Digital Commons Network^™

Life After Prematurity: Special Health Care Needs, Working Memory, And Health-Related Quality Of Life Among 9- To 11-Year-Old Children Born Prematurely, Michelle L. Kelly

Dissertations

Premature birth, defined as birth before the completion of 37 weeks of gestation, places children at risk for medical, physical, psychosocial and neurodevelopmental impairments. These impairments may vary in severity. Beyond infancy, children born prematurely are typically not studied as a group, but rather fall within many other diagnostic labels and categories. Non-categorical research, using consequence-based measures, is a means of capturing the effect of prematurity. In this study three major areas of functioning were assessed in 9- to 11-year-old children born prematurely and a group of full-term controls: special health care needs, working memory capacity and health-related quality of …

Navigating Troubled Waters: Chronic Illness Experience In A Health Care Crisis, Sally Thorne

Dissertations

This dissertation chronicles the complexity of chronic illness experience in a western biomedically-oriented health care system. It combines an exhaustive description of what it is like to be chronically ill in the current social context with an analysis of the implications of health care service delivery structures and ideologies for shaping that experience. In so doing, it applies an account of the chronic illness experience toward an understanding of some inherent flaws underlying modern health care delivery systems. The methodology for this research applies secondary analysis to an extensive data base derived from indepth qualitative investigations of chronically ill individuals …

A Bundled Approach To Iv Site Care And Maintenance, Dawn A. Smith

Dissertations

Hospitalized patients receiving medications intravenously are at increased risk for developing hospital associated infections (HAIs), including MRSA if their peripheral intravenous catheters are not maintained appropriately. These HAIs pose a financial burden to both patients and institutions and increased morbidity and mortality for the patient. A bundled set of evidence-based interventions was implemented on three acute care units as part of a quality improvement project. The aim of the project was to ensure proper care and maintenance of intravenous catheter devices. Interventions included a) consistent use of a phlebitis infiltration scale; b) maintaining a clean, dry, and intact dressing with …

Effect Of Sedative Music And Scheduled Rest On Anxiety, Pain, And Myocardial Oxygen Demand During Chair Rest In Adult Postoperative Open-Heart Patients, Jo A. Voss

Dissertations

Open-heart surgery patients in ICU report anxiety and pain with chair rest despite administration of opioid analgesics. In addition, chair rest increases myocardial oxygen demand (MVO2). Non-pharmacological, complementary methods (such as sedative music and scheduled rest) used to reduce anxiety, pain, and MVO2 during chair rest warranted further investigation. The conceptual framework was based on the transactional model of stress and coping. A 3-group pretest-posttest repeated measures experimental design examined the effect of music and rest on anxiety, pain sensation, and pain distress and MVO2 during chair rest in adult postoperative open-heart surgery patients.

An Investigation Of How Spirituality Supports Smoking Cessation, Lenora D. Follett

Dissertations

Smoking is a worldwide problem with major economic impact. Smoking cessation is difficult to attain, with the majority of smokers desiring to quit smoking. Religiosity has consistently shown some association with decreased smoking levels and increased smoking cessation, but little was known about how spiritual practice or religiosity could be incorporated into smoking cessation interventions. The purpose of this study was to describe the aspects of spirituality that were reported to be helpful by those who said that God or their spirituality supported them in smoking cessation, and to describe other factors that combine with spirituality to accomplish success in …

The Experience Of Puerto Rican Families Who Bring Their Children To The Emergency Department For Asthma Care, Jean Sheerin Coffey

Dissertations

The aim of the study was to describe the experience of Puerto Rican families who brought their child to the emergency department (ED) for asthma care. Asthma is the most common chronic pediatric disease, affecting 6.3 million children in the United States and accounting for 728,000 visits to the ED in the year 2000. Black and Hispanic children are frequent visitors; however Puerto Rican children use the services most often. The volume, patterns and populations of children who use the ED for asthma care have been extensively studied, although to date there are no known studies that have explored the …

As Normal A Life As Possible: Mothers And Their Daughters With Congenital Heart Disease, Laura Tynes Gantt

Dissertations

This study utilized qualitative descriptive methodology to examine the impact of the chronic illness, specifically congenital or acquired childhood heart disease, on the mother-daughter relationship. Many studies have examined the effects of the child's illness on the mother-child relationship when the child is very young, but few have looked at the ongoing problems that chronic illness may cause. The investigator observed in her own clinical practice that the mother-daughter relationship when the daughter was chronically ill frequently appeared more antagonistic and ambivalent.

