Digital Commons Network^™

Promoting Healthy Sleep Practices Among Parents Of Young Children: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial, Kristin Lynn Edwards

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One of the most significant and underrecognized public health concerns in young children is related to the consequences of inadequate sleep. Inadequate sleep may result in problems related to behavioral regulation, executive functioning, and academic performance. ‘Sleep hygiene’, a term that describes consistent daytime and nighttime practices that promote healthy sleep, has been found to significantly increase sleep duration and improve sleep quality in the pediatric population. Researchers have found that many parents have a poor understanding of sleep hygiene. The purpose of this study was to determine if an educational intervention increased parental knowledge and practices of sleep hygiene …

The Role Of Secreted Proteases In Regulating Disease Progression In Staphylococcus Aureus, Brittney D. Gimza

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Staphylococcus aureus is a highly successful pathogen capable of producing a wealth of virulence factors in the human host. Of note, ten extracellular proteases are produced alongside these virulence factors and play a multifaceted role during infection. They not only cleave host proteins to promote bacterial invasion, immune evasion and survival, but also control disease progression by modulating the stability of self-derived pathogenic determinants. The importance of the secreted proteases modulating virulence factor stability is evidenced by our groups previous finding that a protease-null strain has a substantially increased infectious capacity in a murine model of sepsis; resulting from the …

Book-Sharing As A Context For Fathers And Mothers To Enhance Language Development Of Their Preschool Children, Yagmur Seven

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Poor reading levels is a pervasive problem in the US. For example, two of every three eigth grade students in the US are estimated to demonstrate insufficient reading comprehension skills. Early use of decontextualized language, in which the language expressed is removed from the here and now, serves as a precursor of academic language proficiency. Starting as early as the third year of life, decontextualized language is less likely to be practiced in lower socio-economic status (SES) households. Although storybooks offer a rich context for practicing the language with young children, reading storybooks alone is not adequate to promote conversational …

Development Of Α-Aa Peptides As Peptidomimetics For Antimicrobial Therapeutics And The Discovery Of Nanostructures, Sylvia E. Singh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For decades it has been convention to use antibiotics for the treatment of bacterial infections. Due to the overuse and misuse of these drugs, bacteria are becoming resistant to these treatments. This phenomenon has led to the search for alternative antibiotics, and in the study of Host Defense Peptides (HDPs). HDPs are the body’s innate immune response to infection. They are known to modulate immune system response and kills bacterial using various methods causing them to be less susceptible to bacterial resistance. The method by which we can mimic these biological peptides is called peptidomimetics. Various research shows the use …

The Potential Impact Radius Of A Natural Gas Transmission Line And Real Estate Valuations: A Behavioral Analysis, Charles M. Hilterbrand Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study intended to address the question, “How would a purchase price be impacted if a seller provided buyers a notice that the residential property that has been listed for sale is located within a Potential Impact Radius (PIR) of a natural gas transmission line?” Does the notice of the location affect the purchase value a buyer is willing to offer for a residential property? Does the perceived risk associated with PIR affect the amount a potential buyer would offer?

To address these questions, a Qualtrics survey that included three video tour treatments of a residential property was sent to …

“We Can Learn Some Things From Them, But They Can Learn Some Things From Us Too”: Intergenerational Perceptions Of Shared Infant Feeding Information, Alexis L. Woods Barr

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Breastfeeding is associated with unparalleled benefits for infants, mothers, families and society. In light of the breastfeeding disparities and health disparities experienced by the African American community, their women and children stand to gain the most from breastfeeding practices compared to other first-food feeding methods. Moreover, African American mothers are constantly exposed to messages, images, and stereotypes about motherhood (from multiple channels of communication) which influences their infant feeding practices. Many of these exposures send mixed messages and tend to be cultural contradictions of Black motherhood. What complicates this issue is the shortage of research that investigates the intergenerational infant …

(Re)Making Worlds Together: Rooster Teeth, Community, And Sites Of Engagement, Andrea M. M. Fortin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My research examines the communicative practices by which fans of the entertainment brand Rooster Teeth (RT)—with millions of members around the world engaged with one another through in-person meetups, as well as a variety of digital spaces — constitute community. I study these moments in communication in terms of sites of engagement, or real-time windows where actions occur through the intersection of people, mediational means, and social practices. My research is important for a contemporary understanding of communities, as well as being critical in considering how our online and offline practices are inextricably tied in ways we have only begun …

Taking An “Ecological Turn” In The Evaluation Of Rhetorical Interventions, Peter Cannon

