Digital Commons Network^™

Teachers' Perspectives On The Inclusion Of Children With Autism In Preschool And Kindergarten Programs Within Inclusive Classrooms In Saudi Arabia, Budur Alsalamah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has witnessed a significant increase in the number of students with autism being integrated into mainstream classrooms. This is thanks to laws and regulations enacted to provide appropriate education for students with special needs, particularly those with autism, in less restrictive environments. This is a positive step towards providing equal educational opportunities for students with special needs. However, teachers' views on integrating children with autism into mainstream education remain varied. Studies have shown that teachers with positive attitudes towards inclusion are more likely to provide inclusive education in the classroom (Dev & Hayes, 2015). This …

The Power Of A Princess: Rebranding For A New Generation, Victoria A. Heath

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The lyric “Well, that sounds an awful lot like princess problems” from Snow White (2025) reflects Disney’s evolving portrayal of its princesses as more self-aware and independent. This shift is echoed in earlier live-action adaptations, such as Beauty and the Beast (2017), where Belle’s longing for “adventure in the great wide somewhere” signals her rejection of a limited, traditional role. Guided by Feminist Film Theory and media framing, this study examines how Disney’s rebranding of princess characters in Beauty and the Beast (2017), The Little Mermaid (2023), and Snow White (2025) reflects contemporary ideals of empowerment. Through narrative content and …

Making Sense Of The Body: Cognitive Science, Disability, And Embodiment, Cheyne L. Joslin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to analyze different methodological approaches in the philosophy of cognitive science, with the goal of determining their usefulness for explaining and understanding bodily awareness and skill-acquisition over time. The examples of skill-acquisition are limited to motor control, impaired by various kinds of disability—but then acquired over time, via technological or rehabilitative means. These phenomena of motor learning are then viewed through the lens of two competing theoretical approaches in cognitive science: neuromechanical cognitive science, and radical enactivist cognitive science.

The strengths of the neuromechanical framework are found in its historical pedigree, and in the …

Semiotics Of Difference: Language, The Body, And Haitian Personhood In The Dominican Republic, Benjamin Puterbaugh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The present dissertation is an ethnographic and multimodal semiotic analysis of the role of signs in the daily life of Haitians in the Dominican Republic (DR). I investigate how language and other embodiments of Haitian alterity are perceived and ascribed value by hegemonic social orders. I center the analysis on the popular perceptions of the Haitian person-type or characterological figure (Agha, 2003) as (over)determiners of actual Haitian subjectivity. I investigate the ways that Haitian personhood is translated, that is, perceived and assigned value, in the Dominican context, and the implications this has on realities of Haitian immigrants. In addition to …

The Dynamic Nature Of Comprehensibility During Itas’ Oral Language Performances, Tania Ferronato

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In U.S. academic settings, everyday oral multilingual interactions can pose communicative challenges (Gass & Varonis, 1984), which can be understood and addressed by looking into communicative dynamics. Exploring the construct of comprehensibility, the perceived ease or difficulty in understanding self and others’ speech (Munro & Derwing, 1995a), through a dynamic lens (Nagle et al., 2019; Trofimovich et al., 2022) helps gaining insights into interlocutors’ subjective experiences to better understand the more social nature of successful real-time communication. This is fundamental in linguistically diverse classroom settings where L2 English speakers can be employed as International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) to teach undergraduate …

Representations Of Motherhood In 19th And 20th Century American Literature, Zabrina L. Shkurti

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how American women writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries constructed, contested, and reimagined motherhood as both a lived experience and a powerful social institution. Drawing on feminist theory and motherhood studies—particularly Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood as experience and motherhood as institution and Shari Thurer’s definition of the “good mother”—it argues that this institution and ideology were never stable or universally attainable. Instead, it functioned as a shifting, exclusionary construct shaped by race, class, industrial capitalism, and patriarchal authority. Through close readings of domestic literature, poetry, fiction, and reformist texts by writers including Elizabeth Oakes …

A Look At The Potential Impacts Of Priming Thoughts Through The Show Family Guy, Thomas Wiskoff