Development And Testing Of An Explanatory Model Of Registered Nurse Empowerment, Marilyn D. Klakovich

Dissertations

Recent innovations in patient care delivery and nursing governance require an empowered workforce. However, little is known about what combination of organizational, leadership, and personal characteristics maximize the prediction of registered nurse empowerment. The purpose of this study was to develop and test an explanatory model of registered nurse empowerment. The predictor variables included personal characteristics of registered nurses (age, experience, organizational tenure, education, and position level of clinical and/or management responsibility), perceptions of organizational culture, and connective leadership.

The Development And Psychometric Analysis Of An Instrument To Measure A Woman's Experience Of Childbirth, Elizabeth V. Rini

Dissertations

This paper describes the development and testing of the Women's Experience in Childbirth Survey (WECS). Although many qualitative and quantitative studies of the childbirth experience have been published, there is no comprehensive instrument that measures the physical, emotional, cognitive, and social aspects of the experience. Forty nine Likert-type items were generated from review of the literature and feedback from mothers participating in two pilot studies. Content validity was analyzed with both pilot studies.

Between This World And The Next: The Lived Experience Of Having A Life-Threatening Illness, Janna C. Roop

Dissertations

Wonderings about hospice patients' experience of dying evolved into the question, "What is it like to have a life-threatening illness?" That question guided this interpretive phenomenological inquiry. Phenomenology is a philosophy that seeks to rediscover the rich meaning lying hidden beneath the surface of everyday. Phenomenology's quest is to coax that which has been concealed out into the light. It is a call to re-dis-cover what Martin Heidegger (1959/1966) might call the mystery of Being. What is it that anesthetizes us to the wonder of our everydays? What is it about the ordinary that blinds us to its depth? We …

The Relationship Between Perceived Clinical Decision Making Ability And Medication Dosage Calculation Ability Of Registered Nurses, Lynn Marie Stover Nichols

Dissertations

To be an effective registered nurse, one must be able to integrate clinical decision-making skills into the medication calculation process in order to provide safe and effective care. Medication errors have been associated with negative outcomes for both patients and registered nurses. The execution of clinical decision-making skills throughout the medication administration process is crucial; however, the literature has not revealed a linking of these 2 concepts. The purpose of this study was to describe the relationship between registered nurses' clinical decision-making skills and the accuracy of medication dosage calculation. Simon's (1977) theory of decision making served as the conceptual …

Hope In The Elderly: Exploring The Relationship Between Psychosocial Developmental Residual And Hope, Eileen Deges Curl

Dissertations

Hope has been postulated to be a motivational life force associated with psychosocial developmental residual from early stages of life (Erikson, 1963). This study explored the relationship between psychosocial developmental residual and hope, in order to test a mid-range theoretical model of hope. The hope model was retroductively derived from Modeling and Role-Modeling theory (Erickson, Tomlin, & Swain, 1988) and previous qualitative research (Dufault & Martocchio, 1985). A correlational research design, with a qualitative component, was used to test the model. For the quantitative part of the study, 90 elderly subjects were selected from two community-based congregate housing units in …

Effect Of A Preoperative Warming Intervention On The Acute Phase Response Of Surgical Stress, Vanda Doreen Wagner

Dissertations

When a patient is exposed surgical stress, the endocrine system secretes hormones in response to that stress. These hormones further activate the immune system to release cytokines and other acute phase reactions. These processes are supposed to protect the body by upregulating the innate immune system and producing an inflammatory response that acts to protect and heal. However, uncontrolled surgical stress may cause a weaker immune response that may lead to delayed wound healing. The phenomenon of unplanned perioperative hypothermia is known to expose patients to additional surgical stress. The purpose of this preliminary experimental study was to determine the …

The Effects Of Cyberbullying As It Relates To Social Media: A California High School Assistant Principal And High School Counselor Perspective, Rodney Stone

Dissertations

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the perceptions of high school assistant principals and high school counselors regarding the impact of cyberbullying on high school students in southern California. The study also sought to identify strategies and prevention programs essential to counteract cyberbullying as perceived by high school assistant principals and high school counselors.

Methodology. A qualitative methodology was used with data collected through interviews and review of artifacts. High school assistant principals and high school counselors voiced their perspectives and personal views relative to the strategies and prevention methods to counteract cyberbullying. …

Bimodal Emotion Classification Using Deep Learning, Ashutosh Kumar Singh

Dissertations

Multimodal Emotion Recognition is an emerging associative field in the area of Human Computer Interaction and Sentiment Analysis. It extracts information from each modality to predict the emotions accurately. In this research, Bimodal Emotion Recognition framework is developed with the decision-level fusion of Audio and Video modality using RAVDES dataset. Designing such frameworks are computationally expensive and require more time to train the network. Thus, a relatively small dataset has been used for the scope of this research. The conducted research is inspired by the use of neural networks for emotion classification from multimodal data. The developed framework further confirmed …