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to develop a new method for the evaluation and assessment of therapeutic libraries in a health ecology. To do so, I employ a modified version of Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation as a methodological tool for the investigation of health ecologies by applying an ecological analysis to an alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment center in Tampa, Florida. By modifying Bitzer’s rhetorical situation schema and expanding the concept of health ecologies, I develop several innovations useful for tracing the impact of actants and rhetorical events specific to health and medicine. A major focus of this dissertation is a …

Adolescent Identity Exploration And Civic Identity Development In A U.S. Government Classroom, Sarah Mead Denney

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As technological advances provide minute-by-minute updates of current events and personalized media feeds push the boundaries of political polarization, the task of social studies educators to provide students with the tools to become effective citizens becomes increasingly important. Undergirded by theories of psychosocial identity development, civic identity development, and the promotion of identity exploration in the academic curriculum, this qualitative multiple case study attempts to examine the processes of adolescent identity exploration and civic identity development in relation to the assignments and activities in a twelfth-grade Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. Government classroom. Classroom observations, teacher and student interviews, and artifact …

An Assessment Of The Role Of Florida Pharmacists In The Administration Of Inactivated Influenza Vaccine To Pregnant Women, Oluyemisi O. Falope

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The influenza vaccine is a safe and effective vaccine in preventing influenza infection in the general population. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommend that pregnant women receive influenza inactivated vaccine (IIV) due to the high morbidity and mortality associated with influenza infection in pregnant women. Despite the recommendation, the U.S. national influenza vaccine uptake rates among pregnant women continue to remain low. Studies have shown barriers to influenza vaccine uptake in pregnant women to include issues with access, unavailability of vaccine, and lack of time during prenatal visits. These barriers can be overcome using pharmacists because, among healthcare providers, …

Understanding The Family Planning Care Experiences Of Young Black Women Using An Intersectionality Mixed Methods Approach, Rachel G. Logan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Black women in the U.S. disproportionately experience unintended pregnancy, particularly as compared to their white counterparts. When racial and ethnic disparities in reproductive health are combined with other marginalized identities, such as low social status and young age, Black women’s risk of negative health outcomes may increase and further produce disadvantage.

Objective: The overall objective of this research was to understand the family planning care experiences of young Black women.

Methods: This study used a transformative mixed methods design to understand young Black women’s most recent family planning care experience in the last 12 months through Intersectionality, Psychological Reactance, …

Developing A Computer-Managed Mentor Matching System For Graduate Students, Donna J. Knudsen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Changes to the higher education landscape resulting from digital-age advancements in technology limit the opportunities for doctoral students and faculty to find one another for research and mentorship pairings as they once did when higher education was a wholly brick and mortar enterprise. Further, doctoral student attrition has remained unmoved at approximately 50% since the 1990s, with studies consistently citing the absence of mentoring (or doctoral students’ dissatisfaction with their mentors) as chief among the factors that contribute to the high rate of attrition. Some predict that the rate of doctoral attrition is as much as 20% higher for programs …

Effects Of Reservoir Conditions And Trace Co-Contaminant Gases On Geological Carbon Sequestration, Ram Kumar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Geological carbon sequestration in a saline formation is a promising technology for large-scale carbon dioxide (CO2) mitigation. Several factors such as temperature, pressure, salinity, hydraulic conductivity, and mineralogy of a formation affect the CO2 sequestration in saline formations. These factors can vary widely depending upon the type of formation or the degree of heterogeneity within a formation. In addition to these properties of the repositories, the CO2-rich flue gas streams captured from point sources often contains small amounts of impurities such as sulfur oxides (SOx) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), which may have serious implications on the chemistry of the repositories …

Reading Rape And Answering With Empathy: A New Approach To Sexual Assault Education For College Students, Brianna Jerman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The issue of sexual assault on college campuses is addressed in part by a mandate that all college students complete some form of sexual assault education. While current education programs have proven successful in teaching bystander education and dispelling rape myths, they have not proven to increase reporting rates while also decreasing the number of sexual assaults. This dissertation makes a pedagogical argument for a new approach to sexual assault and prevention education at the college level that would use literary rape narratives to dispel sexual assault myths, teach trauma theory principles, and address intersectional aspects of rape culture with …

Simulation And Experimental Investigation Of Fluid Mixing Enhancement With Orifice Plate, Mohammed Al Busaidi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current experimental and simulation fluid mixing studies aim to increase mixing efficiency and incorporate various measurement methods to quantify mixing. In this thesis, comprehensive simulation and experimental studies were carried out to investigate the effects of an orifice plate on mixing. Mixing efficiency is measured through the correlation of volume fraction to color light reflectivity, as dyes were introduced to the fluids being mixed. Volume fractions close to 0.5 indicate high mixing performance, and the efficiency declines as volume fractions depart from 0.5. It was found that fluids in a small diameter tube do not mix due to the absence …

The Hostile Media Effect And Its Potential Consequences: Examining The Influence Of Presumed Influence Of International Media Coverage, Zhennan Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to explore American and Chinese's perception towards foreign media's coverage about their own country, as well as the main influencing factors and its consequences of this phenomenon. We designed an online survey based on the existing literature on hostile media perception. The sample included 301 American participants and 300 Chinese participants (N=601).

