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Creation And Validation Of The Critical Thinking About Sustainability Scale, Vivian Gregory Alexander

Open Access Dissertations

Alexander, Vivian G. Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2015. Creation and Validation of the Critical Thinking about Sustainability Scale. Major Professor: Yukiko Maeda.

Toward A Psychosocial Understanding Of Suicide In American Literature And Culture Of The 1990’S, Sara E. Murphy

Open Access Dissertations

As a means of rectifying the problematic absence of multidisciplinary scholarly work on suicide, this dissertation project interrogates suicide in American literature and culture of the 1990’s across disciplines within the humanities, medicine, and the social sciences. Utilizing a psychosocial approach to the study of suicide – that is, an understanding of suicide as produced both by one’s psychological development within and by one’s social relationship to his or her environment – I address what I have identified as a unique trifurcated suicide response that arose in American culture in the 1990’s as it emerged through major societal and legal …

Mental Health, Health Behaviors, Social Support, Self-Efficacy And Disease: An Integrative Model, N. Simay Gokbayrak

Open Access Dissertations

The utility of modifiable health behaviors for better physical health outcomes is well-established. Because mental illness is a serious public health concern worldwide, an important question pertains to whether health behaviors likewise have benefits for mental health. Although simple research methods indicate positive relations, no investigations have tested models with mediating factors to discern specific pathways between health behaviors and mental health. As such, this study aimed to do so using path analysis to examine the impact of three key health behaviors (i.e., smoking cessation, exercise, and healthy eating) on mental health. In addition, the potential roles of perceived social …

Predictors Of Change In College Freshmen And Sophomore Cognitions Of Alcohol Expectancies, David Lee Villegas

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examined predictors of change in college freshmen and sophomore cognitions of alcohol expectancies through secondary analyses of data collected in a randomized brief motivational interview (BMI) intervention for at-risk college drinkers (N=1067). Positive and negative alcohol expectancies were assessed at 6 time points over a 2 year period. Information on the selected predictors, which include demographic, peer and family influence, alcohol use and problem, and other drug use variables, was collected at baseline. Change in alcohol expectancies over time was evaluated using linear mixed effects regression and hierarchical modeling procedures. Results indicated that positive and negative alcohol expectancies …

Nursing Satisfaction In A Magnet Hospital, Ahlam Hussain Abdullah

Open Access Dissertations

A cross sectional descriptive study was conducted to examine the relationship between staff nurses' self-perceptions of structural empowerment, self-perceptions of Magnet hospital characteristics and job satisfaction in a Magnet-designated community hospital in the Northeastern United States. Demographic variables of age, ethnicity, educational level, marital status and years of experience were also examined to determine the extent to which these variables can predict nurses' job satisfaction in a sample of 97 registered staff nurses. Simple linear regression analysis was used to answer the two research questions: What is the relationship between nurses' perception of structural empowerment level and job satisfaction? What …

Prescription Stimulant Misuse And Adhd Symptomatology Among College Students In Iceland, Bergljot Gyda Gudmundsdottir

Open Access Dissertations

As growing numbers of students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) pursue postsecondary education, the availability of psychostimulant medications on college campuses has steadily increased. Although a large body of research has documented that misuse of prescription stimulant medication is a prevalent problem on American college campuses, few studies have been conducted beyond the United States. Iceland, closely followed by the United States, has the highest stimulant medication prescription rates in the world; however, no systematic efforts have been made to investigate to what extent these medications are being misused within the Icelandic college student population. Therefore, the purpose of …

Perspectives On Hope Of Hospice And Palliative Care Nurses, Katherine Margaret Paquette

Open Access Dissertations

Fostering hope for clients experiencing end of life is an essential component of Hospice and Palliative Care nursing practice. There is a limited repertoire of literature that describes the perspectives on hope held by Hospice and Palliative Care nurses. The purpose of this doctoral research study was to describe the perspectives on hope of Hospice and Palliative Care nurses who work in one Hospice and Palliative Care organization in the northeast. The specific research questions that guided this inquiry included: How do Hospice and Palliative Care nurses describe the concept of hope? In what ways do the nurses think that …

The Stigma Of Obesity: Examining The Relationship Between Bmi And The Treatment Of Pain In Surgery Patients, Dennis H. Sewchuk Jr.

