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Prospective Students
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Alumni and Friends
The effects of safe sex practice education on knowledge and attitudes among college students. (Under the direction of DR. KATHLEEN JORDAN)
Introduction: Sexual health education is crucial in reducing the burden of STIs among young adults. Comprehensive sexuality education can lead to positive risk reduction outcomes, such as delayed initiation of sex, a decreased number of sexual partners and frequency of sex, and increased use of contraceptives. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational program focused on sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and safe sex practices among college students who are Greek life members. The intervention aimed to enhance the knowledge and attitudes of these students regarding sexual health and promote healthier sexual behaviors. This project is significant as it endeavors to fill the gap in existing literature concerning the effectiveness of sexual health education in college populations who are at heightened risk for STIs.
Design/Methods: The study utilized a pre-post intervention quantitative design. A convenience sample of 23 sorority and fraternity members aged 18-24 participated in the study. The intervention included an educational session focusing on aspects of sexual health, including transmission, screening, prevention of STIs, as well as safe sex practices. Participants were surveyed before and after the educational intervention using the STD Knowledge Questionnaire (STD-KQ).
Results: Of the 55 Greek life members who completed the pre-test, 23 completed the post-test. A paired-sample t-test showed that there was a statistically significant difference in STD-KQ scores pre- and post-intervention, t(22) = 4.51, p < .001, 95%CI [3.36, 9.08]. The average STD-KQ scores significantly increased from 8.65 ± 5.69 pre-intervention to 14.87 ± 5.69 post-intervention, indicating a significant improvement in STI knowledge and attitudes among the participants after the educational program. Additionally, most respondents reported an increased likelihood of using condoms during sexual activity post-intervention. Additionally, the respondents also reported an increased awareness of STDs and safe sex practices.
Discussion:
The findings highlighted the positive impact of targeted sexual health education in a university setting, especially within the Greek life community. These results underscored the need for universities and health educators to prioritize and integrate sexual health education within the curriculum. Lastly, the study also supports adopting a structured, informative approach to improve students’ awareness and practices regarding STI prevention.
Human Capital Theory has been widely used in academic research to explain the factors that affect career attainment and job promotion potential. According to this theory, investing in human capital can improve career prospects. While previous studies have focused on human and social capital to explain leadership growth within organizations, this research takes a new approach by analyzing telecommuting and how psychosocial support, human capital, and social capital influence employees’ perception of career advancement. In this study, psychosocial support refers to trust, emotional support, and building strong social networks. Education and skills represent human capital, while network ties foster a diverse social level of sponsorship for social capital. All three variables played a role in moderating the relationships between gender, work type, and race as a catalyst for career attainment.
The survey results predicted that women who work from home receive more human capital, which strengthens their career advancement opportunities. Additionally, the results imply that people of color face barriers in achieving career advancement, indicating the presence of a glass ceiling. Career-related support, race, and work type significantly predicted career attainment. These effects provide insights into the dynamics of reaching top management positions within the finance industry.
This dissertation is primarily concerned with the subsystem problem for subshifts of finite type (SFTs) on countable amenable groups. Firstly, we demonstrate that an SFT with positive entropy exhibits a ubiquity of subsystems. We prove that for any countable amenable group G, if X is a G-SFT with positive topological entropy h(X) > 0 and Y ⊂ X is a subshift such that h(Y) < h(X), then the entropies of the SFTs Z which satisfy Y ⊂ Z ⊂ X are dense in the interval [h(Y), h(X)]. Secondly, we present an embedding theorem which provides conditions under which a given subshift may be realized as a subsystem of a given SFT. Let G be a countable amenable group with the comparison property. Let X be a strongly aperiodic subshift over G. Let Y be a strongly irreducible shift of finite type over G which has no global period, meaning that the shift action is faithful on Y. If h(X) < h(Y) and Y contains at least one factor of X, then X embeds into Y. Our proofs rely on recent developments in the theory of tilings and quasi-tilings of amenable groups.