The current study used paired sample T test, Pearson correlation coefficient and SEM model test. Three important results were found. First, hostile media perception is widespread. In the study, both American and Chinese participants were biased to varying degrees against foreign media …

Teaching Towards Critical Consciousness: Preservice Teachers Narrate Race In English Education, Joanelle Morales

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

English teacher educators argue the need to reshape English Education programs by offering transformative discussion that promote “Critical Race English Education” which centers race and racism and examines the role of language and literacy in disrupting existing power relations (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017). This study explored four secondary English preservice teachers’ understandings of race in education under a Critical Race Theory lens. Through narrative inquiry, their stories revealed how they constructed and made meaning of their racial identities and how these identities informed their practices and instructional decisions as English teachers. By inviting preservice teachers to confront their experiences …

Understanding The Influence Of The Cancer Microenvironment On Metabolism And Metastasis, Shonagh Russell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cancer is a complex and heterogeneous disease. Not only is there considerable variability between different cancer types, but there is enormous variability between and within patients who have the same type of cancer. Within tumors, there are multiple cell types, including cancer cells, stromal cells, and immune cells. The tumor microenvironment often induces the healthy cells to become pro-tumorigenic. Cell metabolism is exquisitely sensitive to changes in the tumor microenvironment and can be measured to infer the aggressiveness of cancer and predict response to therapy. In this dissertation, we aim to understand how the microenvironment, specifically low pH, affects the …

Desertification Risk Analysis Based On Soils And Climate In Olive Cultivated Areas In Tulare County, California, Zehra Kavakli Karatas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Desertification is one of the most critical environmental problems caused by human activities and climate change. As a result of human activities, land degradation has been seen in many agricultural areas. Intense pressure on cultivated fields causes loss of soil fertility, which can then lead to desertification. Planting plant drought-resistant plants, such as olives, is one strategy for reducing desertification risk in cultivated areas. It is essential to find a way not only how to combat this process but also how to adapt or survive with desertification conditions. Defining desertification risks have a fundamental role in combating drought. The goal …

Measuring And Utilizing High-Dimensional Information Of Optical Fields, Ziyi Zhu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Currently, many areas of optical techniques including imaging, inspection and communication emphasize the utilization of the high-dimensional information encoded in optical fields. There is also a requirement for novel measurement techniques to extract this high-dimensional information with high-speed and accuracy. We firstly introduce a scan-free direct measurement technique that is capable of simultaneously characterizing the amplitude and phase of a coherent scalar optical field. Our direct measurement approach is constituted of a weak polarization perturbation which is followed by the recording of a polarization-resolving imaging process. The weak perturbation rotates the linear polarization on the spatial frequency domain of the …

Enhancing Secrecy And Capacity Of Wireless Systems Using Directive Communications, Mohammed A. Hafez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The emerging advances in wireless communications make it an essential component of our everyday life. Moreover, the current research aims towards involving wireless communications in health monitoring applications, which helps medical personnel to remotely keep track of the development of the condition of their patients. Such information is considered highly sensitive and may cause significant harm if acquired by an adversary. The wireless environment has a broadcast type of nature, where the emitted electromagnetic waves spread all over the surrounding area of the transmitting antenna. This broadcast nature raises a considerable concern about the secrecy of this sensitive information while …

Detecting Digitally Forged Faces In Online Videos, Neilesh Sambhu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We use Rossler’s FaceForensics dataset of 1004 online videos and their corresponding forged counterparts [1] to investigate the ability to distinguish digitally forged facial images from original images automatically with deep learning. The proposed convolutional neural network is much smaller than the current state-of-the-art solutions. Nevertheless, the network maintains a high level of accuracy (99.6%), all while using the entire FaceForensics dataset and not including any temporal information. We implement majority voting and show the impact on accuracy (99.67%), where only 1 video of 300 is misclassified. We examine why the model misclassified this one video. In terms of tuning …

Chemolithotrophic Denitrification Of Nitrate Contaminated Groundwater Using Sulfur-Bearing Minerals, John Sutton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nitrate contamination in groundwater resources poses a serious threat, not only to the health of those who would drink it, but also as a potential nutrient for eutrophication. Current methods of nitrate removal can efficiently remove nitrate below 10 mg/L as nitrogen, but may require resources unavailable to small community water systems (SCWS). Sulfur-oxidizing biological denitrification is a promising alternative that may be more suitable for SCWS. Sulfur-oxidizing denitrification has previously been shown to have a high nitrate removal efficiency; however, it produces water high in sulfate. Utilization of sulfide-bearing minerals, rather than elemental sulfur as an electron donor, may …

