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The Theatrics Of Political Representation: Homestyle, Boundary Work, And Emotional Labor Among Florida Legislators, Donald E. Mullins

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how political representation is performed and sustained in the Florida Legislature. Rather than treating representation primarily as votes, bills, or policy outcomes, it approaches it as interactional work through which legislators remain believable, accessible, and authoritative across overlapping audiences. Grounded in an interpretivist epistemology and Goffman’s dramaturgy, the study develops an ethnographic account of representation through three analytic anchors: Fenno’s homestyle, Lamont’s boundary work, and Hochschild’s emotional labor. Methodologically, the project draws on ~100 days of participant observation during the 2025 legislative season, hundreds of pages of fieldnotes, and semi-structured interviews with ten Florida legislators. The findings …

“Makes Me Wanna Holler”: Psychological Safety In Program Development Under Anti-Dei Legislation, Derrick B. Johnson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This evocative autoethnographic study explores the professional and emotional experiences of a Black male higher education administrator who developed a college success program for Black male students at a mostly White institution in Northeast Florida. The research took place as new state laws against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were introduced, showing how these changes disrupt DEI efforts. By using narrative inquiry, the study emphasizes how laws, campus culture, and racial expectations directly affect the emotional intelligence and professional identity needed to support Black male student success.

By focusing on the author's personal experiences, this evocative autoethnography shows the emotional, …

Encouraging A United Response: A Systematic Review And Mixed-Methods Collaborative Evaluation Of Co-Responder Model Effectiveness In Florida, Kelsey Greenfield

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Even before the deinstitutionalization movement caused the influx of state hospital patients into communities ill-prepared to navigate their needs, law enforcement has been responsible for responding to persons in crisis (PIC) due to mental illness. In response to the high rates of incarceration for persons with mental illness (PMI), a growing number of law enforcement agencies have adopted diversion strategies referred to as police-mental health collaboration (PMHC) models to divert PMI away from the criminal justice system and towards community mental health services. Despite nearly forty years of research, there are still considerable knowledge gaps regarding who benefits from PMHCs …

Master’S Students: Experiences, Transitions, And Needs In The College Of Education, Brandi L. Sanchez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative case study explores the experiences, transitions, and needs of first-year master’s students in education. Guided by Schlossberg’s Transition Model, the study examines how students perceive shifts in academic rigor, workload, and the increased self-direction required in graduate education. The case study used three data collection methods: semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and observations that provided insights into the student perception of master’s students studying education’s experience, transition, and needs. Additionally, this case study enabled exploration of the research questions across six types of master’s programs within the College of Education. By focusing on the first year of graduate study, …

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 …

Human First: How Journalists Employ Ethics Of Care And Empathy When Covering School Shootings, Grace M. Ficara

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

School shootings have become a regular part of the news media cycle in the 21st century. Now, more than ever, journalists are needing to find innovative, yet empathetic, ways to deal with such crises as they navigate their own professional boundaries. Using the Ethics of Care model, this research intends to showcase how journalists have, willingly or unwillingly, utilized an empathetic approach when covering school shootings and how they use these tools to comfort their sources and themselves. Through semi - structured interviews of 9 participants, this study seeks to connect the practice of journalism with the one thing journalists …

Mismatched Music And Meams: Short-Form Social Media Videos And Social Attitude Messaging, Kaitlyn M. Serafin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“If the formative power in the media are the media themselves, that raises a host of large matters” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 10). Famed communications theorist Marshall McLuhan stated this all the way back in the 60s to explain how technology can act as a formative force in the messaging of media. This is because the medium in which they communicate the messaging can act as its own force, shaping the message like clay. The dominant media at the time of this theory was television; however, in the past decade social media and short-form social media videos have become dominant forms …

Is There No Such Thing As Bad Pr? A Case Study Analysis Of Influencer Pseudo-Events, Authentic Crises, And Crises As Opportunity, And Paracrisis, Sofia Aparicio-Gallagher

