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The Memphis Gambling Screen: A Clinical Validation Study Of An Enhanced-Readability Self-Report Measure For Gambling Disorder, Natasha Bourgoin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Precise identification of gambling disorder can be difficult when commonly used screeners vary in clarity and diagnostic accuracy. The Memphis Gambling Screen (MGS) was developed as an enhanced-readability self-report measure to improve item comprehension and strengthen the diagnostic accuracy of DSM-5 gambling disorder. This study evaluates the psychometric properties and diagnostic accuracy of the MGS with a combined sample of individuals seeking treatment for problem gambling or substance use disorder and college students with a recent history of gambling (N = 232). Participants completed a demographic questionnaire, the MGS, and another commonly used measure, the Problem Gambling Severity Index …

Race, Sex, And Age Disparities In Homicide Clearance Rates In Tennessee: An Intersectional Approach, Teliyah Cobb

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Demographic factors can influence homicide solvability. This study examines the relationship between victim characteristics and homicide clearance rates in Tennessee from 2001 to 2023. Using an intersectional approach, it assesses whether victim characteristics both individually and in combination are related to case solvability. Variables of interest include: (1) victim race, age range, and sex; (2) year the case was reported; (3) crime type; (4) whether the case was cleared; and (5) the circumstances leading to clearance. A total of 11,534 homicide cases from the Tennessee Incident-Based Reporting System were analyzed.

Findings indicate that individual victim characteristics do not significantly predict …

Staying The Course: Community College Student Lived Experiences On Program Completion And Motivation, Jessica Leigh Mills

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of former community college students who successfully completed an associate degree, certificate, or program of study and to understand how they experienced the personal, institutional, and environmental factors that supported their persistence to completion. The study, guided primarily by Tinto’s (1975,1988) Model of Student Departure and was complemented by Bandura’s (1988) Social Learning Theory (SLT), and Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of Needs, explored the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations students attributed to their successful completion of their associate degree, certificate, or program of study. Twelve former community college students who …

Teacher Autonomy In Accountability-Driven Contexts: A Phenomenological Study Of Middle School Mathematics Teachers In East Tennessee, Hollyann Perdue

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore East Tennessee middle school mathematics teachers’ experiences of professional autonomy and how those experiences relate to institutional decision making within the accountability-driven educational environment. This study utilized the Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2017) as a framework to examine how teachers perceived their ability to make instructional decisions while navigating district expectations, pacing requirements, mandated curriculum, and state testing pressures. Data were collected through one-on-one semi-structured Zoom interviews with 12 East Tennessee middle school mathematics teachers representing varying levels of teaching experience, effectiveness ratings, and instructional settings, including both general …

Weathering More Than Storms: Understanding The Mental Health Disparities Of Black Farmers In The Appalachian Region, Aliyah Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Black farmers in Appalachia represent a vital and historically marginalized population within one of America’s most economically distressed regions. Black farmers have endured generations of systemic racism, resulting in land loss, economic hardship, and mental stressors. This study examines the intersection of race, agriculture, and behavioral health to illustrate how structural barriers and cultural stigmas shape the mental well-being of Black farmers across Appalachia.

Findings from the analysis will guide the development of a conceptual model based on constructs from the Social-Ecological Model (SEM), Intersectionality Theory, and Critical Race Theory (CRT). This study will use Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) conducted …

Wisdom In Counseling And Psychotherapy: A Conceptual Model For Practice, Mitchell Waters

Papers

Wisdom is increasingly recognized as a critical construct in counseling and psychotherapy, yet it remains conceptually diffuse and underdeveloped for clinical application. This article proposes an integrative conceptual model of wisdom that extends the Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) WISE MIND framework by incorporating temporal and self-transcendent dimensions. Wisdom is defined as a dynamic, context-sensitive capacity to coordinate cognitive, affective, temporal, and spiritual processes in response to complex life demands. The model includes four components: (a) cognitive–affective integration, reflecting the synthesis of emotion and reason; (b) temporal integration, involving adaptive coordination of past experiences and future possibilities; (c) self-transcendent orientation, conceptualized …

A Mindfulness-Based Stop Technique Training To Improve Nurses’ Knowledge And Self-Efficacy In Stress And Burnout Prevention, Rukiat Abolanle Afinni

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Nurse burnout and stress are well-documented occupational concerns in outpatient clinical settings, where high patient acuity and chronic staffing shortages leave nurses with little structured support for proactive self-care. To address this gap, a mindfulness-based STOP (stop, take a breath, observe, proceed) training program was developed and evaluated for outpatient nurses. The evidence-based practice question was: Among nurses in an outpatient clinical setting, what is the impact of a mindfulness-based STOP technique training on nurses' knowledge of stress and burnout prevention and self-efficacy in applying the technique? A one-group pretest-posttest design was used with eight participants. A project-developed questionnaire measured …

