Nurses have been on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic and experienced direct impacts over the last few years. Many encountered additional stressors of isolation from loved ones and the challenges of parenting school-age children. Additionally, due to the recent and significant departure of nurses from bedside nursing, there has been greater need for remaining nurses to precept new staff coming into the hospital. Some nurses assumed a preceptor role in addition to their direct care responsibilities. It has been reported that combined home and work-life burdens put nurses at higher risk of burnout, resulting in poor health outcomes and increased depression, anxiety, and stress. Mindfulness meditation is an evidenced-based tool to help acknowledge surroundings and to help to lower or decrease perceived stress. A randomized controlled design with a two-group pretest-posttest was used to evaluate the impact of a mindfulness smartphone application on the perceived levels of burnout, stress, anxiety, depression, and mindfulness of nurses. After taking a pretest, participants were randomized to either a waitlist control group or an intervention smartphone group. The waitlist group did not have any intervention during the 30 -day study period. The intervention group was asked to complete sessions via a smartphone mindfulness app for 30 days. The instruments used in this study were the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale 21 questions (DASS-21), Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), and the Mobile Device Proficiency Questionnaire 16 questions (MDPQ-16). This dissertation includes three reports based on the same dataset. The first report analyzed the effects of a smartphone mindfulness application on burnout in nurse preceptors. Results of the study indicated that a smartphone application can reduce burnout in the subscales of Personal Accomplishment and Depersonalization but not in Emotional Exhaustion. The second report examined the impact of a smartphone mindfulness application on scores of depression, anxiety, and stress of nurses. The study results indicated a significant improvement in the smartphone application group compared to the waitlist group for the variables of depression and stress. The third report evaluated the impact of the smartphone mindfulness application on the mindfulness levels of participants and the relationship between their technology proficiency to their interaction with the application. The smartphone group's mindfulness scores increased significantly compared to the waitlist group. However, mobile proficiency was not significantly related to the participants’ use of the mindfulness application. The findings of this study indicate that the use of a smartphone application can effectively increase mindfulness when used by nurses at the bedside. The smartphone mindfulness app also showed potential benefits in reducing self-perceived levels of several aspects of burnout, depression, and stress in nurses. Hospitals could choose to embed mindfulness principles into the hospital environment's culture or provide staff opportunities to practice mindfulness through a smartphone application during the day. Such mindfulness may decrease the consequences of burnout, which include increased nurse turnover, decreased quality of care, and high costs of recruiting and training new nurses. Further research is needed to study the long-term impact of using the smartphone application and the time required daily to show results

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic found a fertile ground for the spread of online misinformation, with emphasis on social media. Avoiding misinformation spread requires rapid, engaging, and effective science communication in a clear, easy-to-understand, attractive, and entertaining format that can be readily shared online. Comics fulfill these characteristics, being a promising tool to fight misinformation on social media. The goals of this study were: 1) Develop a novel narrative comic strip to promote recognition of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine among adult social media users (ages 18-65) based in the United States, drawing on the existing research on the Health Belief Model and Theory of Planned Behavior; 2.) Compare the comic strip evaluation and capacity to influence misinformation identification to those of an educational text about COVID-19 vaccination. 3a) Evaluate differences in the key outcomes (misinformation identification, and attractiveness, trust, perceived usefulness, willingness to share, and acceptance of each educational tool) across participants with varying demographic characteristics, health literacy levels, COVID-19 vaccination history, and demographic characteristics. 3b) Across the entire sample, evaluate the correlation between these constructs and health literacy, digital health literacy, vaccine attitudes, trust in science and health authorities, and social media use. Participants (N = 285) were recruited via social media advertisements and randomly assigned to the comic strip group (CS) (N = 92), educational text (TX) (N = 96), or a control 4 group (CL) (N = 97), which had not read any educational material. An online survey accessed the main outcomes (misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, evaluation of the educational tool (attractiveness, trust, perceived usefulness, willingness to share, and acceptance of the educational material). Participants also answered demographics questionnaires, COVID-19 vaccine concerns scale, and questionnaires on Health literacy, eHealth literacy, social media use, trust in health authorities and scientists, and COVID-19 vaccination history. Group CS answered questions regarding transportation into the narrative. There were no differences in misinformation identification between groups, possibly explained by a low sensibility of the misinformation identification instrument, timing of the data collection, and sensitiveness of