Digital Commons Network^™

Gender Role As A Mediating Factor In Gender Pay Equity Analysis, Jillian Ann Girard

Dissertations and Theses

The gender wage gap has been persistent despite the introduction of new laws designed to address the disparity. One of the challenges in addressing this inequity is the lack of complete understanding of the driving factors of the pay gap. One yet unexplored factor is the impact of the gender role, which is a social role based on sex/gender which provides a structure and expectations for social relationships. The purpose of this research was to explore the relationship between gender role, biological sex, and base pay. A matched, cross-sectional sample drawn from large U.S. cities was utilized to test the …

The Impact Of Paternal Caregivers For Youth Who Commit Sexual Offenses, Miranda Hope Sitney

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation presents three manuscripts exploring the impact of caregivers, particularly male caregivers, on the development of juvenile sexual offending behavior. The first manuscript investigated the role of disrupted caregiving for juvenile sexual offenders compared to non-offending juveniles and youth who committed non-sexual crimes. The results indicated that juvenile sexual offenders have particularly poor relationships with their primary caregivers, especially if their primary caregiver was male. The second manuscript is a systematic literature review that explored the pathways through which male caregivers may influence the sexually aggressive behavior of their sons. A total of thirty-four articles describing three pathways (i.e., …

Home Resources Supporting Workplace Resources: An Investigation Of Moderated Intervention Effects From The Study For Employment Retention Of Veterans (Serve), Sarah Nielsen Haverly

Dissertations and Theses

Social support directly impacts psychological outcomes both within the home and work domains. Hammer and colleagues suggest that social support at work from supervisors is related to a number of positive workplace outcomes. Kossek et al. elaborated that social support from supervisors is additionally effective when it is tailored to the unique needs of workers (i.e., role demands). The Veteran Supportive Supervisor Training (VSST) educates supervisors how to better support former service-members employed within the civilian workplace. Additional sources of social support are also key to positive outcomes for workers. Research shows that support from a partner or spouse can …

Examining The Narratives Of Military Sexual Trauma Survivors, Maria Carolina GonzáLez-Prats

Dissertations and Theses

Background: The return of military sexual trauma (MST) to the national spotlight has been fueled by a combination of continued reports of sexual assaults across the various military branches, increased visibility of sexual abuse scandals in the media, and mounting calls for accountability from veteran advocacy groups and legislators. Although there have been numerous reforms implemented by the military, there still exists a significant gap between the military's official efforts and the reality of the survivors' experiences. Consequently, more research is needed to understand how survivors perceive the military's efforts, how these efforts affect their experiences, and how future …

Social Saints In The City: Race, Space, And Religion In Chicago Women's Settlement Work, 1890-1935, Johanna Katherine Murphy

Dissertations and Theses

Many scholars on the settlement movement have mentioned Hull-House's interactions with the Catholic Church and/or the surrounding immigrant communities, but have failed to fully examine the dynamic between Hull-House women, Catholic laywomen who took up settlement work, and the various Catholic immigrant groups of Chicago. This research seeks to place these relationships within the context of space -- meaning physical space in the neighborhood, access to spaces, and space as influence. This lens acts as a thread connecting the tangled and fluctuating dynamics of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender surrounding the settlement house movement.

Hull-House residents and Catholic laywomen contended …

The Economically Disadvantaged Speak: Exploring The Intersection Of Poverty, Race, Child Neglect And Racial Disproportionality In The Child Welfare System, Angela Gail Cause

Dissertations and Theses

The relationship between poverty and child maltreatment has long been addressed in the literature. Disproportionally, children, especially those of color, are more likely to live in poverty than adults. It has been established that the risk of child maltreatment increases the longer impoverishment is experienced. Thus, the likelihood that racial disproportionality may have negative impact upon the child welfare system is potentially increased. Much attention has been given to the overrepresentation of certain children of color within the child welfare system when cared to their representation within the general population. This study explores the intersection of poverty and race upon …

The House We Built In Challenging The Status Quo: House And Ballroom Community Leadership And Health Justice, Jennifer Lee

Dissertations and Theses

Background: The House Ballroom Community (HBC), an underground queer subculture, has been leading actions in large urban cities throughout the Unites States to address health inequities exacerbated by stigma, systemic neglect, and economic disparities, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The HBC is an inventive and dynamic space that posits new leadership paradigms for health equity and health justice, where collective actions and their resulting social impact center the embodied knowledge of their members to create social change.

