Digital Commons Network^™

Associations Between Sexual And Gender Minority Stress Exposure And Schizophrenia-Like Experiences In The South, Lillian A. Hammer

Dissertations

Background: Negative experiences related to one’s minority identity serve as stressors contributing to mental health concerns for those identifying as a sexual and/or gender minority (SGM). SGM groups have greater severity of some mental health symptoms than non-SGM individuals, yet it is poorly understood whether these findings extend to schizophrenia-like experiences (SLEs). SLEs are associated with significant distress and may indicate risk for the development of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Associations between exposure to minority stress and SLEs are underexplored. This study aimed to fill this gap by assessing whether exposure to SGM-related minority stress was related to SLEs using ecological …

Combat And Beyond: Predictors Of Post-Traumatic Growth In War Zone Veterans, Gabriela Crucianu

Dissertations

Veterans returning from combat often face psychological challenges, but many also experience posttraumatic growth (PTG), which refers to positive changes that can emerge after trauma. This study explored whether coping strategies, personal characteristics, social support, and combat exposure were associated with PTG in a sample of 42 war zone veterans using quantitative and qualitative methods. Participants completed validated measures assessing combat exposure, coping strategies, social support, personal characteristics (e.g., optimism), and PTG. Regression analyses showed that combat exposure, coping strategies, and optimism were not significant predictors of overall PTG. However, combat exposure was associated with appreciation for life, a dimension …

Familismo: Exploring A Culturally Sensitive Correlation Between Parentification And Relationship Satisfaction Amongst First Generation Mexican-American Adults Through An Attachment Theory Lens, Ana K. Perez

Dissertations

Parentification refers to the role reversal of children who take on adult responsibility to care for family members. This role is often filled by Mexican-American children as a result of immigration and assimilation. This study explored the relationship between parentification and adult romantic relationship satisfaction among first-generation Mexican-American adults, with particular attention to the moderating roles of attachment styles and perceived unfairness. While earlier research has linked parentification to mental health challenges, few studies have examined its long-term impact on intimate relationships, including relationship satisfaction and experiences of intimate partner violence. A total of 132 participants completed an online survey …

Working Mothers Of Children With Disabilities: Professional And Social Identity Negotiation, Christy D. Boyles

Dissertations

Women who have children with disabilities may struggle with both employment and childcare, and have barriers to re-entering the workforce. One struggle is the role identification and negotiation that occur when one transitions from one role to another. This research sought to answer the following questions: RQ 1. How does professional identity influence the “return to work” decisions for mothers who have children with disabilities? RQ 2. How do working mothers of children with disabilities negotiate their identities as caregivers and professionals? RQ 3. What other emerging factors affect women’s decisions to return to the workforce? A purposeful sample of …

"Please Put The Phone Down!": Self-Determination Theory Applied To Parental Social Media Mediation, Benjamin A. Dolowich

Dissertations

The majority of adolescents and young adults use social media (Chaddock, 2024; Coyne et al., 2013). Parents are faced with the challenge of considering the role social media may play in their children’s lives (Valkenburg et al., 2013). Using self-determination theory as a framework (Deci & Ryan, 2000), we investigated psychological needs as one mechanism connecting parental social media mediation strategies with well-being and emotional distress in a sample of young adults. Participants were 244 undergraduate students who completed online questionnaires. The results highlighted that controlling styles of parental social media mediation have an association with emotional distress. Psychological needs …

Increasing Self-Efficacy To Assist Intimate Partner Violence Victims Using Staff-Directed, Rosanina Carlotta Ketchum

Dissertations

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a women’s health issue. IPV is underreported and a barrier to screening and referral service interventions is a lack of knowledge by health care workers. The purpose of this quantitative quasi-experimental project was to determine if and to what extent the implementation of an evidence-based education session on IPV increased self-efficacy for addressing IPV and the frequency of documented IPV assessments and referrals by staff and volunteers working at a community health perinatal support ministry program in the Midwest. The theoretical frameworks for understanding the effect of IPV and how to increase self-efficacy were the …