the vaccination topic, subject to accrued attitudes, such as believing in misinformation. Participants with lower health literacy in group TX scored less on the misinformation identification questionnaire than those with higher literacy, which was not observed in the CS group, indicating that the comic strip may benefit better individuals with low health literacy. Vaccine hesitant/ refusers’ misinformation identification scores seem to have been benefited by the comic strip. The comic strip was better evaluated for trust in its content and acceptance than the educational text. Still, misinformation identification scores were not correlated to any evaluation construct in both groups CS and TX. Transportation into the narrative was positively correlated with all comic strip evaluation constructs but not with the misinformation identification score. Future studies should focus on exploring different styles and sizes of comic strips, using more heterogenous sample and addressing different health topics.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have faced unprecedented challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic. This dissertation draws on the comparative case study design to examine the institutional response to the Covid-19 pandemic across seventeen HEIs in three urban contexts: Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and New York. Due to the limited knowledge base about the novel coronavirus and its rapid spread, the institutional response to the Covid-19 pandemic was premised on uncertainty and presented a unique challenge to decision-makers. This study is informed by the systems approach in the three strands of literature I draw from – disaster studies, sociology of risk, and higher education governance. The evidence from this study supports the conceptualization of the Covid-19 response as a by-product of social design and socially constructed events. I take a qualitative approach to study the institutional response through semi-structured interviews, documents, and recruitment survey responses. Guided by organized risk sensemaking, I put forth the following research questions: (1) What policies, if any, have been adopted to mitigate the risk of Covid-19? (2) What decision-making structures, if any, have been mobilized to mitigate the risk of Covid-19? (3) How, if at all, institutional managers have rationalized the decisions adopted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic? and (4) How, if at all, has the external environment impacted the institutional response to Covid-19? In the first findings chapter, I examine the Covid-19 policies adopted during the pandemic and conclude that the measures taken to mitigate risks associated with the pandemic have counter-intuitive consequences. The Covid-19 response has strengthened HEIs’ place-based identity and underscored the role universities and colleges play in their immediate communities as anchor institutions. The second analytical chapter shows how decision-making structures were established and mobilized during the Covid-19 pandemic within different HEIs. It typifies decision making structures by their focus (general vs. specific) and temporality (permanent vs. temporary). This chapter discusses the challenges and benefits of different decision-making approaches, including the involvement of faculty and staff, the elimination of organizational silos, and the funneling of decisions to higher levels of authority. Furthermore, I interrogate the institutional managers’ rationalizations of challenges and ethical dilemmas brought on by the pandemic. In this chapter, I present the four emerging attitudes toward the Covid-19 pandemic as a sensemaking framework, illuminating the institutional response as a temporally dynamic phenomenon. Lastly, I focus on the external environment and specifically, the non-state sectoral actors that have played a crucial role in informing and shaping HEIs' responses. The relationships with these actors serve advisory, brokerage, coordination, data collection, material support, lobbying, and translation functions for HEIs. The study contributes to the literature on comparative education by providing empirical evidence on the role of non-state sectoral actors, the decision-making processes of HEIs, and the impact of Covid-19 on higher education. It also highlights the importance of universities and colleges as anchor institutions within their communities.

In this thesis, we consider improving supply chain and service systems through demand-side management. In Chapters 1 and 2, we focus on a new notion of flexibility that has emerged in e-commerce called consumer flexibility. Motivated by the fact that some customers may willingly provide flexibility on which product or service they receive in exchange for a reward, firms can design flexible options to leverage this consumer flexibility for significant benefit in their operations. In Chapter 1, we consider the context of online retailing where consumer flexibility can be realized through opaque selling, where some specific attributes of the products are not revealed to the customer until after purchase. In Chapter 2, we focus on the context of online booking systems for scheduled services where consumer flexibility can be realized through large time windows. The main findings are on the power of limited flexibility using simple flexible options with just a small fraction of customers willing to be flexible. In Chapter 3, we study the issue of congested elevator queuing systems due to the requirement of social distancing during a pandemic. We propose simple interventions for safely managing the elevator queues, which require no programming of the elevator system and only manage passenger behaviors. The key idea is to explicitly or implicitly group passengers going to the same or nearby floor into the same elevator as much as possible. Simulations and stability analysis show that our proposed interventions significantly reduce queue length and wait time.