Methods: Community-based participatory research (CBPR) was a fundamental method and framework for each of the studies (Aims 1, 2, and 3). The meaningful …

Individual And Community Supports That Impact Community Inclusion And Recovery For Individuals With Serious Mental Illnesses, Rachel Elizabeth Terry

Dissertations and Theses

The current dissertation presents two published manuscripts and discusses a third study that explored the role of social support in promoting community participation for individuals with serious mental illnesses. The first manuscript investigated sense of community as a potential mediating factor between community participation, psychological distress, and mental health functioning utilizing quantitative methods. The results indicated that sense of community acted as a partial mediator between community participation and psychological distress, as well as mental health functioning. The second manuscript is a literature review that explored the influence of social support on community integration for individuals with serious mental illnesses. …

A Colorless Nature: Exploring The Mental Health (Help-Seeking) Experiences Of Pre-Adolescent Black American Children, Christopher Ashley Burkett

Dissertations and Theses

Black American children and adults seeking help for mental health concerns face countless obstacles rooted in systematic oppression, institutional inequalities, and structural disparities; consequently, accessing essential services at much lower rates than their White American counterparts. The unidentified and untreated mental health issues of Black American children and youth can have catastrophic life outcomes for them. Some researchers cite barriers such as stigmatization, negative attitudes toward mental health services, and a lack of culturally relevant treatment models as explanations for these impediments to mental health (help-seeking). It is my contention that these analyses are arguably incomplete, despite having accurate elements. …

Organizational Risk In Multi-Sector Health Partnerships: A Case Study Of Oregon's Accountable Health Communities, Shauna Jean Nicole Petchel

Dissertations and Theses

The literature on collective action has documented that the perception of organizational risk -- both the uncertainty of potential outcomes and the meaning attached to them -- is an important factor in whether and how organizations engage in cross-sector collaborations. Yet there are few examples to date that document how health and social service leaders perceive organizational risks in cross-sector health partnerships focused on social determinants of health, or how their perceptions influence organizational commitment and willingness to engage in these partnerships over time.

This research aimed to fill this gap through a mixed methods case study of health and …

Re-Engaging Individual Capacities In Service Of Civic Capacity: A Model Of Holistic Civic Engagement Education For The University, Jane Gerald Carr

Dissertations and Theses

A healthy democracy requires active civic engagement. Effective civic involvement can be encouraged by education that helps students learn to respect diverging viewpoints and build skills such as critical thinking about policy frameworks. In higher education, we have seen progress in teaching for civic engagement despite pressures to focus narrowly on career preparation. However, it is important to build on this work in two ways. First, the noncognitive and holistic dimensions of civic engagement have not been thoroughly considered in designing civic education. Second, the field could reach its goals more effectively by adopting teaching strategies that directly help students …

Support From Inside Out: Exploring Whether Various Social Supports Assist In Reducing Prison Rule Violations, Sarah Renee Lazzari

Dissertations and Theses

Scholars argue that prison rule violations are a way to assess whether individuals are engaging in prosocial behaviors. Individuals who engage in prosocial behaviors, during periods of incarceration, are less likely to engage in behaviors that result in official rule violations. Decreasing rule violations is one way to work towards a safer prison environment, while also preparing individuals for release. The current study uses cross-sectional data form the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Facilities, in order to examine whether multiple types of prisons programs, which will be framed as various types of social supports, influence the frequency …