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examined whether brief exposure to a death-themed episode of the adult animated show Family Guy could prime viewers to adopt less serious attitudes toward death and dying. Drawing primarily from priming theory, with supporting insights from cultivation and framing theories, the research focused on the show's unique use of magical realism and irreverent humor, particularly the personification of Death as the sarcastic Grim Reaper, to explore potential shifts in death-related attitudes. Participants (N = 100) were randomly assigned to view one of two clips from Family Guy Season 2, Episode 6 ("Death is a Bitch") with one clip …

Framing Power: The “Deep State” In Georgian Populist And Conspiratorial Rhetoric Introduction, Salome Tsetskhladze

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how the concept of the “deep state” is used in contemporary Georgian political communication. The term traditionally refers to hidden networks of power that function within state institutions. However, in Georgia, it has become a political narrative that interprets international criticism, delegitimizes domestic opposition, and derails political accountability. The study analyzes how this concept is constructed and mobilized in the political discourse.

The research employs a qualitative inductive-deductive thematic analysis. It examines 125 statements made by Georgian public officials between August 2024 and February 2025 referring to the “deep state.” The analysis integrates framing theory, populist communication …

The Role Of Teacher-Student Identity-Matching In Multi-Informant Universal Screening For Social, Academic, And Emotional Behavior Risk Among Middle School Students, Melissa L. Brown

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Multi-informant universal screening tools leverage insights from multiple perspectives to paint a comprehensive picture of student risk across a variety of domains. However, many barriers exist to the appropriate and effective implementation of multi-informant universal screening within the school. When such screening tools are utilized without intentional consideration of students’ unique backgrounds and lived experiences, harmful outcomes may disproportionally impact marginalized and minoritized students. To address this, context-sensitive, identity-conscious approaches may improve the accuracy and equity of identifying students in need of support. This study investigated the role of identity concordance (i.e., alignment of teacher and student gender and race/ethnicity) …

Genetic Testing Motivations Among Men With A History Of Prostate Cancer: A Judgment-Based Analysis, Maximilian Junge

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Identifying individuals at increased hereditary cancer risk through genetic testing can improve early detection, inform treatment decisions, and enhance outcomes for patients and their families. While prior research has largely focused on women, less is known about factors that motivate men with prostate cancer to pursue genetic testing. This study examined components of visual messaging that may influence motivation to undergo genetic testing among men with a self-reported history of prostate cancer. Participants completed a survey in which they viewed eight visual messages that systematically varied across three components: image type (family-focused vs. individualized treatment-focused), written content (familial risk-focused vs. …

Assessing Capability, Opportunity, And Motivation In Relation To Guideline Adherence For Inherited Cancer Risk, Cecilia L. Delisanti

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Although National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines provide cancer screening or risk reduction recommendations for individuals with germline pathogenic and likely pathogenic variants (GPVs) in actionable hereditary cancer genes, guideline adherence remains inconsistent, and the behavioral contributors to this gap remain understudied. To identify behavioral factors related to adherence across inherited cancer risk genes, this study used the COM-B model, which posits that capability, opportunity, and motivation shape health behaviors.

Methods: IMPACT study participants, all with GPVs in a variety of actionable genes, completed surveys (N=575). Minimal adherence was based on gene-specific NCCN guidelines. COM-B constructs (capability, opportunity, motivation) …

Mall For Lifelong Learning: Older Adults’ Self-Directed Language Learning Via Duolingo, Jihye Kim

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) has proliferated due to rapid technological advancements, enabling language learning anytime, anywhere. Among these technologies, commercial applications such as Duolingo have achieved global popularity across diverse age groups. Despite this, research examining efficacy and User Experience (UX) has predominantly focused on undergraduate populations or formal educational settings. While a limited number of studies have explored populations outside university contexts (e.g., Puebla et al., 2022; Rosell-Aguilar, 2018), there remains a scarcity of research regarding the MALL experiences of older adults (aged 60 and above) in informal settings.