A Quiet Valley At Roztoky: Testimony Of Singularity In The Landscape Imagery Of Zdenka Braunerová, Zdislava Ungrova

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although Czech artist Zdenka Braunerova (1858-1934) has been recognized by scholars for her contributions to the Czech cultural scene, thorough visual analyses of her artworks are rare. By investigating a single landscape painting, A Quiet Valley at Roztoky, and placing it into the visual and contextual frame of its creation, this thesis thus approaches Braunerova’s artistic oeuvre in an uncommon way. I argue that if understood within its social, cultural and historical context, the painting transcends the purely optic qualities of a landscape genre and acquires instead the self-referencing character of a self-representation.

By subjecting the chosen painting to a …

Adaptations Of Ovid’S Metamorphoses In Late Medieval France: Material And Moral Recontextualization In The Tapestry Of Narcissus At The Fountain, Morgan J. Macey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a result of Ovid’s prominence in Northern Europe from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, French adaptations of and commentaries on the Metamorphoses from the late medieval period abound. Here, I address the physical and moral transformation of the Narcissus myth in the tapestry of Narcissus at the Fountain. Specifically, I explore how the tapestry’s presentation of the youth transforms Ovid’s verse in a tantalizing yet moralizing image. To aid in this endeavour, I survey the intermediate sources which inspired said transformation. I argue the lavish clothing, lush garden, ornate fountain, and solemn reflection featured in the tapestry …

Life As A Reluctant Immigrant: An Autoethnographic Inquiry, Dionel Cotanda

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I draw on memories inspired and heightened by compassionate interviews in order to produce a unifying narrative of interactions with family and friends prior to and following my exile from Cuba in 1960. I use autoethnography and narrative inquiry to understand how I made the decision to leave Cuba and the life I have lived in exile for almost sixty years. My dissertation focuses on what it means to live as a reluctant immigrant and how historically constituted power relations define the identity of many Cuban exiles. I discuss and contrast the politics of passion and the …

A Research On Esports Users’ Motives And Satisfaction In China The Case Of League Of Legends, Qianyin Sun

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research mainly explores the motives and satisfaction of Chinese eSports users. Due to the changing role of eSports in China this year, the attitude of Chinese society towards eSports has changed from depreciation to praise, and the identity of belonging sense of game players has become one of the motives for them to continue playing League of Legends (LOL). In addition, as a milestone in eSports field, the playability of LOL itself and its pastime and social functions as a mass media will affect the motives and satisfaction of players. This survey used online survey to investigate the satisfaction …

Sundaas Story: A Mixed-Methods Study Of Household Sanitation Provisioning In Urban Informal Housing In India, Sarita Vijay Panchang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aims of this research were to examine sanitation insecurity in urban informal housing through the lens of the built environment, social disparities, and health implications. While the Millennium Development Goals for halving the global proportion of people without access to safe drinking water were met ahead of schedule, progress fell short for sanitation, creating new objectives for the Sustainable Development Goals to be met in 2030. Much research in the Global South is dedicated to community-level sanitation promotion, but often presumes a rural rather than urban setting. Urban informal housing settings constitute a unique challenge due to the range …

The Research On The Determinants Of Users' Willingness To Pay For Chinese Paid Sports Model Based On Use And Gratification Theory, Jing Li

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study adopted use and gratification theory as a theoretical guide to explores the impact of individual needs, product variables, and copyright consciousness on audience’s willingness to pay in paid sports media in China. The most important part of this study was tested whether product variables act as a mediating factor and whether copyright consciousness plays as a moderating factor to influence the relationship between individual needs and willingness to pay. This quantitative study collects the data from a sample of 679 (valid N=568) Chinese adults who have some exposure or understanding of the paid sports model in mainland China. …

An Analysis Of The Language And The Relationship Of The President Of The Usa Related Twitter Accounts Toward The National Media, Sait Serif Turhan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on the language tone of the United State of America’s presidentrelated Twitter accounts and the ways of the interaction with the national media with their tweets. The literature provides how politicians utilize and for what purposes they use Twitter. Framing theory was applied to conceptualize the manner of conveying messages and impressions of politicians toward the national media. Content analysis was utilized to analyze 902 mediarelated tweets to find out the ways of the interactions and language tone and the level of emotions in tweets of US president-related Twitter accounts with the national media during the period …