Attrition And Psychotherapy, Jesse Barrington Homan

Dissertations and Theses

Attrition in psychotherapy, also known as dropout, is a problem that affects clients who terminate, their families, therapists, mental health systems, and the overall community. Research on attrition is vast. However, the majority of this research has been done post hoc, relied on quantitative methods, and looked primarily at client demographic variables as the predictors of attrition. This has resulted in inconsistent findings, offers little to no useful information about attrition, and appears to blame clients for failed therapy. There has been little research on attrition from the perspective of clients who terminate. This study was designed to answer the …

Interrogating The Construction And Representations Of Criminalized Women In The Academic Social Work Literature: A Critical Discourse Analysis, Sandra Marie Leotti

Dissertations and Theses

In the United States today, there are 2.3 million people behind bars in jails and prisons. Mass incarceration has swept up the United States to such a degree that we are known globally for holding more people in correctional facilities than any other country in the world. Although women have always, and still do, reflect a smaller proportion of the correctional population, over the last 40 years, their rates of criminalization and imprisonment have far outpaced that of men's. Drastic increases in the criminalization of women are intimately connected to the entrenchment of social disadvantage enabled under neoliberal globalization. Neoliberal …

Nine Times Out Of Ten, You Don't Die, Patrick Ronald Wensink

Dissertations and Theses

My novel, "Nine Times Out of Ten, You Don't Die," is the story of Layla Wisnewski and her quest to write a book about her famous father. In the 1970s, "Big Dan" Wisnewski was a motorcycle stuntman who broke more bones than anyone living. He jumped cars and buses and rivers atop a white Harley Davidson. Big Dan was considered an American Hero.

Fast forward forty years, Big Dan has been dead for decades, and his daughter Layla is writing a book about his life. While researching the book, she learns she was kidnapped as a baby. This …

Impactful Care: Addressing Social Determinants Of Health Across Health Systems, Nicole Lisa Friedman

Dissertations and Theses

There is emerging evidence that addressing health-related social needs through enhanced clinical-community linkages can improve health outcomes and reduce costs. Unmet health-related social needs, such as food insecurity, inadequate or unstable housing, and lack of access to transportation may increase the risk of developing chronic conditions, reduce an individual's ability to manage these conditions, increase health care costs, and lead to avoidable health care utilization. In response, work on social needs is happening across large health systems in the United States, but the pace of progress is slow and accountability is diffuse.

The goal of this applied research project is …

Learning From Culturally Specific Programs And Their Impact On Latino Parent Engagement, Analucia Lopezrevoredo

Dissertations and Theses

Latinos are the largest and fastest growing ethnic minority group in the United States. Academically, they are significantly trailing their non-Latino peers in graduation and overall educational attainment. Among many socioeconomic factors, parent engagement has been identified as being a defining indicator of student success. Reflective of racial and class disparities, this study explored with the use of critical race and intersectionality theory, that low Latino parent engagement is a result of the historical devaluing and omission of Latino culture, history and language from formal academic settings, and compounding social factors that make engagement complex for Latino immigrants in America …

Physical And Emotional Sibling Violence And Child Welfare: A Critical Realist Exploratory Study, Katherine Elizabeth Winters

Dissertations and Theses

Sibling violence is a pervasive, yet poorly understood and substantially underreported phenomenon. Currently recognized as the most common form of intra-familial abuse, various estimates suggest that 30 percent or more of children in the general population experience severe acts of violence inflicted by a sibling each year.

