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Hidden Struggles Within The Mental Healthcare Workplace, Tammy V. Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) have reported on the worldwide pervasiveness and increasing societal costs associated with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). A recent post on the WHO website cited recent scientific research (2022) indicating the magnitude of harmful effects attributed to ACEs, even classifying them as “violence against children.” Esaki and Larkin (2013) indicate that ACEs are prevalent among many social service professionals, including mental health clinicians.

This study uses mental health clinicians as the sample population to identify the impact of ACEs on job performance. Findings from a volunteer …

Neural And Cardiac Mechanisms In Friedreich's Ataxia With Patient-Derived Ipscs, Mariana Burgos Angulo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Friedreich's ataxia (FA) is an autosomal recessive disease caused, in most cases, by a GAA trinucleotide repeat expansion in the first intron of the frataxin (FXN) gene, which results in transcriptional repression of the encoded protein frataxin. FA is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, but the primary cause of death is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which occurs in 60% of the patients. Several functions of frataxin have been proposed, but none of them can fully explain why its deficiency causes the FA phenotypes nor why the most affected cell types are neurons and cardiomyocytes. It is possible that frataxin affects neural and cardiac …

Development And Evaluation Of The Values-Centered Assessment Tool (Vcat) To Inform Culturally Responsive Behavioral Parent Training Intervention, Daniel Kwak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, we aimed to develop and evaluate the use of the Values-Centered Assessment Tool (VCAT) intended for use by behavior analysts to design and provide culturally responsive behavioral parent training intervention for children with behavioral difficulties who are from diverse cultural backgrounds. The study was completed in two phases using a mixed methods research approach. In Phase 1, the VCAT was developed through review of literature and interviews with behavior analysts and was validated through an expert panel review. Major revisions made from the initially developed VCAT included the addition of (a) a questionnaire for parents, (b) information …

Advanced Analytical Method Development: From Highly-Enrolled Classroom To Data-Intensive Proteomics, Laxmi Sinduri Vuppala

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In analytical chemistry, method development is key to identifying, separating, and quantifying chemical components of interest systems. The chemical aspects are fundamental to understanding the subject of any analytical system, whether in academic research, industry, or government. These methodologies serve as a bridge between the classroom, where students are taught to be curious and enlightened, and research, where one strives to contribute. The Ph.D. dissertation integrates advanced methodologies in basic and applied research and advanced instrumentation, but the core criteria for validation remain the same. As part of chemical education curriculum development, a large cohort of undergraduates performed two gas …

4d Printing Of Smart Hydrogel Scaffold To Program Neural Stem Cell Differentiation, Omar Khater

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Injuries like Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and Spinal cord injuries (CSI) areconsidered one of the biggest challenges in the medical sector as there is no specific treatment for these injuries and the medical intervention on these injuries is restricted to reducing the pain and removing the damaged human parts. One of the helpful and most effective treatment methods for these injuries involve neural tissue regeneration in the area of the injury. The main issue when trying to treat such injuries is that neural tissues are often unable to regenerate by themselves and require outer human intervention to differentiate. Biomedical scaffolds …

Essays On Opioid Related Issues, Minglu Sun

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Strong empirical evidence points towards a significantly higher prevalence of opioid consumption among people receiving disability benefits (DB) than in the general population of the United States. However, no previous research established a causal relationship between the decision to award DB to applicants and their subsequent opioid use. We aim to contribute towards filling this gap. There are channels through which awarding DB may both increase and depress opioid consumption, and thus, ex-ante, the sign of a potential causal relationship is ambiguous. To correct for the treatment endogeneity, since an individual’s age at the time of the decision on an …

Functional Morphology And Taphonomy Of Ordovician–Silurian Diploporan Echinoderms, Stephen Ashley Hill

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Diploporan echinoderms were one of the most speciose groups of stemmed echinoderms during the Ordovician. Despite this widespread abundance, the fossil record of diploporan fauna consists primarily of incomplete specimens, with complete specimens being rare. While the theca, or body, is more commonly preserved, the feeding appendages and the attachment structures (i.e. stems or holdfasts) are seldomly preserved. Insight into these features is highly valuable to the understanding the paleoecology, like the feeding and respiratory strategies, of these enigmatic creatures.