Remotely Assessing Foundational Skills Of 5–14-Year-Old Children: A Six-Country Psychometric Evaluation Of The Remote Assessment Of Learning (Real), Elizabeth Hentschel, Sascha Hein, Nan Li, Clay Westrope, Julia Taladay, Gillian Valentine, James Leckman, Amira Abdurahman, Fatime Bachir, Farah Darwazeh

Psychological Science Faculty Publications

Approximately 250 million children worldwide are out of school. There is growing consensus for investing in feasible, contextually appropriate, psychometrically tested, remote tools to support quality education in low-resource contexts, including low- and middle-income countries and crisis-affected contexts. Save the Children developed the Remote Assessment of Learning (ReAL) to assess 5–14-year-old children's foundational learning. Children (N = 4,840) were sampled from Cambodia, Mozambique, Niger, the occupied Palestinian territories, the Philippines, and Sudan, with an approximately equal proportion of male and female children within each country. The study assessed inter-rater reliability, factor structure, item slope and difficulty, criterion validity, …

Comparing Online Versus In-Person Administration Of Cognitive Tasks And Evaluating Their Predictive Utility Of Inattention Symptoms And Related Behaviors, Cameron Pothoven

Master's Theses

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with less developed working memory (WM) processes, theorized to be a core contributing factor in the development of ADHD and a predictor of ADHD symptom severity (Alderson et al., 2013; Rapport et al., 2008). Objective measures inclusive of working memory tasks, when used in conjunction with self-report measures, have been previously shown to increase the accuracy of diagnosing ADHD (Marshal et al., 2021. However, given that WM is typically assessed by a trained clinician, it is unclear how accurate and comparable online administration of adapted WM tasks are to their in-person counterparts. …

2026-2027 Lindenwood University Graduate Course Catalog, Lindenwood University

Course Catalogs

Lindenwood University Graduate Course Catalog

2026-2027 Lindenwood University Undergraduate Course Catalog, Lindenwood University

Course Catalogs

Lindenwood University Undergraduate Course Catalog

Content Appeals And Messaging Used By Tik Tok Influencers Promoting Peptides, Hannah R. Gunter, Jack Dominick, Allison Komosa, Alexis Zeidner, Aida Calo, Richard M. Perloff

Student Scholarship

Peptides, small protein-like molecules that regulate important body functions, have exploded in popularity, in large part due to persuasive appeals on social media and a plethora of online promotions by social media influencers. However, there is large gray market of unregulated peptides that have serious side effects. This timely content analysis thoroughly examines how peptides are promoted on TikTok by prominent and popular male and female influencers. The study sheds light on the strategies influencers employ, and the disturbing fact that a small minority of messages mention side effects that users may confront or other adverse consequences of these supposedly-miracle …

Cultural Values, Norms, And Mental Health Service Utilization Among Young Adult Guyanese Immigrants, Rhonis Alfred

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Young adult Guyanese immigrants living in the United States often face cultural, familial, and social challenges that influence their perceptions of mental health and willingness to seek professional support. Despite growing attention to immigrant mental health, limited research has explored the experiences of this population. This qualitative study aimed to improve understanding of how cultural values, family dynamics, and acculturation stress influence mental health perceptions and help-seeking behaviors. The theoretical framework underpinning this study was acculturation theory. The research explored how participants navigated cultural identity, family expectations, and adaptation to life in the United States. A purposive sampling strategy was …

The Comfort Cart Initiative: A Quality Improvement Intervention To Improve Patient Satisfaction In The Emergency Department, Heidy Cladimir Ayala

Doctor of Nursing Practice Final Project Abstract

The Comfort Cart Initiative: A Quality Improvement Intervention to Improve Patient Satisfaction in the Emergency Department

Purpose

The Comfort Cart QI project aimed to improve Emergency Department patient, parent, and guardian satisfaction by 10% over an 8-week implementation period.

Background

In healthcare, patient satisfaction is an important indicator of the quality of care provided, and many literature reviews suggest it is closely associated with patient-centered care.

 Methodology

The Comfort Cart intervention is an evidence-based quality improvement project employing a pre- and post-intervention design, conducted over an 8-week period, in the Emergency Department. The project was guided by Kolcaba's Comfort Theory …

Flipping The Script: An Osint-Driven Framework For Smb Cyber Resilience, James A. Herrick

All Student Scholarship

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are critical economic drivers, yet they remain prime targets for cyber-attacks. Frequently operating under constraints involving financial resources, personnel, technical expertise, and time, SMBs have difficulty recognizing cybersecurity as a business risk warranting the expenditure of resources. Traditional cybersecurity consulting approaches meet with organizational resistance and fail to gain acceptance due to the SMB’s general underestimation of their own risk. This paper introduces a novel structured, repeatable framework designed to introduce a fresh mindset to conventional consulting. It repurposes Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) reconnaissance - a toolset typically used by adversaries - for a constructive, empathetic …

Co-Creating The Garden With The Soil, Water, Plants, And Bees: Unsettling Gardening With A Different Axiology And Epistemology, Kathleen Cameron

Social Justice and Community Engagement Major Research Papers

No abstract provided.