An Evaluation Of Text Representation Techniques For Fake News Detection Using: Tf-Idf, Word Embeddings, Sentence Embeddings With Linear Support Vector Machine., Sangita Sriram

Dissertations

In a world where anybody can share their views, opinions and make it sound like these are facts about the current situation of the world, Fake News poses a huge threat especially to the reputation of people with high stature and to organizations. In the political world, this could lead to opposition parties making use of this opportunity to gain popularity in their elections. In the medical world, a fake scandalous message about a medicine giving side effects, hospital treatment gone wrong or even a false message against a practicing doctor could become a big menace to everyone involved in …

Drug Reviews: Cross-Condition And Cross-Source Analysis By Review Quantification Using Regional Cnn-Lstm Models, Ajith Mathew Thoomkuzhy

Dissertations

Pharmaceutical drugs are usually rated by customers or patients (i.e. in a scale from 1 to 10). Often, they also give reviews or comments on the drug and its side effects. It is desirable to quantify the reviews to help analyze drug favorability in the market, in the absence of ratings. Since these reviews are in the form of text, we should use lexical methods for the analysis. The intent of this study was two-fold: First, to understand how better the efficiency will be if CNN-LSTM models are used to predict ratings or sentiment from reviews. These models are known …

Adapting Microservices In The Cloud With Faas, Mateusz Pietraszewski

Dissertations

This project involves benchmarking, microservices and Function-as-a-service (FaaS) across the dimensions of performance and cost. In order to do a comparison this paper proposes a benchmark framework.

Lightgwas: A Novel Genome-Wide Association Study Procedure, Bruno Ambrozio

Dissertations

This dissertation proposes LightGWAS, a novel machine learning procedure for genome-wide association study (GWAS) based on LightGBM and k-fold cross-validation. The conducted literature review identified that the currently available GWAS implementations rely on massive manual quality control steps to address statistical issues, such as controlling for false-positive inflation and power reduction. It also showed they demand a specific GWAS method for each type of genomic dataset morphology, which consequently increases the human dependency and open margins for misleadings. LightGWAS is a potential single, resilient, autonomous and scalable solution to address such concerns. Through this research, LightGWAS was contrasted against the …

A Study To Investigate The Relationship Between Teacher Self-Efficacy, School Climate, And Student Behavior, Gegimara Fluelen-Ra-El

Dissertations

This quantitative study examined the relationship between teacher self-efficacy, student behavior, and school climate at a high school in Southern Illinois. The teaching staff, which consisted of 59 teachers, were invited to participate. The researcher utilized a teacher self-efficacy survey, school climate survey, and student behavior survey to collect data on a sample population of teachers. Participants completed the surveys in intervals. The surveys allowed the researcher to collect attitudinal data from participants for dissemination and analysis to develop statistical inferences and generalizations about the sample related to the hypotheses statements and based on the results. The Pearson Product-Moment Correlation …

Self-Management In Youth With Spina Bifida: Associations With Parent Factors In The Context Of A Summer Camp Intervention, Colleen F. Bechtel Driscoll

Dissertations

Achieving condition-related independence is an important developmental milestone for youth with spina bifida (SB) that can be impacted by a variety of parent factors. This study aimed to investigate (1) the cross-sectional associations between parent factors (adjustment, perceptions, attitudes, behaviors) and youth self-management (e.g., youth's condition-related responsibility and mastery), (2) relations between these same parent factors and changes in youth self-management following participation in a summer camp intervention for one summer, and (3) associations between parent factors and growth in self-management variables over two summers. Participants were 89 camper-parent dyads recruited at a summer camp for youth with SB (Myouth …

"An Environmental Sleight Of Hand:" Trash, Activism, And Urban Finance In Detroit, 1970-1990, Chelsea Denault

Dissertations

This dissertation explores the political, economic, and environmental choices that led city officials in Detroit to build the world's largest waste incinerator. in the 1970s, Detroit officials €“ led by Mayor Coleman Young €“ confronted the difficult financial realities of the urban crisis alongside the rise of a new environmental issue €“ the garbage crisis. a single solution to these dual crises seemed to present itself in €œresource recovery,€ the burning of municipal waste in an incinerator to produce steam and electricity. in the context of the energy crises of the 1970s, the logic of resource recovery was compelling to …

Think Like A Teacher: How Reflective Educators Use Multiple Data Sources To Inform Their Practice, Jana Grabarek

Dissertations

Teacher data use has become an increasingly central feature of American education. Messages from the public policy, research, philanthropy, and professional development arenas assert that collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data€”particularly number-based achievement data€”will increase student achievement. in this dissertation, a review of literature exploring the link between data use and achievement yielded mixed results. While increased achievement was slightly more likely when data use involved multiple types of data and/or data use strategies, its effectiveness was not consistently supported, and least apparent when tied to marginalized students. to better understand what effective data use might look like at the micro …