One group of diploporan echinoderms which does have an extensive fossil record, is the Holocystites Fauna, primarily known from the …

Coupling 210Pb And 14C To Constrain Carbon Burial Efficiency Of Blue Carbon Ecosystems, Tynisha R. Martin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Blue carbon ecosystems cover a small global area but have the potential to sequester large amounts of organic carbon (OC) from the coastal ocean in the sediment. Organic carbon is continually remineralized and exported in the dissolved form, which is currently only poorly accounted for in blue carbon budgets. Constraining carbon cycling in blue carbon systems is complicated by the range of carbon sources and sinks in the system and high export rates from the system. By coupling 14C and 210Pb chronometers to ascertain the amount of primary production stored within peat, it is possible to study carbon transport through …

Revisiting ‘Our’ Place On Campus: A Queer(Ed) And In-Depth Interview Study Of Qt Resource Professionals In Higher Education, Kristopher Andrew Oliveira

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an interactional, structural, and theoretical analysis of the experiences of Queer and Trans (QT) resource professionals in higher education. Data from the empirical chapters draws on 41 in-depth semi-structured interviews that conducted with QT resource professionals from 19 different states across the United States. The interactional and structural chapters reveal tensions between institutional commitments to doing equity work on college campuses and the neoliberal and institutional barriers that QT resource professionals experience in promoting and fostering institutional equity on campus. The third substantive chapter offers a queer of color critique – through Muñoz’s (2019) notion of queer …

Inflammatory Bowel Disease & Social (In)Visibility: An Interpretive Study Of Food Choice, Self-Blame And Coping In Women Living With Ibd, Jessica N. Lolli

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an interpretive project that uses autoethnography and qualitative interview methods to understand the role Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) plays in women’s quality of life and interpersonal relationships. It focuses on the impacts on patients of dietary changes and how food choice serves to make this ordinarily “invisible” illness visible to others, leading to unwanted exposure. Using Erving Goffman’s stigma theory and its extensions in studies of chronic illness, I demonstrate that IBD is characterized by layers of stigma because it creates situations in which patients are forced to disclose their illness even if they are not ready …

A Tale Of Two Art Programs: Art & Identity For People With Disabilities, Melinda Leigh Maconi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between disability and art in individual and organizational narratives told in the context of art programs that are designed to provide meaningful and inclusive experiences for people with disabilities outside of “art therapy.” Findings of narrative and thematic analysis of the websites of two non-profit disability centered arts education organizations, autobiographical sketches of disabled artists, and in-depth family history interviews with parents of people with disabilities suggest that the clear cut boxes created by scholarly and social movements narratives of disability do not map neatly onto the lived experiences of people with disabilities, their families, …

The Effects Of Temperature And Oxygen Availability On Aerobic Performance In Three Coastal Shark Species; Squalus Acanthias, Carcharhinus Limbatus, And Carcharhinus Leucas, Alyssa M. Andres

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anthropogenically driven climate changes are altering marine habitats globally. Rising sea surface temperatures and coastal eutrophication, arising from global warming and coastal nutrient loading, have resulted in progressive ocean deoxygenation. This may restrict available habitat of marine organisms as studies suggest that the balance between metabolic oxygen demand and environmental supply plays an important role in limiting viable habitat and species fitness. As ectothermic predators, with temperature-dependent metabolism and high metabolic demands, coastal shark species may be susceptible to shifts in ocean temperature and oxygen. Such environmental changes may alter metabolic performance and ultimately success and survival within shark habitat. …