Neoliberalism And The Crisis Of Hope: How Capitalist Culture Constrains The Aspirations Of Low-Income And Racialized Youth In Canada, Andrew Okingo

Social Justice and Community Engagement Major Research Papers

This Major Research Paper examines how neoliberalism shapes the aspirations, self-perceptions and imagined futures of low-income and racialized youth in Canada. Drawing on Critical Political Economy, Postcolonial Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Intersectionality, the study uses a qualitative semi-systematic literature review and an autoethnographic lens to critically examine how neoliberal ideologies influence young people’s experiences. The findings suggest that neoliberalism not only produces material conditions of economic and social precarity but also individualizes structural inequality, encouraging youth to interpret systemic barriers as personal failures. These processes can constrain aspirations and contribute to an erosion of hope when pathways toward desired …

An Expectancy-Based Theory Of The Firm: How Media Tone And Ceo–Media Political Ideological Alignment Shape Corporate Investment, Ondina Sevilla

All Dissertations

This study examines how ideologically differentiated media tone in business and economic news relates to firm investment decisions and how CEO–media ideological alignment conditions this relationship. I advance an expectancy-based extension of the Behavioral Theory of the Firm in which media tone serves as an external informational signal that is interpreted through managerial cognition rather than directly influencing firm behavior. CEO political ideology shapes how media signals are interpreted and incorporated into managerial expectancies regarding future conditions.

To test these arguments, I construct firm-quarter measures of positive and negative media tone from business and economic news articles, disaggregated by outlet …

Toward A Conceptual And Methodological Understanding Of Supervisor Gaslighting In The Workplace, Gabriela Peschiera

All Dissertations

The term ‘gaslight’ has infiltrated popular media, with articles, TV shows, and podcasts dedicated to identifying gaslighting behaviors and mitigating its effects. Despite the term’s popularity, much of the existing literature solely focuses on gaslighting in intimate partner relationships, medical settings, and political campaigns. As a result, little is known about how it operates in the workplace context and whether it is distinct from other well-established workplace mistreatment constructs. In this dissertation, I explored the mechanisms of supervisor gaslighting by developing a scale and testing its distinctiveness from other workplace mistreatment and positive workplace behaviors. While two scales were recently …

Human-Centered Design Of Extended Reality For Learning Adoption, Effectiveness, And Collaborative Training Performance, Bhargav Upadhyay

All Dissertations

Extended reality (XR) technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can be used for technical training to help students learn and practice complex tasks in a safe digital environment. Despite known benefits evidence is required to explore the effectiveness of these technologies to support student learning outcomes. Furthermore, technical training programs need evidence about when these tools improve learning, what are the barriers to adoption of these technologies, and how training should be designed by leveraging these technologies. This dissertation examined how XR technologies can support higher education and workforce training, specifically focusing on barriers and facilitators to …

Beyond Going Green: A Multilevel Examination Of Sustainability Climate Formation, Meredith Pool

All Dissertations

Going green at the organizational level does not automatically produce a shared sustainability climate among employees. How individual perceptions of organizational sustainability support form, and under what signal conditions they converge, has been theorized but rarely tested experimentally. The present study examined these questions using a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial vignette experiment (N = 332) with full-time employed adults, manipulating organizational sustainability signal strength (strong vs. weak), team-level sustainability signal strength (strong vs. weak), and team functional context (operations vs. analytics). Two large main effects emerged. Organizational signal strength produced a large effect on Perceived Organizational Sustainability …

A Socio-Cognitive Process Theory Of Error Response: Evidence From Shot Selection In Basketball, Jordan Britt

All Dissertations

Errors in organizational research have traditionally been conceptualized as static, preventable outcomes as opposed to dynamic events embedded within changing social environments. This dissertation reframes this by conceptualizing post-error response as an ongoing identity-regulation process. Drawing from self-presentation theory and identity control theory (ICT), it was hypothesized that an error’s deviation from expectation and its social context (self, teammate, or opponent error) influence post-error caution. These results were hypothesized to be greater when audience salience and situational importance were higher. Using play-by-play shot selection data from the 2023-2025 NCAA Division I basketball seasons as a natural testing environment, this study …