Investigating The Mechanism Of The Coronavirus Endoribonuclease In Antagonizing Innate Immune Signaling, Matthew Hackbart

Dissertations

Coronaviruses (CoVs) are positive-sense RNa viruses that can emerge from endemic reservoirs and infect zoonotically, causing significant morbidity and mortality. CoVs encode an endoribonuclease (EndoU) that cleaves RNa in biochemical assays, but the target and function of EndoU activity during viral replication was not known. My work focused on characterizing the functions of EndoU during infection. I report that EndoU is an innate immune antagonist. to function as an immune antagonist, EndoU cleaves the 5'-Poly-Uridines from Negative-sense viral RNA, termed PUN RNA, which is the product of polyA-templated RNa synthesis. Using a virus containing an EndoU catalytic-inactive mutation, I detected …

The Influence Of Dialecticism On Savoring Across Cultures, Soyeon Kim

Dissertations

The present study investigated the influence of dialectical thinking on the ways in which people savor positive experiences across culture. Although both the concept of savoring (i.e., the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and regulate positive experience) and the concept of dialecticism (i.e., a prevalent Eastern philosophy that values the interconnectedness of all things, constant changes in life, and coexistence of contradictory phenomena) are essential topics in contemporary psychology, there is a lack of theory and research that links together these two concepts within a cross-cultural framework. Literature has shown that emotion is a product of culture and norms; East …

A Self-Study Of The Relationships Between My Leadership And The Promotion Of A Supportive School Environment, Cory Overstreet

Dissertations

A SELF-STUDY of the RELATIONSHIPS between MY LEADERSHIP and the PROMOTIon of a SUPPORTIVE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT There has been a recent focus in education on Social Emotional Learning, Restorative Justice, and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS). All of these areas are tied to creating a Supportive School Environment that will help students be successful. Chicago Public Schools created a Supportive School Certification process in 2017 and works closely with schools to help them achieve certification (Mathewson, 2017). as the fifth principal in the past ten years at J. P. Miller School, there has been a significant change in leadership styles, …

Useful For Life: Women, Girls, And Vocational School Reform In Chicago, 1880-1930, Ruby Oram

Dissertations

This dissertation explores how the competing efforts of women to prepare girls for wage-earning and homemaking shaped the development of vocation programs for female students in Chicago schools between 1880 and 1930. Histories of vocational education have neglected the role of women as school reformers and suggested that boys rather than girls were the primary focus of new work-oriented classes in urban public schools. Using Chicago as a case study, this dissertation uncovers how groups of women social reformers, educators, and trade unionists promoted vocational programs to protect school-aged girls from dangerous working conditions, steer girls into "wholesome" occupations, and …

Mobilizing The Past: Local History And Community Action In Modern Metropolitan Chicago, Hope Shannon

Dissertations

The vast majority of local historical societies in operation today opened in the decades following World War II. These organizations are common fixtures in cities, towns, and neighborhoods across the United States, and their members continue to support the mandate to protect and share the local past set by their society founders forty, fifty, and sixty years ago. Despite the ubiquity of the local historical society, however, few scholars have considered the ways historical society founders and members used these organizations to do anything beyond explore an interest in local history. €œMobilizing the Past€ investigates how and why residents formed …

Engendering Empathy For Immigrants In Middle Grade Readers Through Culturally Relevant Young Adult Literature, Amy J. Cattapan

Dissertations

This dissertation uncovered the ways through which culturally relevant young adult literature (YAL) engenders empathy for immigrants in middle grade readers. Empathy was displayed through both affective and cognitive responses and resulted in mirror and window moments (Bishop, 1990) as well as crystallizing experiences. Their empathetic responses led students to apply critical literacy skills to issues related to stereotypes, racism, discrimination, and immigration policies.

I conducted a qualitative case study to examine the ways in which reading and discussing YAL about immigrants created empathy in eighth graders in a culturally and linguistically diverse middle school and in what ways it …

Institutions-Based Influence: The Vatican's Mediations Of International Conflicts, Mamy Wilson Daniel Randriamanantena

Dissertations

This dissertation examines why the Vatican as a global religious organization and the smallest state in the world is able to successfully mediate some difficult and intractable conflicts while it fails to do so in other cases. Drawing from the New Liberalism theory in International Relations, the mediation theory and the literature on the Vatican as a player in world affairs, it suggests the important role of the Vatican's institutions at both the global and local level, besides its spiritual and moral leverage. The method, which combines a longitudinal analysis, a process tracing procedure and a comparative analysis, is used …