Advances in behavioral genetics provide a game-changing paradigm shift in the development of an accurate framework for a more precise marketing segmentation strategy. Genetics can explain most of the systematic variation between individuals, continuity of behavioral and personality traits, as well as 50% of the variance in human traits. Leveraging that all human behaviors are influenced in some way by the individual’s genetic constitution, a theoretical framework is presented for the definition of a new segmentation base called “Genomics Segmentation”. Moreover, we empirically showed the applicability of the new Genomics Segmentation through a K-mean clustering analysis of the alcohol consumption market using 7 different polygenic scores related to personality and cognitive traits. This study increases the predictive power of consumer behavior and marketing segmentation leveraging molecular genetics and 150 years of behavioral genetics replicable findings. It presents for the first time fundamental principles from behavioral genetics to lay the ground for genomics marketing and the transformation of segmentation strategies. It proposes the segmentation of markets through the genetic propensity of consumers. It not only highlights embryonic research in genomics marketing but also shows the practical application of genomics segmentation through the usage of molecular genetics to create clusters and understand consumption patterns of each subset.
Recent scholarly attention has turned towards evaluations of harmful or “dark” leadership traits and behaviors. However, prevailing literature on destructive leaders primarily delves into leader-centric evaluations of traits, antecedents, and consequences, leaving a significant gap in understanding follower-driven perspectives on evaluations of destructive leaders. This study advocates for a second-order meta-analysis (SOMA) to scrutinize the interplay between evaluations of destructive leaders, the nomological network of concepts surrounding such evaluations, and the relative importance of potential predictors of such evaluations. While primary meta-analytic inquiries abound in the field, their findings sometimes present conflicting results, necessitating a secondary meta-analytic exploration encompassing diverse variables, including follower traits and various manifestations of destructive leadership. This dissertation takes stock of the limitations and opportunities in the extant literature. It presents a roadmap for a cleaned-up concept space, which will allow more robust future research by systematically searching through 256 articles and retaining 30 articles for the initial inclusion before additional searches to fill the remaining SOMA effect size estimates in the correlates in matrices for follower and leader individual differences, leadership construct correlates, and potential outcomes of DLB. Although I successfully coded over 37 follower differences, 68 DLB outcomes, and five destructive leadership constructs as correlates, many missing correlates were primarily tied to outcome relationships, demographics, and personality measures. These missing correlates were initially substantial, with over 70% of the meta-analytic correlation matrices bank. Moreover, the selection process prioritized meta-analytic estimates with the largest sample sizes to mitigate random sampling errors, resulting in comprehensive matrices comprising 182 meta-analytic estimates (total k = 10,818 & total sample size (n) = 2,384,935) not including any Metabus.org derived meta-analytic estimates. Some key statistically significant results include a robust model using eleven follower individual differences (i.e., gender, age, race, five-factor personality traits, positive affect, narcissism, trait anger) with R2 = 0.239 and all incremental correlate additions measured by Change in R Squared with p < 0.05 for all predictor additions excluding age and gender variables. Also, the relative weights and regression coefficients supported these findings. Emotional Stability emerged as a dominant predictor across the personality and demographic traits for followers at RW% = 0.46 with a coefficient β = - 0.652, p < 0.001. Additionally, Trait Anger yielded RW% = 0.23 with a coefficient β = - 0.514, p < 0.001. Additionally, this study suggests the most robust leadership construct relationships to destructive leadership, ethical leadership with ρ = - 0.63 (k = 2; n = 8,186), and unethical leadership ρ = 0.58 (k = 3, n = 2,702).
Research has demonstrated the prevalence and cumulative nature of trauma and its lifelong adverse effects on physical, cognitive, emotional, and social wellness (Felitti et al., 1998; Merrick et al., 2019). Thus, counselor educators must prepare their students to work with clients with trauma effectively and ethically. A single study investigated trauma education and found that not all programs offer a trauma course (Montague et al., 2020). Thus, the CACREP (2015) trauma standards may be infused into other courses. The purpose of this study was to explore how trauma history, attitudes related to trauma-informed care, and prior trauma training were related to the infusion of trauma education into non-trauma-specific core courses by counselor educators working full-time for CACREP-accredited programs. It also investigated to what degree the trauma standards were infused. Multiple regression was used to analyze the data collected from 261 participants. Results indicated that moderate and substantial training were positive significant predictors of the degree of infusion (p <.001). The variables accounted for 14.1% of the variance. Although most counselor educators (91%) reported infusing the trauma standards into core courses, the standards were not infused equally. Results highlighted a high incidence of ACEs among counselor educators, with 62% reporting two or more and 33% four or more. Implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research are discussed.