Over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, works of art explored social isolation, abolition, and climate crisis. The pandemic had ruptured normative curricular practices in schools and learning discourses focused on minimizing those interruptions. Meanwhile, works such as Ellen Reid’s SOUNDWALK, Kamau Ware’s Fighting Dark, and Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest crafted relationships to knowledge through site-specific sounds, familiar materials, and sensory experiences of their environments. A group of curriculum designers, researchers, and educators, including the author of this study, affiliated with a university-based Curriculum Lab engaged with these artworks, while processing the pandemic’s effects on their own curricular practices. Situated within the Lab, this project used ethnographic and speculative methods to research how the artworks’ aesthetic and sensory strategies activated curricular contact zones and contributed to artful practices for curriculum theory and design. This study built on the work of critical curriculum scholarship which has demonstrated that significant forms of knowledge and belonging are produced through informal and null curriculum, and outside of schools entirely. Drawing on aesthetics, affect, and vital materialisms, this study theorized ambient curriculum: a surround through which any variety of onto-epistemological practices might cohere into relationships of knowing and becoming. At the same time, this study recognized that formal curriculum exerts a large influence on the daily lives of teachers and students, and that there are educators searching for forms of curriculum more aligned to their commitments to social and ecological justice; beliefs about the complexity of knowledge and learning; and approach to design as a creative process. This project considers the implications of such creative processes for curriculum design as a nomadic practice and curriculum designers as nomadic becomings, making and made by their creations.

Human decisions are simultaneously determined by economic incentives and psychological motivations. Based upon this fundamental assumption, I compose three interdisciplinary studies which analyze individual, collective and government actions at multiple levels of aggregation, and how they in turn lead to various economic and psychological outcomes. In the first study, Iexplore the key predictors of the level of compliance to social distancing and mask wearing in the United states by aggregating interdisciplinary datasets and applying multi-level analysis. I use a behavioral model to classify the determinants of compliance to COVID-19 response measures into economic incentives and psychological motivations and show that the former would have an increasing marginal effect on working hours. Empirically, I show that (a) economic vulnerability was the key predictor of failure of social distancing in 2020, even taking partisanship into account. (b) mask wearing was more politicized than social distancing, and in Fall (close to the elections), Republican partisanship was the only dominant indicator of noncompliance of mask wearing. In the second study, we use a coordination game model to discuss the dynamics of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 in the United States. We use atheoretical model to justify that there exist social reinforcement effects between policies in US states, i.e. the implementation of an NPI in a state would increase the possibility that others follow suit. Under certain conditions, if enough states engage in NPIs, they will tip others that have not yet done so to follow suit and thus shift the Nash equilibrium to the greatest one (allstates follow). Then, we show that there can be equilibria where states with different political leanings adopt different strategies when politics is a determinant of the interaction intensity. Empirically, we use a random utility model (RUM) to test it in reality with Probit and Logit regressions, and find robust evidence that inter-state social reinforcement is important and that equilibria can be tipped in mask wearing, and slightly weaker confirmation for social distancing. In the last study, I explore how personality traits in China are different from the traditional Five-Factor model by a large twin dataset in Yunnan Province. I find robust evidence about personality structures, formation and impacts in China and state three findings: (1) Personality traits in China seem to have a significance deviation from the well-accepted Five Factor Model. Instead, it has two general factors, relying on whether the item is positive or negative in tone. Positive factors include Social Desirability, Extraversion and Openness; negative factors include Disorderliness, Neuroticism and Introversion. (2) The genetic heritability of personality traits in China is significantly lower than that measured in the Western countries. For some traits, such as Social Desirability and Disorderliness, the genetic effect is around 0 and the shared environmental effect is much larger. This challenges previous findings in the West. (3) Using a within-twin fixed effect model, we find suggestive evidence on the causal effect on economic preferences and outcomes, including education performance, income, risk attitudes and subjective well-being.These three studies use the similar behavioral science methodology to study different levels of decision making, and all have important implications for issues of sustainable development.