Taking a concurrent mixed-methods approach with an emphasis on qualitative …

Construction Of Chinese Identities And Community: A Linguistic Ethnographic Study Of A Chinese Culture-Sharing Club At A Us University, Yuxuan Mu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chinese identity has been viewed as a debated and contested notion in sociolinguistics (Wong et al., 2021). Existing sociolinguistic research, which has centered on Chinese identity-related questions, such as “Who can be or cannot be Chinese?”, has been closely involved with the current political tensions between mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as their associated linguistic tensions between simplified Chinese writing and traditional Chinese writing, and Cantonese and Mandarin. Building on these studies, this dissertation goes beyond the scope of Sinophone contexts traditionally examined in prior research (e.g., mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) to examine how US …

They Find A Way: The Transnational Practices And Experiences Of Diaspora Conflict Journalists, Grace E. Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As global tensions continue to rise, media landscapes are changing. Diaspora communities play an integral role in this shift, as they search for verifiable news with a global perspective to keep them informed on crises in their home countries. In order to keep their communities informed, diaspora journalists step up to localize coverage, creating transnational networks to bridge home and host countries. They often work through intense situations, sacrificing normalcy for information. Building on the framework from Ogunyemi’s (2018) diasporic media observations, Fraser’s (1992) counterpublics theory, and D.K. Thussu’s (2006) contra-flow in global media theory, this study explores how diaspora …

Lost & Found: The Postmodernism Of Japan's "Lost Decades" In Kamen Rider Decade, Andrew K. Barrow

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a franchise, Kamen Rider is underrepresented in anglophonic scholarship despite its potential to relate postmodern texts, nostalgia, and history. In making these relations, Decade in particular challenges postmodern critiques that were prevalent in its time and during the time of the material it references, from 2000 to 2008. Scholars critical of postmodernism such as Fredric Jameson and Hiroki Azuma situate themselves as such because of postmodernism’s perceived detachment from history and lack of depth, creating a cultural logic of artworks that pales in comparison to older logics and eras. By teaching himself and another Kamen Rider morals and lessons …

Examining Whether Survivors Of Domestic Violence Perceive Ifps As More Helpful Than Other Available Support Resources, Aleidys Lopez Romero

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Injunctions for protection (also known as restraining orders or civil protection orders) are often used by survivors as a line of defense against continued instances of physical violence or stalking by abusers (Houseman et al., 2024). This study aims to fill these gaps by examining whether survivors of domestic violence perceive IFPs as more helpful than other available support resources. Understanding this process may offer important insights into IFP accessibility, survivor perspectives, and/or alternative resources that may be equally, if not more, helpful to survivors than IFPs. Grounded in Gondolf & Fisher’s (1988) Survivor Hypothesis and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) Structural …

Comfort Beyond Grief: The Influence Of Brazilian Spiritism On Grief, Maria Luiza D. Reynaud

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the transformative influence of Brazilian Spiritism on the experience of grief, utilizing a qualitative framework of autoethnography and ethnography. The research begins with the author’s personal account of transitioning from paralyzing existential anxiety and a childhood fear of hell and death to a state of spiritual peace fostered by the study of the Spiritist Doctrine. Historically perceived as an unbearable mystery, Spiritism posits life as a continuous continuum where the immortal soul merely sheds the physical body like a cocoon to return to its true home.

Rooted in the 19th-century codification by Allan Kardec, the doctrine is …

Understanding How Single Mothers In Southwest Nigeria Navigate Mental Health Challenges And Financial Hardships: A Culture-Centered Approach, Zulykha B. Akinjobi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Single motherhood is a growing yet stigmatized family structure in Southwest Nigeria, where patriarchal norms, cultural expectations, and structural inequalities converge to produce unique mental health and financial challenges for women. This qualitative study examines how single mothers in Southwest Nigeria navigate mental health challenges and financial hardships through the lens of the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA). Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 20 single mothers residing in the Yoruba-speaking region of Southwest Nigeria, this study foregrounds locally situated narratives to understand how these women construct and reconstruct meanings of single motherhood within their cultural and structural contexts. Findings reveal that …

Human-Ai Collaboration In Marketing Brainstorming: A Meta-Analytic Investigation Of Implementation Approaches And Creative Outcomes, Michael Michaels

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Marketing organizations face intensifying pressure to sustain creative output while managing constrained resources and accelerating digital content cycles. The integration of artificial intelligence into marketing brainstorming processes presents a promising response to this challenge; however, prior to this investigation, no comprehensive quantitative synthesis had established the overall effectiveness of human-AI collaboration in marketing creativity contexts or identified optimal implementation strategies.