Millions of survivors are living following treatment of breast cancer. Survivors commonly experience cancer-related cognitive impairment (CRCI), which is associated with decreased quality of life. Occupational therapists (OT) assess and treat CRCI, yet are under-utilized. A barrier to utilization may be related to clinicians’ lack of education related to OT for CRCI. This project compared clinicians’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes regarding the use of OT for CRCI and the number of referrals to OT before and after an educational intervention.
A pre-test and post-test comparative exploratory design using a 17-item survey was used. Session content included interventions for CRCI focused on OT, and logistical information needed to support OT referrals. OT referral rates were extracted from the electronic medical record. The sample was a convenience sample of 9 clinicians from a suburban oncology clinic.
Significant differences were noted between pre- and post-survey scores in 7 of 8 slider scale items. Clinicians reported greater frequency in assessing for CRCI, comfort in assessing and suggesting interventions for CRCI and knowledge about OT following the educational intervention. More providers identified OT as an intervention for CRCI and fewer clinicians were unaware of available interventions for CRCI. The number of OT referrals for CRCI significantly increased in the post-intervention period.
This pilot study demonstrates the feasibility of an educational intervention to improve knowledge, skills, and attitudes of clinicians who care for breast cancer survivors with CRCI. Increase in OT referrals suggests that education led to increased awareness and management of CRCI, which may improve quality of life among breast cancer survivors. This intervention has potential to be broadly replicated, positively impacting oncology clinicians and their patients experiencing CRCI.
Financial stress has received meager attention in organizational science research. So far, financial stress research uses inconsistent or nonexistent definitions, and an array of terms, to describe what appears to be the same overarching construct, which limits practical and theoretical applications of financial stress. I address this definitional ambiguity by reviewing existing work and using qualitative interview data to inductively study workers’ financial stress experiences. The findings allow me to develop a comprehensive definition of financial stress, shed light on how individuals come to experience and address financial stress, and describe to whom individuals compare themselves when evaluating their financial status. Findings include several applied and theoretical contributions, which are indicative of an array of future research opportunities.
Tornadoes are among the most destructive natural disasters, posing significant risks to communities and infrastructure, underlining the need for robust methodologies to assess building vulnerability and enhance structural resilience. This research addresses the gap in current tornado vulnerability studies by investigating the impact of material deterioration on building fragility, focusing on commercial buildings at the end of their useful life. The overarching goal is to comprehensively quantify the effects of material deterioration on tornado vulnerability, including its implications for EF-scale ranking and associated wind-speed thresholds for Degree of Damage (DOD) classifications.
The research develops predictive models to forecast deterioration trends for various building components. Focusing on deterioration rates for poorly maintained buildings at the end of their useful life and using probabilistic modeling approaches, the research develops time-dependent deterioration fragility curves to quantify the changing vulnerability of materials used in commercial buildings.
The results reveal decreased wind speed thresholds for EF-scale ranking, indicating notable changes in tornado-induced damage potential due to material deterioration. Additionally, changes in EF-scale ranking and DOD wind speed thresholds underscore the probable inadequacy of existing evaluation protocols that do not account for material deterioration. This research enhances resilience and promotes sustainable development in tornado-prone regions by illuminating the dynamic nature of tornado vulnerability.
The National Healthcare Quality and Disparities report in 2022 revealed that almost a quarter of children ages 3-17 in the United States have a mental health related disorder. Because of this, well-equipped child therapists are needed to carry out the responsibility of providing services to support this population. However, several systematic reviews have noted the prevalence of burnout among child therapists, possibly hindering quality care (Acker, 2010; Simionato & Simpson, 2018). Because of this, investigators have sought to understand burnout and its effect on child therapists. Many have noted the risks of professional burnout (Adams et al. 2006; Chen et al. 2019; Paris et al. 2010; Sanchez-Moreno et al., 2015), however there is limited research specific to burnout among child therapists. This study examined how self-efficacy, workload, and parent engagement interrelate with burnout among child therapists. A multiple regression analysis was employed to investigate the influence of self-efficacy, workload, and parent engagement as predictors of child therapist burnout (N=537). The findings indicated that the predictor variables significantly explained 63% of the overall variance. In addition, this study revealed that self-efficacy served as a moderator for parent engagement and workload; and parent engagement and burnout. Additionally, average or high self-efficacy moderated the connection between workload and burnout; and parent engagement, workload, and burnout. Lastly, considerations, implications, and recommendations for future research are reviewed.