Deep Learning And Feature Engineering For Human Activity Recognition: Exploiting Novel Rich Learning Representations And Sub-Transfer Learning To Boost Practical Performance, Ria Kanjilal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A significant gap exists in our knowledge of how domain-specific feature extraction compares to unsupervised feature learning in the latent space of a deep neural network for a range of temporal applications including human activity recognition. This dissertation aims to address this gap specifically for human activity recognition using acceleration data. To ensure reproducibility, we use two publicly available datasets, UniMiB-SHAR and ExtraSensory, with a well-established history in the human activity recognition literature. We methodically analyze the performance of 64 different combinations of i) learning representations (in the form of raw temporal data or extracted features), ii) traditional and modern …

Juvenile Homicide Offenders: A Life-Course Perspective, Norair Khachatryan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Murder by offenders under the age of 18 is a cause for public concern, despite the overall decrease in the rate of juvenile-perpetrated homicide since 1994. Due to several rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court (i.e., Miller v. Alabama, 2012), the likelihood that convicted juvenile homicide offenders (JHOs) will be released from prison has increased. Accordingly, it is important to examine these offenders’ long-term readjustment to society after their release. Using a mixed-method approach, the present study was designed to explore the factors that influence whether JHOs reoffend and their reoffending patterns, over a period of approximately 35 years. Another …

Stability And Interaction Analysis Of Inverter-Based Resources In Power Grids, Li Bao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The increasing penetration of inverter-based resources (IBRs) introduces some unexpected dynamic issues, including low-frequency oscillations. To investigate these phenomenon, a laboratory-scale grid-following voltage-source converter (VSC) system is implemented to demonstrate weak grid oscillations. Grid-following control is applied in VSC to provide active power, reactive power or ac voltage control. The test bed is also replicated in electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation environment (MATLAB/SimPowerSystems) for benchmark purpose. Case studies are carried out to demonstrate low-frequency oscillations under real power/ac voltage or real power/reactive power control. An analytical model is carried out to examine the stability condition and compared with EMT or hardware …

Elucidating The Sources Supplying Aerosol Iron, Zinc, And Cadmium To The Surface Of The North Pacific Ocean With Stable Isotopes, Zach B. Bunnell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Transition metals, such as iron (Fe), zinc (Zn) and cadmium (Cd), are found at just trace amounts within the global oceans yet are vital for many biological functions of phytoplankton. As a result, these metals influence the ocean’s efficacy for carbon sequestration. Atmospheric dust is the primary input of Fe to various surface waters and may also supply Zn and Cd to oligotrophic surface waters. Here, I present Fe, Zn, and Cd isotope data from the US North Pacific GEOTRACES Section GP15 (Alaska-Tahiti) from the low-dust season (Sept. – Nov. 2018). Using this data and aerosol enrichment factors, I show …

Zooplankton Biodiversity In The Northeast Gulf Of Mexico And On The West Florida Shelf From 2005 - 2014, Megan Ferguson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Zooplankton abundance and biodiversity was measured in the northeast Gulf of Mexico (NEGoM) and on the West Florida Shelf. Bongo net samples were collected between May 2005 to September 2009 through the SEAMAP program, and between July 2010 to August 2014 through the C-IMAGE program. Calanoid copepods were the most abundant zooplankton group in most of the samples collected, but ostracods, larvaceans, and chaetognaths were also abundant. Shannon and Inverse Simpson indices were calculated for all zooplankton samples and generally showed similar trends, but only Shannon indices were used for statistical analyses. In the winter and spring there were significant …

Large Area Projection Sintering Of Semicrystalline Polymers And Part Analysis Of The Printed Specimens, Taranjot Kaur

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the requirements posed to products have increased in recent years. The trend towards individualized serial products steps up the need for respective manufacturing techniques to be more and more flexible. Conventional techniques of serial production, such as injection molding, are unable to fully meet the requirements of this trend. Additive manufacturing techniques generate components directly from a CAD data set while requiring no specific mold, producing minimal waste, and reaching satisfactory geometric accuracy. This is how, as opposed to conventional techniques, they comply with these increased demands to processing technology. Over the last two decades, the research community has …