Open Access Dissertations

There is a growing epidemic of obesity in the United States and a corresponding increase in the number of morbidly obese patients receiving healthcare. Despite the increasing focus and research on obesity over the years, the prevalence of obesity in the United States has continued to worsen. A stigma against obesity exists in the general public including among healthcare professionals. Attitudes and bias of healthcare professionals against obesity can negatively affect judgment and choices related to the enactment of care, affecting both the quality of healthcare delivered and patient outcomes. Studies have shown that stigmatization against groups of patients such …

Undestanding Stage Of Change Transitions Across Multiple Behaviors, Leslie Ann Daline Brick

Open Access Dissertations

Health behavior research reveals that individuals vary in their general readiness to change their behaviors, as well as their attitudes and beliefs about that change. Adolescents are an important population for health behavior change interventions because the choices and behaviors early in life can have long-term health impacts. A large (N=42158), school-based Transtheoretical Model (TTM) randomized trial evaluated two tailored, computer-delivered multiple behavior interventions designed to impact energy balance behaviors, including physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption, and TV viewing, or substance use, including smoking and alcohol. The study took place over a four-year period, with intervention points during grades …

Stories That Shape: The Work Of Writing Program Administration, Marcy Isabella

Open Access Dissertations

Assessment practices are part of the work of writing program administration (WPA), and the WPA function can take several forms. While some scholars champion certain constructions of WPA - be they collective, collaborative, post-masculinist, distributed, and so on - Stories that Shape: The Work of Writing Program Administration argues that what is most crucial isn’t that a program implements a particular construction, but that the specific construction in play suits the specific context of the program in which it is located. And because programs change - because the larger field of rhetoric and composition changes - the work of WPA, …

Tracking Control For Non-Minimum Phase System And Brain Computer Interface, Yacine Boudria

Open Access Dissertations

For generations, humans dreamed about the ability to communicate and interact with machines through thought alone or to create devices that can peer into a person’s mind and thoughts. Researchers have developed new technologies to create brain computer interfaces (BCIs), communication systems that do not depend on the brain’s normal output pathways of peripheral nerves and muscles. The objective of the first part of this thesis is to develop a new BCI based on electroencephalography (EEG) to move a computer cursor over a short training period in real time. The work motivations of this part are to increase: speed and …

Insomnia And Identity: The Discursive Function Of Sleeplessness In Modernist Literature, Sarah Kingston

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the topic of insomnia in British and American modernist literature, focusing primarily on the ways in which the condition of insomnia and the identity category of the “insomniac” intersect with other aspects of subjectivity, such as gender, occupation, race, and social class. Through examining insomnia from a narratological perspective, using fictional, philosophical, psychological, sociological, and medical literature, I discuss the discursive function of both this disorder and identity category during the Modernist period. It also explores the relationship between insomnia and Modernism itself, regarding both the discursive production of knowledge of insomnia and the insomniac during this …

Three Essays On Co-Management In A Fishery, Mihoko Tegawa

Open Access Dissertations

Co-management has been recognized as an important scheme in successfully governing common-pool resources (Ostrom, 1990, 2002). Contrary to Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (1968) or Olson’s Logic of Collective Action (1965), empirical research has found many long-lasting self-governing communities through extensive case studies (Baland & Platteau, 1996; Ostrom, 1990; Wade, 1989). This is no exception in fishery (Pinkerton, 1994). Fishery cooperatives, where fishermen collectively manage the fishery, have been garnering much attention from both regulators and academics (Costello, 2012; Deacon, 2012; Townsend, Shotton, & Uchida, 2008). In fact, Northeast multispecies groundfish fishery in US has implemented a sector management system, …

Exploring The Experiences Of Adolescents Participating In Interpersonal Group Psychotherapy, Francine Rose Bianca Pingitore

Open Access Dissertations

Given the number of adolescents who present with mental health issues, it is important to explore the best treatment options for this population. Group psychotherapy has been described in the literature as the ideal choice for adolescents who engage in mental health treatment. It is considered a “natural” fit, as adolescents are focused on their peer group during this developmental period. There has been an abundance of research examining behavioral oriented group psychotherapy with adolescents suggesting positive clinical benefits and outcomes. However, process oriented group psychotherapy research with adolescents has been lacking. In particular, the “voice” and perspectives of adolescents …

Unconscious States: A Novel, Rachel May

Open Access Dissertations

Unconscious States tells the story of three sisters in a rural New England town and aims to explore the class, racial, and agricultural tensions in central Massachusetts while addressing issues of addiction, the choices that three women face in making their lives, and a family’s struggle to sustain themselves after a devastating accident severely injures the oldest of the Roe sisters, Mary. The novel integrates the choices of educated women today—between scholarship, family, and work—and the racist underbelly, subtle but pervasive, in a New England town like Bolton, as well as the financial burdens that all families face in a …

Price Reframing: Role Of Price Familiarity In Consumer Choice, Miri Chung

Open Access Dissertations

A framing strategies that marketers widely employ in pricing is a Pennies-a-Day (PAD) strategy. This decomposes the total price in order to frame it into a smaller, more palatable daily amounts. To date, several theoretical perspectives were investigated in an attempt to identify mediators of PAD effectiveness: perceived triviality, perceived benefits, and the feeling of being misled.