Algorithmic management systems organize many different kinds of work across domains, and have increasingly come under academic scrutiny. Under labels including gig work, piecemeal work, and platform labor, these systems have been richly theorized under disciplines including human-computer interaction, sociology, communications, economics, and labor law. When it comes to the relationships between such systems and their workers, current theory frames these interactions on a continuum between organizational control and worker autonomy. This has laid the groundwork for other ways of examining micro-level practices of workers under algorithmic management. As an alternative to the binary of control and autonomy, this dissertation takes its cue from feminist scholars in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies. Drawing on frameworks from articulation, repair, and mutual shaping, I examine workers’ interpretations and interactions, to ask how new subjectivities around identity and community emerge from these entanglements. To shed empirical light on these processes, this dissertation employs a mixed-methods research design examining the introduction of facial recognition into the sociotechnical systems of algorithmic management. Data include 22 in-person interviews with workers in New York City and Toronto, a survey of 100 workers in the United States who have been subjected to facial recognition, and analysis of over 2800 comments gathered from an online workers’ forum posted over the course of four years.Facial recognition, like algorithmic management, suffers from a lack of empirical, on-the-ground insights into how workers communicate, negotiate, and strategize around and through them. Interviews with workers reveals that facial recognition evokes polysemia, i.e. a number of distinct, yet interrelated interpretations. I find that for some workers, facial recognition means safety and security. To others it means violation of privacy and accusations of fraud. Some are impressed by the “science-fiction”-like capabilities of the system: “it’s like living in the future.” Others are wary, and science fiction becomes a vehicle to encapsulate their fears: “I’m in the [movie] The Minority Report.” For some the technology is hyper-powerful: “It feels like I’m always being watched,” yet others decry, “it’s an obvious façade.” Following interviews, I build a body of research using empirical methods combined with frameworks drawn from STS and organizational theory to illuminate workers’ perceptions and strategies negotiating their algorithmic managers. I operationalize Julian Orr’s studies of storytelling among Xerox technicians to analyze workers’ information-sharing practices in online forums, to better understand how gig workers, devices, forums, and algorithmic management systems engage in mutual shaping processes. Analysis reveals that opposing interpretations of facial recognition, rather than dissolving into consensus of “shared understanding,” continue to persist. Rather than pursuing and relying on shared understanding of their work to maintain relationships, workers under algorithmic management, communicating in online forums about facial recognition, elide consensus. After forum analysis, I then conduct a survey, to assess workers’ fairness perceptions of facial recognition targeting and verification. The goal of this research is to establish an empirical foundation to determine whether algorithmic fairness perceptions are subject to theories of bounded rationality and decision-making. Finally, for the last two articles, I turn back to the forums, to analyze workers’ experiences negotiating two other processes with threats or ramifications for safety, privacy, and risk. In one article, I focus on their negotiation of threats from scam attackers, and the use the forum itself as a “shared repertoire” of knowledge. In the other I use the forums as evidence to illuminate workers’ experiences and meaning-making around algorithmic risk management under COVID-19. In the conclusion, I engage in theory-building to examine how algorithmic management and its attendant processes demand that information-sharing mechanisms serve novel ends buttressing legitimacy and authenticity, in what I call “para-organizational” work, a world of work where membership and legitimacy are liminal and uncertain. Ultimately, this body of research illuminates mutual shaping processes in which workers’ practices, identity, and community are entangled with technological artifacts and organizational structures. Algorithmic systems of work and participants’ interpretations of, and interactions with, related structures and devices, may be creating a world where sharing information is a process wielded not as a mechanism of learning, but as one of belonging.

