Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Nothing To Do But Be Borne And Steered”: Unpacking Feminist Scripts In Elana Arnold’S Damsel, Jenna Spiering, Nicole Ann Amato

Faculty Publications

Feminism in novels marketed for young adults often reflects the values of a popular feminism that relies on individual and personal means of empowerment, rather than critiquing or seeking to dismantle systems of domination. In this paper, we illumminate frameworks and methods for engaging students in careful readings and evaluations of texts marketed as feminist, through an analysis of Elana Arnold’s feminist fairy tale, Damsel (2018). Drawing on theoretical frameworks of popular feminism, feral feminism, and theories of becoming, the authors use Critical Content Anlaysis to explore several tenets in contemporary feminist thought in order to analyze Arnold’s text and …

Impact Of The Resident Mentor Role On Student Worker Mental Health, Lauren Cartwright

Senior Theses

What do stress and burnout look like for RMs at a flagship university in the southeast during the early Covid-19 epidemic? How would the average student worker rate the RM role in terms of satisfaction, recommending the role to others, and weekly workload?

To answer these questions, I surveyed 51 Resident Mentors (RM) at the University of South Carolina (UofSC) in Spring, 2021 to gather information on their general backgrounds, workload, and overall satisfaction with the RM role. Results generally showed high workloads and stress levels. I argue that these findings may be reflective of role ambiguity and changes in …

Examining The Effects Of A Well-Being Therapy Protocol On Sexual Minority Individuals’ Psychological Well-Being, Thomas M. Toomey

Theses and Dissertations

Sexual minority individuals are at higher risk of mental health concerns than heterosexual individuals due to the impacts of minority stress. Previous counseling interventions for sexual minority individuals have focused on pathology and reducing negative symptoms. However, there is a need for more empirical counseling interventions that address these disparities from a positive psychology perspective. Utilizing a multiple baseline single case research design, the current study examined the impact of a wellbeing therapy protocol for improving the psychological well-being and decreasing depressive symptoms for three sexual minority individuals. There was no functional relationship observed for the Well-Being Therapy protocol on …

Unrestricted Factor Analysis: A Powerful Alternative To Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp, Alberto Maydeu-Olivares

Faculty Publications

The gold standard for modeling multiple indicator measurement data is confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), which has many statistical advantages over traditional exploratory factor analysis (EFA). In most CFA applications, items are assumed to be pure indicators of the construct they intend to measure. However, despite our best efforts, this is often not the case. Cross-loadings incorrectly set to zero can only be expressed through the correlations between the factors, leading to biased factor correlations and to biased structural (regression) parameter estimates. This article introduces a third approach, which has emerged in the psychometric literature, viz., unrestricted factor analysis (UFA). UFA …

Women In Stem Fellowship: An Intersectional And Interdisciplinary Approach To Advancing Inclusion In The Sciences, Ina C. Seethaler, Gabriela Perez-Alvarado

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

At our university, women-identified individuals make up 23% of students in STEM fields; less than 15% of them graduate with a STEM degree. Nationally, more than 40% of women who enter a STEM job leave it within fewer than ten years. Gendered issues within STEM industries have been identified, yet we are far from equal opportunities for all genders. In 2018, we—the director of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) with colleagues in Math, Computing Sciences, and Chemistry—received a $45,000 grant to create a “Women in STEM Fellowship.” The inclusion of WGS made the fellowship interdisciplinary, intersectional, and informed our decision-making …