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There's no such thing as bad PR, and any publicity is good publicity are phrases coined by 19th-century P.T. Barnum, a showman and businessman known for his circus hoaxes (Hiergesell, 2025). The idea implies that all media attention, whether negative or positive, is beneficial to the organization or individual. The purpose of this study is to evaluate three brands; Tarte, Poppi, and Shein during a brand event to determine whether it was a pseudo-event created to gain awareness, or a genuine, unplanned crisis. Another purpose of the study was to determine if the event was used as an opportunity for …

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 …

Examining The Effect Of Household Socioeconomic Status And Maternal Characteristics On Child Developmental Delay In The United States, Samuel Ilori

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Child developmental delay remains a pressing public health issue with lifelong implications. This study examines the association between household socioeconomic status, maternal characteristics, and child developmental delay using data from the 2023 National Survey of Children's Health (N = 35,399 female respondents). Bivariate analyses using Chi-square tests and binary logistic regression with sequential modeling were conducted. Results revealed that economic hardship, employment status, maternal mental health, maternal physical health, marital status, and race were significantly associated with child developmental delay (p<0.001). Educational level and poverty level showed no significant associations. Among mothers reporting poor mental health, 90.0% had a child with a delay, compared to 6.6% among those with good mental health. Every mother reporting poor physical health had a child with a delay, while virtually none with good or better physical health did. In the fully adjusted regression model, maternal mental and physical health remained the most powerful predictors, while economic hardship and employment status became non-significant once health was introduced, suggesting mediation. Maternal mental and physical health are the factors most strongly correlated with child developmental delay. Economic hardship matters primarily because it undermines maternal well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic likely intensified these dynamics by disrupting healthcare access and increasing economic instability. Supporting maternal health must be recognized as a fundamental strategy for promoting child development. Universal screening for maternal depression and physical health problems, integrated into pediatric and obstetric care, can identify at-risk mothers early. Policies that reduce economic hardship alleviate the chronic stress that undermines maternal health. Children thrive when their mothers are healthy.

Remotely Training Applied Behavior Analysis Practitioners To Conduct A Repeated Latency Functional Analysis, W. Daniel Oliver-Wong

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has established functional analyses (Iwata et al., 1982/1994) as valuable tools for ABA practitioners. Despite previous findings, behavior analysts often default to other methods when identifying the maintaining variables of problem behavior. Several studies have examined training methods and variations of traditional functional analyses to increase clinical applications. The Repeated Latency Functional Analysis (RLFA) is a newly developed adaptation to the functional analysis (Han et. al., 2023). This study used video modeling to train three ABA practitioners in RLFA procedures through online role-play scenarios. The findings suggested that online video modeling is a promising training modality for ABA …

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) …

The Emotional Construction Of Religious Experience: Senitmentalism And Moral Motivations, Yvonne Candelario

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper addresses the growing prevalence of reported religious experiences across diverse religious and spiritual traditions, alongside the persistent absence of such reports among many adherents within the same communities. This asymmetry poses a challenge for both supernaturalist and reductively skeptical accounts of religious experience. I develop a naturalistic constructivist framework to explain why some individuals choose to interpret and report some human experiences as religious experiences or report having religious experiences at all, while others do not. Drawing on a post-modern revision of moral theory, an account of constructive sentimentalism, I argue that religious experience is shaped by socially …

Understanding Math-Anxious Teachers' Stories Of Comfort, Competence, And Confidence With Learning And Teaching Mathematics, Deborah Peart Crayton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Math anxiety is a complex issue that affects students and teachers. It has been researched for decades, but the focus has often been on addressing math anxiety in students, while finding solutions to support elementary teachers experiencing math anxiety has been overlooked. This study fills a gap in existing research by shedding light on math anxiety in elementary education and highlighting ways to address it by leveraging existing structures that support professional development. This qualitative narrative inquiry explores the experiences of four elementary educators who identify as math-anxious and how they report that math anxiety impacts their confidence in teaching …