Supporting Best Practice Standards In Clinical Simulation Through Community Collaboration: An Exploration Of Impacts On Nursing Student Clinical Competency, Lindsay N. Dubois

Dissertations

Authentic patient representation is essential for preparing nursing students to provide quality care. This need is significant for populations impacted by legislative restrictions to healthcare. Additionally, inconsistent approaches in clinical simulation can hinder teaching and learning of valuable content. Nurses have extensive experience in ethics and social justice advocacy to improve health outcomes. Community collaborations help nurses better support their patients and novice learner competency. In 2022, clinicians and faculty collaborated to improve gender-inclusive representation in undergraduate nursing curricula and to educate learners about local resources. This standardized patient experience, focused on the care of a transgender and non-binary identifying …

Medication Dosage Calculation: The Impact Of Simulation-Based Deliberate Practice On General Self-Efficacy In First-Quarter Nursing Students, Hasani Green

Dissertations

Medication dosage calculation (MDC) competency is essential for safe nursing practice. However, many prelicensure nursing students experience persistent numeracy deficits, anxiety, and inconsistent preparation, contributing to academic failure and potential patient harm. This Doctor of Nursing Practice project addressed the need for effective early instructional strategies by evaluating the impact of an MDC simulation-based learning through deliberate practice (SBL-DP) intervention on first-quarter Associate Degree in Nursing and Bachelor of Science in Nursing students’ General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE) scores. Guided by Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory, a quantitative, quasi-experimental one-group before-and-after design was used with a convenience sample of students enrolled in a …

Servingness In Solidarity: How Filipina/X/O American Student Organizations Cultivate Belonging, Clarissa Mae Lico Calimbas

Dissertations

Filipina/x/o American college students represent one of the largest Asian ethnic subgroups in the United States, yet their educational experiences remain underexamined within institutional research and higher education scholarship. Aggregated under the broader Asian American category, Filipina/x/o American students are rendered invisible by data practices that obscure the distinct colonial histories, socioeconomic realities, and identity negotiations. This qualitative study examined how Filipina/x/o American students at Pacific State University (PSU) describe their involvement in Filipina/x/o American Student Organizations (FASOs) and how that involvement shapes their sense of belonging, cultural identity development, and academic persistence. Guided by a critical race phenomenological framework …

Special Education Teacher's Perceptions Of Genai For Creating Individualized Lesson Plans, Mahadevan Iyer

Dissertations

In the United States today, 7.3 million students are receiving special education (SPED) services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA, 2004). Rules and regulations governing SPED help ensure that SPED students receive good quality education. Section 1414(d) of IDEIA requires schools to provide specialized academic instruction as per each student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP). SPED teachers are responsible for accommodating, scaffolding, and individualizing the curriculum to meet the goals specified in the IEP. Defining the individualized curriculum is an added responsibility for a SPED teacher. This study examined SPED teachers’ access to instructional materials that implement EBPs …

Vision With Grace: Intersectionality Of Education And Spirituality, Preeti Jha

Dissertations

Contemporary educational leaders face increasingly complex challenges, systemic inequities, educator burnout, and demands for transformation, yet existing leadership frameworks fail to address the inner lives and spiritual practices that sustain such demanding justice work. While research demonstrates spirituality's role in leadership effectiveness, this dimension remains largely unexplored in educational research, particularly regarding how spiritual consciousness shapes daily practices and social justice engagement. This qualitative study will examine how spirituality shapes educational leadership and social justice engagement through portraiture methodology and in-depth interviews with three spiritually aligned educational leaders in Northern California. Drawing upon the Bhagavad Gita, Spiritual Leadership Theory, and …

A Mixed-Method Study To Determine The Relationships Between Academic Confidence, Anxiety And Success In College Physics I At A Small Midwestern University, Jason Fenske

Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed-method study is to examine the effect of a variety of factors on student success in College Physics I. These factors include the transfer of knowledge from both high school physics and prerequisite mathematics courses for use in physics as well as anxiety, academic confidence, physics confidence, and methods designed to address these. The experiment occurred in a medium-sized midwestern university in two different classrooms. The results of this experiment showed that there is a direct correlation between mathematics confidence and physics confidence and therefore between these and student success. The study found that students who …

The Ramifications Of Covid-19 On Young Adults With Ocd, Clare E. Mcintosh

Dissertations

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was a profound event in modern history, contributing to significant disruptions on a societal and individual level. This period of time was marked by elevated uncertainty and fear among individuals. COVID-19 contributed to deterioration in not only physical health but also psychological well-being. One mental health condition frequently under-examined and saturated with misconceptions is obsessive-compulsive disorder. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a condition characterized by the presence of obsessions and/or compulsions. Intolerance of uncertainty is a core component of the condition, and the pandemic was riddled with unpredictability. The purpose of this study was to …

The Relationship Between Adverse Childhood Experiences, Protective And Compensatory Experiences, And Parenting Attitudes Among Fathers, Kylie Schmidt

Dissertations

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are defined as potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood particularly between the ages of 0 and 17 years that negatively influence long-term health, relational functioning, and parenting practices (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2026; Felitti et al., 1998; Merrick et al., 2019). Conversely, protective and compensatory experiences (PACEs) have emerged as protective factors that foster resilience and possibly buffer against the adverse outcomes of ACEs (Narayan et al., 2018). As the existing research has greatly focused on mothers, little is known about how men’s early life experiences shape their parenting attitudes, particularly during the …

Examining The Impact Of Social Support On Academic Self-Efficacy In Black Doctoral Students In Psychology, Asia A. Hall

Dissertations

This study examined the relationship between perceived social support and academic self-efficacy, or academic confidence, among Black doctoral students in psychology programs at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Grounded in self-efficacy theory, the study was designed to explore whether perceived social support was associated with and predictive of students’ academic confidence. A quantitative, cross-sectional design was used, and data were collected using adapted versions of the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) and the Academic Self-Efficacy (ASE) scale. The sample consisted of 60 Black doctoral students enrolled in psychology programs at PWIs across the United States. Descriptive statistics indicated the …

Offline And Thriving: Understanding The Professional And Personal Lives Of Non-Social Media Users In A Digitally Dominant Era, Bhargava Mantena

Dissertations

Existing research has treated voluntary social media abstinence as the absence of users rather than as a condition worth study. This mixed-methods study examined its psychological and occupational correlates. Adults aged 21 to 65 reporting abstinence from all major platforms for six months or more completed three validated instruments measuring mental well-being, work engagement, and perceived social isolation; a purposive subsample of 12 took part in semi-structured interviews. The analysis set comprised 120 participants, below the 128 indicated by the a priori power analysis. Research Question 1 could not be tested as approved, because no active-user comparison group was recruited; …

Exposing And Addressing Machine Learning Brittleness Through Constraint Solving, Muyeed Ahmed

Dissertations

Machine Learning (ML) implementations are fundamentally brittle: nondeterministic, inconsistent, and prone to overfitting; however, constraint solving can be used to systematically expose, quantify, and address this brittleness.

This dissertation first establishes that widely-used implementations of popular ML algorithms are nondeterministic (producing different outputs on the same input, across different runs) and inconsistent (different implementations of the same algorithm producing different outputs on the same input). This is more prevalent in Unsupervised Learning (UL) implementations where, due to the lack of a ground truth, subtle execution errors can go unnoticed and are difficult to verify. Nondeterminism and inconsistency also introduce security …

Engineered Porous Structures For Propellants Using Additive Manufacturing, Elbert Caravaca