Given that many young people in the child welfare system experience the family conditions associated with abusive sibling violence, recent publications have implored child welfare to embrace the notion that it is a form of child maltreatment. Practitioners and policymakers have yet to reach agreement on what constitutes physical or emotional abuse between …

Our Vision Of Health For Future Generations: An Exploration Of Proximal And Intermediary Motivations With Women Of The Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma, Danica Love Brown

Dissertations and Theses

Health disparities and substance misuse are increasingly prevalent, costly, and deadly in Indian Country. Although women historically held positions of influence in pre-colonial Tribal societies and shared in optimum health, their current health is relegated to some of the worst outcomes across all racial groups in the United States. Women of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (CNO) have some of the highest prevalence estimates in physical inactivity and excessive drinking in the United States. Building on the Indigenous Stress Coping model of indigenous health, "Our Vision of Health for Future Generations" explores the intersection of a historical event, the Trail …

The Interplay Between Early Childhood Education And Mental Health: How Students In An In-Service Early Childhood Teacher Education Program Experience Children With Mental Health And Behavioral Challenges In The Classroom, Katie Statman-Weil

Dissertations and Theses

All early childhood educators who work with children between birth and six years of age are likely to encounter young children who experience behavioral and mental health challenges throughout their careers. Research demonstrates that educators can play a vital role in children's mental health and behavioral development. However, often early childhood educators do not believe they have the knowledge or tools to accurately identify and successfully handle the unique challenges that arise when working with children with behavioral and mental health issues.

Using an Anti-Oppressive Framework, this research study explores, through a qualitative case study design, how students in an …

Investigating Time During Residential Program Until Transition For Adjudicated Youth: A Mixed Methods Study Using Event History Analysis With Follow-Up Interviews, Emily Carol Lott

Dissertations and Theses

Residential placement is considered the most severe sanction for adjudicated youth, yet there is little consensus on best practices and interventions in residential settings. Demographic trends in the juvenile justice system further exacerbate challenges in studying residential placements. Disparities among minority youth, diverging state definitions of juvenile sex offenses, discrepancies in recidivism measures, and variations in local and state juvenile courts have contributed to a convoluted system that has struggled to identify the meaning of "success" in residential settings.

Building on theories of engagement in residential care and program theory of change, this mixed methods study explores how various components …

The Urban Food Desert As A Model For The Urban Health Care Desert: Fundamental Causes And Economic Considerations, Estevan A. Garcia

Dissertations and Theses

Introduction: A “health care desert” is a part of the country where needed medical, behavioral, mental, dental, and/or pharmaceutical health care services are extremely limited or altogether unavailable. This terminology is based on the concept of a “food desert,” which describes an area where people have limited access to affordable and healthy foods, and which, together with the negative health consequences of eating lower-quality foods, is well described in public health literature. The application of this terminology to an urban environment with ready access to transportation has been limited and is controversial. However, the recent increase in urban hospital closures …

A Foucaultian Discourse Analysis Of Person-Centered Practice Using A Genealogical Framework Of Intellectual Disability, Nick Winges-Yanez

Dissertations and Theses

A genealogical framework highlights the important role sexuality has played in constructing the current label of intellectual disability (ID). The genealogical framework is meant to replace the social, medical, and/or rights-based model(s) that have dominated social work and social services working in the disability field. With this framework, or perspective, I use a Foucaultian discourse analysis to read through seminal texts regarding person-centered practice.

Person-centered practice is the foremost intervention used in social work, and other disciplines, to work with people labeled with intellectual disability. My research questions focus on what is revealed about ID in PCP through a genealogical …

The Intersections Of Good Intentions, Criminality, And Anti-Carceral Feminist Logic: A Qualitative Study That Explores Sex Trades Content In Social Work Education, Meg Rose Panichelli

Dissertations and Theses

This study uses anti-carceral feminist logic to explore the cultural meanings, criminal implications, and neoliberal influence that shape the landscape of social work education about the sex trades in the United States and transnationally. "What are social work instructors teaching students about the sex trades in coursework?" is the question that directs the study, which uses a feminist qualitative methodology inclusive of intersectional feminist epistemology as well as direct content analysis. To answer this question, I analyzed 20 social work course syllabi from sex trade related courses across the contiguous United States and interviewed 20 social work instructors from 14 …