This dissertation presents a systematic meta-analytic investigation of AI-enhanced brainstorming effectiveness in marketing contexts. Following PRISMA guidelines, 42 independent empirical studies (N = 2,166 participants) published between 2018 and 2025 were identified across four primary academic databases, coded for implementation …

Youmatter: A Nursing Workforce Study, Stacy L. Pryor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The sustainability and health of the nursing profession are immediate and pressing concerns. Despite decades of research, nurses continue to struggle with high levels of stress and burnout, raising concerns about patient safety and error risk. One in 10 patients is estimated to experience an adverse patient event, with half being preventable, underscoring the need to understand the factors that affect stress among nurses and the subsequent risk of adverse patient events. This dissertation has the following aims: 1) to evaluate whether cognitive failure risk that could lead to an adverse patient event was associated with subjective measures of stress, …

The Bidirectional Effects Of Engaging In Hazard Perception And Work-Related Phone Calls, Hannah V. Pannell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the bidirectional effects of conducting work-related phone negotiations during a driving task. With the prevalence of multitasking in today's fast-paced environments, understanding the effects of dual-task interference is critical for enhancing road safety and workplace efficiency. Experiment 1 established a foundational understanding that multitasking negatively affects both driving ability and negotiation outcomes. Experiment 2 employed an accomplice script to standardize negotiation quality, revealing that while dual-tasking again impaired driving performance, focused negotiators earned more points on the integrative items and overall. Analyses of negotiation behaviors further indicate differences in the use of distributive behaviors. Together, these experiments …

Sensi-Train: Context-Aware Sensitive Content Detection Using Transformers And Large Language Models, Nazeefa Muzammil

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The detection of sensitive content has become a critical task in natural language processing due to the widespread use of online platforms and the social harm caused by it. Even though current methods have advanced significantly, many of them mainly rely on surface-level text and neglect to take into consideration contextual and cultural elements that are crucial for correctly assessing sensitivity of any content to a particular individual. Due to this, implicit offense, sarcasm, and culturally grounded expressions frequently cause problems for such systems. To enable culturally grounded sensitive content detection, this thesis presents Sensi-Train, a context-rich dataset and modeling …

Emotion Differentiation As A Moderator Of The Relationship Between Affect And Alcohol Use Among College Students: An Ecological Momentary Assessment, Gaelle El Helou

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Alcohol use remains prevalent among young adults and particularly college students. Research shows a link between affective states and alcohol consumption, although recent findings appear to be unequivocal on the effect of negative and positive emotions on college drinking. While emotion differentiation (ED) has been associated with alcohol use, previous research has focused mostly on clinical treatment adult populations and / or negative emotions, focusing less on the role that positive emotions play in drinking, particularly among college students. The current study explored the moderating role of negative and positive emotion differentiation (NED / PED) in the association between negative …

Understanding The Effect Of Affective Context On Conflict Monitoring Through Erp And Behavioral Indices Of Cognitive Control, Amanda Holbrook

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Understanding cognitive control in response to conflict requires examining how control-related processes are modulated by affect. This study tested the negative-affective signaling hypothesis, which posits that negative affect elicited by conflict enhances cognitive control. Undergraduate participants (n=73) completed an affective-flanker task in which affective images preceded flanker stimuli. Cognitive control was indexed by the error-related negativity (ERN), conflict N2, response times (RTs), and accuracy, and late positive potential (LPP) to images indexed motivated attention. Across hypotheses, adding event-related potential (ERP) coupling terms did not improve the predictive accuracy of multilevel models, providing no evidence for the predicted trial-to-trial affect-control coupling. …

Adaptive Multi-Agent Intelligence: A Dynamic Data Management System For Enhanced Data Quality And Reconciliation, Anthony Taeyang Vigil