Can Kinematics Specify Tool Use Affordances?, Tyler Duffrin

All Dissertations

Object properties such as length, shape, and heaviness, as well as affordance-based properties such as strike-with-ability and poke-with-ability, can be perceived via dynamic touch as functions of inertia tensor invariants. The primary question addressed here was whether people can perceive these same power and precision properties for purely virtual objects, which lack dynamic physical forces. The Kinematic Specification of Dynamics (KSD) principle asserts that missing dynamics are lawfully specified by kinematic (visual) motion patterns, such that kinematic information alone may support successful interactions with virtual objects. In three experiments, we investigated (1) whether virtual reality (VR) users could calibrate to …

Global Prevalence Of Depression Among University Students: A Comprehensive Umbrella Review, Gilda Yun Kai Sam, Xun Ci Soh, Harshitha Balaji, Gabriel X. D. Tan, Shu Fen Diong, Meilan Hu, Andree Hartanto, Nadyanna M. Majeed

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Depression has become a major concern for educational institutes due to its increasing incidence and detrimental impacts on students’ well-being. However, its global prevalence in the context of tertiary education remains unclear. This umbrella review summarised existing meta-analyses and systematic reviews to examine the worldwide prevalence of depression among university students. Several sociodemographic and methodological factors, including differences in depression prevalence before, during, and after COVID-19, were examined as moderators. Structured and exhaustive searches were conducted in five bibliographic databases and five journals, alongside two sources of grey literature. A total of 61 meta-analyses and systematic reviews were included in …

August 2026 News Releases, University Of Montana--Missoula. Office Of University Relations

University of Montana News Releases, 1928, 1956-present

No abstract provided.

Helicopter Pilots’ Safety Behaviors: Identifying Factors That Affect Risk Perception Among Helicopter Pilots, Khaled J. Alzaabi

Theses and Dissertations

Helicopter operations frequently take place in complex, high-risk environments, where pilots continuously assess hazards and make critical decisions under pressure. Despite standardized procedures, regulations, and training designed to enhance safe operations, helicopter pilots may perceive risk differently when encountering similar flight situations. Understanding the factors that influence helicopter pilots’ perception of risk is essential for improving helicopter operation safety.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of various factors on risk perception among helicopter pilots. Using an explanatory correlational design, the study assessed whether helicopter pilots’ demographics, flight experience, and affective domain factors explain differences in their …

Color-Coding: An Aid Or Hindrance In A Multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Supervisory Control Task, Austin Daniel Wood

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effect of coding types (i.e., alphanumeric coding, color-coding, and redundant color + alphanumeric coding) for vehicle identification and status information on pilots’ recognition performance, situational awareness (SA), and workload for a multi-vehicle operations ground control station (GCS) supervisory control task. With the aviation industry's push towards operators supervising and controlling multiple vehicles, it is pertinent to identify design features that support the capabilities and limitations of human operators. The current study employed a within-subjects, repeated-measures experimental design, in which a sample of 33 students with aviation experience performed three trials, …

Novice Teachers' Effective Use Of Progress Monitoring To Improve Student Outcomes, Melanie Williams

All Dissertations

Novice teachers, those with five years or less of classroom experience, are often burdened with keeping up with constant reform and challenges, while under constant pressure to improve student outcomes. This dissertation in practice aimed to address this burden by reducing the number of students receiving Tier 3 intervention, the highest level of intervention before a special education referral.

Grounded in the theory of improvement, the intervention provided teachers with one day a month of professional development and dedicated time to focus on collaboration of Tier 2 progress monitoring data analysis. Tier 2 interventions focus on reteaching and extending state …

Who Gets To Belong: Using A Tier Two Intervention To Increase Student Sense Of Belonging And Supportive Student-Teacher Relationships, Kevin L. Smith

All Dissertations

Students do better in school when they feel like they belong and have positive relationships with their teachers. This study examined whether dialogue circles as a Tier 2 intervention could help students feel more connected to their teachers and school. The study took place in a small, rural, Title I middle school. Although the intervention did not lead to clear improvements in grades, attendance, or discipline, it did achieve its aim of having at least 80% of pre and post survey respondents report having at least one adult who helped them feel a sense of belonging at school. Furthermore, students …

Unlocking The Behavior Code: How Function-Based Behavior Skills Coaching Empowers Teachers And Reduces Tier Iii Referrals In Mtss, Erin C. Smith-Harrah

All Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of behavior skills coaching on the percentage of students receiving Tier 3 intervention at an elementary school in South Carolina using a Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) framework. The research site for this study has experienced a significant increase in students referred for and receiving Tier 3 instruction. Whereas Tier 3 instruction typically accounts for 5% of a student population, data indicate that the percentage of students who received Tier 3 instruction at the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year at this campus was 39%, with 14% identified as students …