Cortical Organization For Encoding And Perception Of Auditory Spectral And Temporal Cues In Younger And Older Adults, Jitpakorn Pichaitanaporn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Perception of spectral and temporal acoustic cues is fundamental to most auditory tasks including speech discrimination, sound localization, and segregation of speech in background competition. Although neuroimaging studies have shown hemispheric asymmetry in processing spectral and temporal features, where right hemisphere is dominant for spectral processing while left hemisphere is dominant for temporal processing, the effects of aging on hemispheric asymmetry and associated auditory perceptual consequences have not been well studied. Neurocognitive aging studies support that due to limited neural resources, older adults may use different neural circuits than younger adults to maintain perceptual and cognitive performance during the same …

Examining The Social Validity Of Parent Training: Post-Participation Parent Perceptions And Reflections Of Group Triple P, Nycole C. Kauk

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Child behavior problems are highly prevalent and impactful on the child and their family system, bringing both short-term and long-term consequences (Sanders, 2012). Many risk factors for child behavior problems are modifiable via the use of Behavioral Family Interventions, such as behavioral parent training programs (Kazdin, 1991). Behavioral Family Interventions (BFI) modify factors within the family system to minimize modifiable risk factors and engineer protective factors to produce behavior change (Kazdin, 1991). While several manualized behavioral parenting interventions exist, the Triple P parenting program is one of the most researched and effective programs used internationally, particularly the Level 4 package; …

Ultrafast Magneto-Optic Study Of Exchange Interactions In Magnetic Materials, Hengzhou Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Magneto-optic Kerr Effect (MOKE) is a very important method to investigate the magnetization ofmaterials with the polarization and intensity of light reflected from a sample. Both dynamic and static MOKE are performed to study the magnetic properties of thin films and bulk crystals in this research. For the static MOKE measurement, a solid state laser was used to probe the samples to generate a hysteresis loop by changing the external field from -0.8 T to 0.8 T. The magnet can be placed at an angle between 0 to 20 degree with respect to the sample surface to probe different sample …

Aqueous Humor Dynamics And Compound Action Potentials In The Anesthetized And Conscious Freely Moving Rat, Youssef Mohamed

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Vision is dependent on the proper functioning of many intricate components of the eye. Aqueous humor dynamics function to keep the eye inflated at the right pressures and nourish avascular tissue in the eye while properties of the corneoscleral shell dictate how dynamic changes in volume and pressure affect tissue at the optic nerve head. Retinal ganglion cells exit the globe at the optic nerve head and carry all of the visual information to the brain for perception of visual stimulus. In this dissertation, we aim to present a lumped parameter model of the eye that can accurately describe the …

Approach And Avoidance Food Craving: A Dual Cue Reactivity Investigation, Christina Lee Verzijl

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent research suggests that food craving is a motivational process underlying the full spectrum of disordered eating behaviors. The ambivalence model of craving, originally applied to substance use craving, provides a framework through which the push-pull motivational process of food craving and its relation to the range of disordered eating behaviors can be understood. In this perspective, food craving is a multi-dimensional motivational process that involves an individual’s competing desires to both consume (i.e., approach) and not consume (i.e., avoid) certain food. Building on previous literature, the current study tested whether behavioral measures of approach and avoidance food craving (i.e., …

A Bathroom Break For Teachers: An Institutional Ethnotheatrical Inquiry, Jonathan M. Coker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the teacher bathroom dilemma, a term I coined to describe teachers not having adequate access to the bathroom during their workdays. While this issue is widely known by those in the profession, only a handful of articles have been written on this topic. The teacher bathroom dilemma is part of a litany of working conditions that have intensified due to the neoliberal turn in education, forcing teachers to perform precarious actions that endanger their physical and psychological health. This dissertation explored how the teacher bathroom dilemma impacted teachers’ work and personal lives. …