Finding Common Ground: Relationship Building And Communication Between Po And Client Within A Community Supervision Setting, Carl Eugene Appleton

Dissertations and Theses

Previous research on the community supervision model entitled Effective Practices in Community Supervision (EPICS) focuses on the increased attention trained probation officers (POs), as opposed to non-trained POs, pay to using core correctional practices (Smith et al. 2012). While studies like this present a picture of what POs do during face-to-face interactions, there is little focus on PO perceptions of these day-to-day practices. Furthermore, still less studies center the clients on supervision in order to better understand topics such as ideal PO, ideal relationship, and perceptions of common community supervision strategies. To address these gaps, this study uses 30 semi-structured …

The Role Of Caregiver Disruption In The Development Of Juvenile Sexual Offenders, Miranda Sitney

Dissertations and Theses

In the last decade, it has been recognized that juveniles commit as much as 20% of all sexual offenses in the United States (DOJ, 2004). Research that attempts to understand why young people commit sex crimes points to an array of family factors that may uniquely contribute to the development of sexual offending over and above general juvenile delinquency. This study specifically examines disrupted caregiving, or receiving insufficient or substitute care, as a potential moderator in the relationship between offense status and caregiver-child relationship quality. Four distinct moderators were tested: gender of caregiver, biological relationship between caregiver and child, number …

Latinas And Sexual Health: Correlates Of Sexual Satisfaction, Christine Marie Velez

Dissertations and Theses

Latinas/os are one of the fastest growing and most heterogeneous minority ethnic groups in the US. One in 5 women in the US are Latina; by 2060, it is projected that Latinas will compose 1/3 of the female population. Latinas continue to experience disparities in sexual and reproductive health outcomes compared to non-Hispanic whites. While factors impacting undesirable consequences of sexual activity for Latinas have been well documented, Latinas' experiences with sexual satisfaction in the broader context of sexual health remains understudied, despite sexual satisfaction having been identified as an integral component of sexual health. A focus on positive sexual …

Role Of Spouse/Partner In Fertility Preservation Decision Making By Young Women With Cancer, Aakrati Mathur

Dissertations and Theses

Partners play a critical role in making decisions about fertility preservation among young patients with cancer, yet little is known about these dyadic decisions when planning cancer treatment. Fertility preservation entails helping cancer patients preserve fertility after cancer treatment. This qualitative study investigated: 1) Heterosexual couples' responses to potential fertility loss; 2) their process in making fertility preservation decisions; 3) their ethical and legal concerns, and 4) recommendations for other couples undergoing similar treatment.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 heterosexual couples whose female partners were diagnosed with cancer and had received fertility preservation consultations within the past 5 years. …

Exploring The Association Of Victimization And Alcohol And Marijuana Use Among American Indian Youth Living On Or Near Reservations: A Mixed Methods Study, Lindsay Nicole Merritt

Dissertations and Theses

Adolescent substance use research has yet to consider victimization as a potential risk factor contributing to alcohol and marijuana use among American Indian youth living on or near reservations, despite the presence of traumatic experiences, childhood adverse events, racism, and discrimination. Contribution to this lack of attention may be due to little being known about American Indian youth victimization. Even less is known about its association with alcohol and marijuana use in general and for those youth living on or near reservations in particular.

This study utilizes mixed methods with a nationally representative sample of American Indian youth living on …

Is Therapy Going To The Dogs? Evaluating Animal Assisted Therapy For Early Identified At-Risk Children, Leah Faith Brookner

Dissertations and Theses

This study explores the historical context of human-animal relationships and examines the important ways that humans benefit from various types of interactions with domesticated animals. Therapeutic approaches that incorporate animals have been shown to have multiple benefits, including improved physical and mental health. Although this area of study is still largely overlooked in scientific fields of study, including social work, Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) has become increasingly prevalent in various mental health settings. Despite its popularity and anecdotal support, research on the benefits of AAT with children is minimal; there are no studies examining the ways in which this approach …