Interestingly, despite evidence suggesting consumer response to PAD pricing is more complex, the extant literature has not investigated moderators of PAD effectiveness. Based on studies in information processing, the current study suggests that consumers' price familiarity could act in a moderating role on …

Expanding The Foundation For Population-Based Anxiety Management Interventions, Jessica Lipschittz

Open Access Dissertations

Anxiety is the most prevalent mental illness and treatments are effective but underutilized. Failure to design treatments that proactively reach individuals at varying levels of readiness may be one driver of under-utilization. The Transtheoretical Model of behavior change (TTM) offers a framework for designing treatments tailored to readiness to engage in exposure, the process of gradually approaching feared stimuli and the central behavioral component of evidence-based anxiety treatments. This study sought to develop the essential building blocks for applying the TTM to anxiety by developing a set of measures of core TTM constructs (Stage of Change, Decisional Balance, Self-efficacy, and …

Off The Hip: A Thermodynamics Of The Cool, Rebecca Kanost

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation asserts that the cool’s significance in 20th-century American culture exceeds that assigned to it by current critiques. It assays a rhetorical model which describes coolness as stillness in behavior that surprises witnesses, given the assumptions they make about the still person and context for his or her behavior. Such stillness agitates witnesses’ normative assumptions about all those in the rhetorical situation, including assumptions about affect, gender, race, class and sexuality. Agitation may also lead to conjecture about what mindset could produce cool behavior. To test this model I investigate representations of coolness in James Baldwin’s short story, “Going …

Hidden Cost Of Conflict: An Interdisciplinary Examination Between Family Law, Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Justice, And Work Productivity For Employed Adults, Lisa M. Burton

Open Access Dissertations

There is limited understanding of the experience of adults going through the court system to obtain a divorce. Linking the legal process of divorce for employed adults to workplace productivity has not been researched. The method of adjudication of divorce has not been linked to health or occupational outcomes. Results could have compelling implications for corporate work/life programs and public policy. Individuals experiencing heavy demands by either family responsibilities or work demands are at risk for poor mental and physical health outcomes. The role the legal system plays in the variability of stress reactions is unknown. Interdisciplinary knowledge may be …

Influence Of Sociocultural Factors On The Attitudes Toward Intimate Partner Violence Among College Students In Costa Rica, Derby Munoz-Rojas

Open Access Dissertations

Although intimate partner violence (IPV) is a worldwide public health issue affecting millions of people, adolescents and young adults are disproportionally affected. IPV is a complex problem primarily because it is influenced by a web of risks and protective factors, which interact and shape the experiences of each person. However, the exact nature of these interactions is not well understood, particularly among adolescents and young adults and in cultures where gender norms are rapidly changing and less IPV research has been conducted, such as in Costa Rica. Specifically, little is known about the effect of sociocultural factors on the experiences …

Perceived Caring Climate, Empathy, And Student Social Behavior In High School Bands, Susana M. Lalama

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore connections among perceived caring climate, empathy, and student social behaviors in high school bands. Nine high school band directors, along with their students, from Miami-Dade County Public Schools voluntarily participated in the study (N = 203 students, N = 9 schools). Participants completed an electronic questionnaire for variables of caring climate, cognitive empathy, affective empathy, positive social behaviors, negative social behaviors, and victimization. Demographic information for both students and teachers were also collected, along with school and band information. Two multiple linear regressions were performed and results showed that cognitive empathy predicted …

Examining The Association Between Variability In Classroom Interaction Quality And Problem Behavior In Head Start Children, Veronica A. Fernandez

Open Access Dissertations

The present study examined the role of variability in observed classroom interaction quality (as assessed by the CLASS) in a sample of Head Start children (N = 965 children, within 54 classrooms and across 8 centers). First, the psychometric properties of the typically used classroom quality mean scores were examined to test whether the levels (mean differences) and rank ordering (reliability) of the scores varied across activity settings (Free Play, Whole Group, Small Group, Meals or Routines/Transitions). Then, variability scores were calculated for each of the three classroom quality domains to examine the unique association between variability in classroom interaction …

Examining Predictors Of U.S. Student Intent To Study Abroad From A Communication Perspective, Jasmine R. Phillips

Open Access Dissertations

This study of American undergraduate students explored the communication factors that contribute to their decisions regarding participation in study abroad programs. The theoretical framework proposed that several communication constructs were related to intent to study abroad. Specifically, intercultural communication competence (ICC), and social influence via face-to-face and computer-mediated communication, were proposed to affect intent to study abroad. Hypotheses generated in this research were grounded in literature on the above constructs and guided by the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA; Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). Previous literature found that intercultural attitudes such as openness to other cultures and diversity, ethnocentrism, and intercultural …