Educational Language Policy: An Examination Of Race And Language In Policy Discourse, Dionne L. Davis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Linguistic diversity is an integral thread in the tapestry of America. As such researchers how linguistic differences across ethnoracial groups can be understood as resources rather than problems. The aim of this study was to examine ideologies concerning race/ethnicity and language in the discourse of educational language policies that guide multilingual approaches to education. The design of this study was critical discourse policy analysis, and the framework was a combination of Critical Language and Race Theory, also known as LangCrit (Crump, 2014), and Raciolinguistics (Alim, 2016; Flores and Rosa, 2015). The research questions were: (1) How are ideologies about the …

Saudi Efl Learners’ Detection And Comprehension Of English Vivid Phrasal Idioms: A Conceptual Replication Study, Basma A. Moreb

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study was a mixed method research. The quantitative part investigated Saudi English learners’ English vivid phrasal (VP) idiom detection differences by lexical level, semi- lexical level, and post-lexical level, as well as comprehension and interpretation by zero-context and full-context conditions. It also researched the extent to which Saudi English learners differed in their scores on the measure of participants’ perceptions on the need for including VP idioms in classrooms. The qualitative part of this study investigated the challenges Saudi English learners faced while completing the detection and comprehension tasks and the strategies they used to detect and comprehend the …

English Language Learners’ Perceptions Of Employing A Social Annotation Tool To Promote Peer Support, Engagement With The Text, And Reading Comprehension, Inanc Karagoz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

International students in English-medium higher-education programs read various texts from different fields in English throughout their studies. Many students find reading for academic purposes less enjoyable which, in turn, has a negative effect on their engagement and reading comprehension. Collaboration through social annotation tools may transform the process of meaning-making into a social activity. The extant literature focuses on its impact on comprehension and learners’ attitudes. To add to the literature and understand remote learners’ experiences, I explored international students’ perceptions of employing a social annotation tool on promoting their peer interactions, reading engagement, and comprehension in a hybrid EAP …

Ethnographic Insight On The Construct Of Blackness: Heritage, ‘Home,’ Community, And Reality In Carver City-Lincoln Gardens, Tampa, Florida, 1928-2021, Lisa Katina Armstrong

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study is a community-engaged investigation of the experiences and impacts of Black people living in the segregated space called “Carver City-Lincoln Gardens.” This study aims to advance scholarly and mainstream conversations about one racialized community; it is a significant space because the Lincoln Gardens Area was explicitly designated by the Department of Defense as a residential space for Black veterans after World War II to purchase homes. By exploring this housing arrangement through an anthropological lens, the findings indicate that a mixed-method, collaborative ethnography reveals nuances that might be glossed over when communities are racialized. This study also seeks …

An Assessment Of Transgender And Gender Non-Conforming Individuals Gender Affirming Health Care Practices In The Greater Tampa Bay, Sara J. Berumen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The LGBTQ+ community faces discrimination and oppression throughout U.S. history and today. In particular, transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) individuals may face a variety of challenges when seeking biomedical health care tied to hostility, discomfort, lack of training, stigma, and denial of care at clinics or hospitals (Baker & Beagan, 2014; Lykens et al., 2018; Safer, 2021). TGNC individuals face medical gatekeeping when trying to access medical gender-affirming care (Aizura, 2018; Malatino, 2020). The research project aims to investigate these individuals' healthcare experiences, and access to both medicalized and nonmedicalized gender affirming health care practices.

In order to conduct this …

The Experiences Of Black And Hispanic Males Retained Through Florida’S Mandatory Third Grade Retention Law, Sophia Mcmorris

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There has been a constant argument that if students cannot read by third grad, then they will have an uphill struggle for the rest of their educational journey. Researchers have provided evidence signaling some truth to this claim and efforts have been established to ensure that all students receive high-quality instruction (Tweed, 2001). Many states have struggled with policies on how to correct this problem, and they have been challenged to answer whether students who cannot read proficiently by the third grade should be promoted, or if they should be pertained and provided with intensive interventions before moving on to …