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Organizations struggle with data quality problems that cost them millions of dollars annually. Manual data cleanup and standardizing, also known as reconciliation, can take skilled analysts days to complete and can still contain human errors. This dissertation addresses this challenge by developing and validating the Origin Data Management System, which automates processes that traditionally require days of manual work. The system achieved up to 100% accuracy in standardizing vendor names and identifying CEO information across real-world test datasets from Jefferson County Public Schools, Forbes, and Fortune Magazines. Processing time dropped from days to minutes—a 96-fold improvement over manual methods. These …

Psychiatric Symptom Severity And Performance Monitoring: Intraindividual Variability In Neural Responses And Behavioral Adjustments To Errors, Bohyun Park

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Performance monitoring is a cognitive process that involves evaluating one’s own performance and adjusting behavior accordingly. Atypical neural and behavioral indices of performance monitoring are commonly observed in individuals with psychopathology and have led to hypotheses that perturbed performance monitoring may contribute to functional impairment. However, neural and behavioral indices of performance monitoring are often examined in isolation, so it remains unclear how error-related neural activity relates to subsequent behavioral adaptation on a trial-by-trial basis, and whether this coupling varies across different levels of internalizing and externalizing symptoms. The present study examined trial-level relationships between error monitoring event-related brain potentials …

A Bioarchaeological Study Of The Individuals From The Városfalva Burial Mound In Transylvania, Romania (15th-19th Century), Vanessa C. Reeves

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the lives and deaths of the Szekler people recovered from a burial mound in the Transylvanian village of Városfalva. The Transylvanian plateau is located in present day Romania, and is protected on the east and the south by the Carpathian Mountains. The Szekler people arrived in this area around 1000 CE, and were a nomadic group originating in the Asian Steppes region who later intermarried with various migratory groups as they moved across the Eurasian plains. The Szeklers eventually banded together with the proto-Hungarian Magyar peoples and settled in the Carpathian Basin, the easternmost frontier of the …

“For Haitian Culture, Being Older [Is] A Blessing”: Perceptions Of Aging, Elderhood, And Dementia In A Haitian Born Sample, Melissa K. Eustache

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how first-generation Haitian immigrants in the United States understand and interpret dementia within the intersecting contexts of culture, migration, and biomedicine. While dementia is constructed as a pathological “loss of self” and a public health epidemic, in American biomedical and popular discourse, this study examines how Haitian-born individuals—socialized within a non-Western cultural and spiritual framework—make sense of cognitive decline and impairment in ways that diverge from Western biomedical narratives. Guided by theoretical orientations from medical anthropology, including Mark Nichter’s idioms of distress, Margaret Lock’s local biologies, and neuroanthropology, this research explores how cultural models of illness, aging, …

Reducing Data Requirements In Polymer Science: Deep Neural Networks For Predicting Surface Tension Of Copolymer Compatibilizers, Md Mushfiqul Islam

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In polymer chemistry, compatibilization involves adding a substance often a block or graft copolymerto stabilize polymer blends that would otherwise not mix well, leading to rough structures and weak me- chanical properties. Compatibilizers improve miscibility and reduce interfacial tension, which is critical for applications such as mixed-waste polymer recycling. Sequence-controlled polymers offer unique potential by combining the tunable chemistry of synthetic polymers with the precise, function-driven design of biological macromolecules, but unlike proteins, they lack large, evolution-shaped datasets to guide discovery. This research develops a deep learning framework to predict the surface tension of sequence-controlled copolymer compatibilizers across varying concentrations. …

Evaluation Of Functional Communication Training With Sign Mands For Non-Vocal Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Hayley Margaret Mcmanus

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often experience difficulties in both vocal and non-vocal communication, which can lead to problem behavior as a means of expressing needs and wants. Functional communication training (FCT) has been shown to be effective in teaching functional communicative responses (FCRs) and decreasing problem behavior. However, studies on the use of sign language as a communicative response or modality in FCT have been limited, despite its benefits, including feasibility and low response effort, compared to other modalities, such as picture cards and augmentative and alternative communication devices. This study evaluated FCT using sign language mands for …