Acculturation, Acculturative Stress, Social Status, And Well-Being Among English Language Proficient Immigrants, Darren R. Bernal

Open Access Dissertations

The effects of social status on well-being are pervasive (American Psychological Association Task Force on Socioeconomic Status, 2006; Marmot, 2004). Social status has been proposed to play a role (Berry, 1987; Padilla & Perez, 2003) in the complex association between both acculturation and acculturative stress and psychological well-being (Koneru, 2007). Subjective Social Status is a promising method of measuring social status (Adler, 2013) that has not been examined in regard to immigrants’ well-being. In an attempt to fill this gap in the literature, this study explored questions about immigrants’ well-being as they acculturate to and deal with acculturative stressors in …

Use Of A Dvd-Based Strength Training Program By Breast Cancer Survivors In The Home Setting, Ashley Falcon

Open Access Dissertations

Background: Breast cancer (BCa) is the most common type of cancer diagnosed among women in the United States. Advances in cancer detection and treatment have led to improved survival, and focus has shifted towards addressing the adverse physiological and psychological effects associated with BCa and its treatments. Evidence supports regular physical activity (PA) as an effective means of managing the negative side effects of BCa treatments and improving health-related quality of life (QOL). Strength training is of particular importance for BCa survivors who experience treatment-related functional limitations. Despite this fact, PA levels among BCa survivors are below those recommended for …

The Effects Of Vocabulary Instruction On Bilingual Students' Lexico-Semantic Acquisition In English-Medium Contexts: A Systematic Analysis, Alain Bengochea

Open Access Dissertations

This systematic review provides a comprehensive analysis of the empirical literature on the effectiveness of vocabulary instructional methods for English language learners (ELLs) in prekindergarten through 6th grade settings. Thus, a central goal of this study is to appraise the available research on vocabulary learning and assess intervention studies’ levels of evidence for effectiveness in order to make a critical assessment of the variables that are currently represented in the field. Specifically, the research questions guiding this systematic review are: (1) How do intervention studies developing L2 word-meaning acquisition with ELLs in pre-kindergarten through 6th grade settings vary in their …

Illusionism: Making The Problem Of Hallucinations Disappear, Rami El Ali

Open Access Dissertations

My dissertation contributes to a central and ongoing debate in the philosophy of perception concerning the fundamental nature of perceptual states. Such states include cases like seeing, hearing, or tasting, as well as cases of merely seeming to see, hear, or taste. A central question concerning these states arises in light of misperceptual phenomena. While a commonsensical picture of perceptual states construes them as simply relating us to the external and mind independent world’s objects, some misperceptual cases suggest that these states fall short of such world contact. The result is that perceptual states are either thought to fundamentally consist …

Pioneering African American Teachers Of Singing, Carl Franklin Du Pont Jr.

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this essay is to identify the first African American teachers to join the faculties of prestigious predominately white institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. In order to accomplish this, sources on African American musicians were examined, university archivists were consulted, and interviews were conducted. While many singing teachers helped pave the way, Sylvia Olden Lee, Willis Patterson, and Camilla Williams were found to be the first African American voice teachers to establish themselves as instructors in the highest-ranked vocal programs of the United States; as such, the focus of this essay is on those three pedagogues. The …

Patient Safety Culture, Compassion Fatigue, Compassion Satisfaction: Impact On Nurse-Sensitive Patient Outcomes, Debbie Anglade

Open Access Dissertations

Improved patient safety has been one of the most critical issues facing the healthcare industry. The 1999 IOM report To Err Is Human stated avoidable medical errors contributed to 44,000 to 98,000 deaths in the United States. Current estimates are now between 210,000 and 440,000 patients annually. This study aimed: To examine the relationships between: a) inpatient nursing units’ patient safety culture (PSC), b) nurse compassion fatigue (CF), c) nurse compassion satisfaction (CS), and d) the impact on nurse-sensitive patient outcomes. Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model guided this quantitative descriptive correlational design, which used primary and secondary data. Primary data were collected …

Community College Mission Statements In An Era Of The New Community College Baccalaureate, Kelly Hernandez

Open Access Dissertations

Community colleges have long suffered an identity crisis since their inception. Throughout history, community colleges have shifted their missions due to various environmental forces such as the economic climate and societal needs. By employing qualitative content analysis, this study first investigated the salient themes of mission statements from 295 community colleges belonging to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Schools (SACSCOC), and secondly, explored whether there were major variations in the missions depending on their classification as an associate’s degree-granting institution or as a bachelor’s degree-granting institution. Thirdly, the study revealed how the themes of community college …