Dissertations

Foamed polymers are widely used today for shock absorption and packaging materials to prevent damage to their contents. Typical foamed densities vary from 0.1 g/cm³ to 0.4 g/cm³ depending on the polymeric materials used. There is a need to explore foaming densities above 0.4 g/cm³ for propellants with highly engineered surface area progression for increased combustion performance. One way to achieve this is through highly controlled and engineered graded foam structures. To further exploit this approach, additive manufacturing coupled with a tunable means to generate foamed structures is the target of this work. To generate foam structures …

Development Of Ultrafast Protein Digestion And Standards Free Quantitation Methods For Mass Spectrometric Analysis, Praneeth Ivan Joel Fnu

Dissertations

A wide variety of biologically important molecules, such as enzymes, antibodies, hormones, transporters and receptors are proteins by composition and they play key roles in biological functions such as cellular regulation, communication, metabolism and physiological function. Protein dysfunctions and abnormalities are associated with numerous diseases, making proteins critical targets for understanding disease mechanisms and developing therapeutic interventions. Protein-based therapeutics such as monoclonal antibodies, hormones and vaccines gained popularity due to their high specificity, efficacy, and ability to treat complex diseases that are often difficult to address with small-molecule drugs.

Given the important role of proteins in a variety of biological …

The Inverse Elasto-Acoustic Problem, Patrick Grice

Dissertations

A stable and numerically efficient boundary integral method formulation of the elasto-acoustic problem is presented, based on Fourier analysis. The method generalizes well to multiple scattering. The Frechet derivative of the elasto-acoustic problem with respect to shape perturbations is derived, and geometric flow theory is used to design stable numerical methods for the simulation of moving boundaries. The shape derivative is used to define a regularized Gauss-Newton algorithm for shape fitting of elasto-acoustic scatterers.

Geographic And Environmnetal Influences On Color Pattern Similarity Between Coral Snakes (Genus: Micrurus) And Their Lookalikes, Anthony Sena

Dissertations

Venomous coral snakes and their lookalikes are often regarded as a classic example of Batesian mimicry, whereby a harmless species imitates a harmful species. The existing literature regarding coral snake resemblance presents a divisive stance on whether Batesian mimicry is the primary driver of shared color patterns or if alternative factors are responsible. While recent literature largely favors the Batesian hypothesis, empirical support remains inconsistent, and the specific geographic and interpretation of the conditions required for mimicry lacks consensus within the scientific community.

To evaluate the mechanisms maintaining these phenotypes, a quantitative, multivariate framework was utilized to analyze 400 museum …

Geometric Convergence And State-Space Decompositions For Stochastic Gradient Descent Markov Chains, Philip Zaleski

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Solar Wind - Magnetosphere - Ionosphere Coupling Processes Through Small-Scale Magnetic Flux Ropes, Youra Shin

Dissertations

Small-scale magnetic flux ropes (SMFRs) in the solar wind are examined to determine their properties in the near-Earth upstream region and their effects on geospace. Although SMFRs are observed frequently in the solar wind, their statistical behavior near Earth and their role in solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling remain insufficiently constrained. In this dissertation, an automated Grad-Shafranov reconstruction technique is applied to magnetic field and plasma measurements from MMS and Wind, and ionospheric responses are investigated using geomagnetic indices and SuperDARN observations. During the survey period, MMS has an apogee of approximately 25-29 R_E. This orbital configuration allows the near-Earth …

Promoting The Bipartisan Dimension Of Political Leadership: A Study Of The Impact Of A Normative Intervention With Newly Elected Members Of Congress, Jaime M. Ruvalcaba

Dissertations

The U.S. political system is more polarized now than at any time in the past century, as evidenced by the rise of political incivility, legislative gridlock, and hyperpolarization. To date, most studies and efforts have focused on institutional strategies to explain, transform, and mitigate the challenges posed to the political environment. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the normative or values-based behaviors of leaders to either explain or influence political leadership in ways that positively impact the political environment. Fortunately, some organizational programs, like Harvard’s Bipartisan Program for Newly Elected Members of Congress, have taken a different tack, …