Everyone Works On The Sustainability Team: Power Structures And Brand Communication In Sustainable Consumption, Sofia Johansson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In response to growing concerns about the way in which consumption practices negatively degrade the environment and contribute to climate change, this thesis explores the role in which brands may counteract this. There are two significant issues pertaining to environmental marketing: (1) current efforts to promote green consumerism, through which consumer brands market products as “eco-friendly” with only marginal reductions in climate impact and misleading labels, are insufficient in mitigating climate change. (2) Additionally, this kind of consumption is unjust, whereby it is marked up in price, limiting access to merely individuals in higher income brackets. Given the insufficiencies of …

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 …

Framing The Pressure: Mental Health Representation In Olympic Athletes Through The Weight Of Gold, Daniel B. Gearin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines how the HBO documentary The Weight of Gold constructs meaning around athlete mental health through narrative and visual framing. Grounded in framing theory, the purpose of this research is to identify the key themes presented in the film and analyze how cinematic techniques shape audience understanding of mental health in Olympic athletes. The rationale for this study stems from a gap in existing research, as most scholarship focuses on psychological outcomes rather than how media representations construct those meanings. Using a qualitative approach, the study applies thematic analysis to 17 scenes of the documentary, supported by a …

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 …

Practitioner Ethics And Controversial Advertising: A Qualitative Study Of Moral Reasoning Across Product Categories, Teodora Florido Tavares De Souza

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Advertising professionals frequently face ethical challenges in their work, yet the ways they define, recognize, and address these dilemmas remain underexplored. This study examines how practitioners perceive and respond to ethical issues in their work, particularly when it comes to promoting products and services that raise significant public health concerns, such as alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. Drawing on Drumwright and Murphy’s (2004) concepts of Moral Myopia, Moral Muteness, and Moral Imagination, this research investigates how practitioners’ ethical awareness can be shaped by the nature of the product being advertised. Through interviews with industry professionals, the study examines how the ethical …

Growth Mindset And Practice Strategy In Expert Pianists, Yiling Li

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Growth mindset is often theorized to support persistence, strategic learning, and reflective regulation, yet little is known about whether growth mindset differentiates how expert pianists organize and evaluate their practice strategies. The purpose of this dissertation was to examine whether expert pianists’ growth mindset beliefs relate to multidimensional practice strategy effectiveness and usage and to metacognitive indicators of adaptive regulation, including strategy adaptability, self-monitoring effectiveness, confidence in strategy selection, and the illusion of fluency (feeling well prepared in practice yet underperforming in performance). Participants were 90 expert pianists (piano faculty members at North American universities classified as Research 1) who …

Exploring Graduate Nursing Students’ Learning Experiences, Perceived Cognitive Loads, And Attitudes Toward Immersive Virtual Reality (Ivr) In Clinical Training Environments, Pranam Parsanlal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Simulation-based education (SBE) is a widely used learning method in nursing education to develop clinical skills, while in recent years, immersive virtual reality (IVR) has become a sought-after SBE method. There is a significant need to understand how to support IVR integration. Previous research suggests exploring students’ perceptions and experiences toward IVR holistically and comprehensively to understand how to integrate IVR into nursing educational practices. This explanatory sequential mixed methods research study aimed to explore the learning experiences, perceived cognitive loads, and attitudes toward IVR of 11 graduate nursing students in an IVR clinical training environment. To explore perceptions, students …

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 …

Bridging The Intention-Implementation Divide In Generative Ai Adoption: An Integrated Model Of Psychological, Behavioral And Social Drivers, Mohamed Walid Mohamed Lotfy Abdallah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the gap between professionals’ intentions to use Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their actual adoption behavior in workplace settings. Although Generative AI offers substantial potential to improve efficiency and performance, concerns about control, misuse and organizational risk have led to inconsistencies between intended and enacted use. Motivated by this misalignment, the study investigates the psychological, behavioral and social mechanisms that shape the intention-implementation divide. Drawing on an integrated framework combining the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Technology Acceptance Model, alongside personality traits, the research conceptualizes adoption as a phase-specific process involving evaluative, motivational and volitional components. …

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 …