And Support Resources During The Postpartum Admission Stay: A Quality Improvement Project, Danielle Woodman

Master's Theses and Capstones

BACKGROUND: The postpartum period is often imbued with heightened emotions, unfamiliar challenges, and an abundance of uncertainty. Postpartum depression and anxiety are well discussed in literature, yet postpartum mothers may lack knowledge of these conditions and their associated risk factors, signs, and symptoms as well as the support resources which are available to them. Improved postpartum support and awareness may alleviate the prevalence, severity, and progression of these conditions into more severe cases.

LOCAL PROBLEM: Within the given microsystem, a gap in postpartum educational and support resources exists due to a lack of resource awareness and ease of accessibility.

METHODS: …

Telehealth! Policy, Practice And Patients, Deborah H. Fournier, Marcy Ainslie, Marcy Doyle

All Materials

No abstract provided.