A Quantitative Exploration Of Public School Teachers’ Colorblind Racial Attitudes And Their Teaching Practices, Lindsey Dopheide

Dissertations

Teachers play a significant role in shaping student’s academic experiences, social development, and understanding of race and diversity within school settings. Because schools function as important sites of racial socialization, teachers’ beliefs about race may influence how they interpret student behavior, respond to inequities, select instructional practices, and engage with culturally diverse classrooms. One framework that has received increasing attention within psychological and educational research is colorblind racial ideology (CBRI) which reflects the minimization or denial of the continuing significance of race and racism in society. Colorblind racial ideology has been identified in prior literature as a dominant framework for …

A Primary Care Randomized Controlled Trial Investigating The Efficacy Of A Caregiver-Focused Prevention Program For Child Sexual Abuse, Cassandra Dukes

Dissertations

Child sexual abuse (CSA) affects 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys before the age of 18, resulting in significant long-term physical, emotional, and social consequences. Caregivers play a crucial role in preventing CSA by engaging in preventative behaviors with their children. Primary care settings may be an avenue through which to educate caregivers on their role in prevention of CSA. The present study used a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design to investigate the efficacy of a caregiver-focused educational program to prevent CSA, provided via integrated behavioral health (IBH) in a pediatric primary care setting. Participants (n=56) were …

Establishing And Validating Foundational Competencies In The Application Of Behavioral Gerontology Through Expert Consensus, Alexandra Doran

Dissertations

Behavioral gerontology continues to evolve and grow as an application of behavior analysis, but there remains a critical need to define competencies necessary for behavior analysts to provide ethical, effective care within their scope of competence. This study sought to establish and validate foundational competencies for Board Certified Behavior Analyst s® (BCBA s® ) working in this area. A mixed-methods design using three experiments was used. In Experiment 1, a review of discipline-specific competency frameworks and a job mapping process yielded a preliminary set of behavior-analytic competencies for behavioral gerontology. This produced a preliminary framework consisting of 142 competencies. Experiment …

The Impact Of Using History On Learning In Physics Laboratory Settings, Patrick W. Clouse

Dissertations

Integrating History of Science (HOS) into science courses has many benefits. Students demonstrate improved scientific content knowledge, develop their understanding of Nature of Science (NOS), and improve their attitudes towards science. However, barriers prevent instructors from effectively incorporating history into their teaching. The traditions and culture of science instruction, individual teacher attitudes and skills, existing institutional frameworks, and prevailing curricular materials all prevent HOS integration. Preservice teachers may never be exposed to HOS in their science or education courses, meaning they lack experience and knowledge surrounding the benefits of HOS. Therefore, alternative avenues for effective integration should be considered to …

Community Detection In Bipartite Networks Using Bipartite Stochastic Block Models With Node-Level Covariates, Geraldine Elaine Percival

Dissertations

In this age, monumental webs of data demands for perpetual cultivation of ways to untangle these webs of information. One of the many curiosities is how to systematically group entities. When clustering, one avenue to take is ascertaining the interconnectedness between the data points, and gauging their influence to each other. This perspective is programmed to model the relationships between the data presented as a network. Many of the methods being used today are algorithm-based, which may pose limitations in understanding and explaining the uncertainty revolving around the data. Hence, it is proposed to steer towards a model-based approach that …

Bridging The Gap: Action-Oriented Vs. Community-Minded Mentalities And Behaviors In Cold Case Investigation Units, Samantha Strine

Dissertations

One key group in policing that has seen an increase in public and media attention but not research is the cold case investigation unit. These units tend to be more “bureaucratic”, focusing on communication, community-engagement skills, and “desk work”. Thus, this is a potential area for learning techniques and policies that shift the mentalities within police culture to be more accepting of new community focused policies. This study also seeks to address a gap in current research related to studying specialized police units.

The purpose of this study is to describe the organizational dynamics and officers’ tactics, perceptions, and interactions …