My dissertation focuses on investigating the associations of neighborhood environments—namely, built and social environments—with health among community-dwelling older Americans. The first paper examines groupwide variations in social participation patterns among older adults before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and if community social cohesion and health during the pandemic were significantly associated with social participation patterns. Using Rounds 9 and 10 longitudinal data from the National Health and Aging Trend Study, I employed latent class analysis to identify the presence of groupwide variations in social participation, before and during the pandemic. I used logistic and linear regressions to examine the associations between social participation patterns, community social cohesion, and health during the pandemic. Results suggested two participation patterns, active and selective participants. Compared to active participants, older adults who were selective in their social participation were more likely to live in less socially cohesive communities and report substantial depressive and anxiety symptoms. In the second paper, I examined cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between neighborhood physical disorder, low social cohesion, and sleep problems among older Americans. Mediators of health behaviors (i.e., lack of physical activity and social participation) and mental health (i.e., depressive and anxiety symptoms) were also tested in these relationships. Data were derived from three rounds of panel data (Rounds 7-9) from the National Health and Aging Trends Study, involving a sample of 4,029 Americans aged 65 or older. I found statistically significant cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between physical disorder and low social cohesion, and late-life sleep problems. Only cross-sectional mediation effects of health behaviors and mental health were found in the relationship of physical disorder and sleep problems, whereas both cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between low social cohesion and sleep problems were significantly mediated by health behaviors and mental health. In the third paper, I used annual data from the 2015-16 Poverty Tracker study to examine the roles of distance to grocery stores, neighborhood disadvantage, and social cohesion in explaining food insecurity among older adults in New York City. Multiple logistic regressions were conducted to assess these relationships. Results showed that greater distance to grocery stores (0.26–0.75 miles vs. 0.00–0.25 miles) and living in more disadvantaged neighborhoods increased the odds of food insecurity. Community social cohesion was a marginally significant protective factor against food insecurity. The findings of these papers highlighted the associations between the neighborhood environment, social health, sleep quality, and food security status among older adults. These papers also emphasized the potential for environmental policy and social work program interventions to improve the well-being and quality of life among community-dwelling older adults.

This dissertation includes three papers that examine the role of child care policy in promoting early childhood education and care and parental labor supply. Paper one investigates the effects of universal pre-kindergarten on center-based early education and care enrollment and child care expenditures by household income with a focus on middle-income children. Paper two considers how the generosity of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) benefits is associated with child care utilization and maternal labor supply. Paper three assesses the role of coresident grandparents in parental labor supply during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 exacerbated a pre-existing and well-documented mental health crisis on college campuses in the United States. During COVID-19, more college students than ever before in recorded history reported feelings of anxiety and depression, among other mental health issues. There are myriad possible causes for the decline in mental health among college students. One clear cause is the introduction of the smartphone, its widespread adoption, and its frequent use by college-age people. Research also revealed that an unprecedented number of college students are completely disconnected from religion and spirituality. Studies demonstrated that cultivating a religious or spiritual life can be beneficial for one’s mental well-being. The efforts on college campuses to provide mental health resources for students would benefit from additional support. This care should be accessible to more students and should combat the unfortunate stigma around receiving help for mental health. Undergraduate introductory philosophy courses taken as a requirement by various majors can serve as responses to this call for additional care. These classes are inherently accessible and can offer students an engaging experience with self-care by implementing exercises inspired by philosophy as the art of living. Although philosophy as the art of living does not necessarily have to replace religion or other forms of mental health care, it can offer an experience that is of therapeutic value in the classroom. This tradition has a rich, ancient history of intending to serve this purpose. The objective of this research was to present and examine self-care exercises from philosophy as the art of living and to evaluate how these can be taught in the college classroom in response to the mental health crisis on college campuses. It also aimed to render the experience of teaching these exercises. The research was executed through a hermeneutical and phenomenological approach. The phenomenological methodology was performed by a teacher in the form of a self-study. It was also conducted with the teacher as a witness to what transpired in introductory philosophy classes with thousands of students in dozens of individual classes in a diverse metropolis. A college introductory philosophy course in this epoch of mental health crisis on campuses should abide by philosophy as the art of living’s imperative to decrease suffering. There is a vital need for additional resources to respond to the decline in mental wellness among students. The results of this research demonstrated that philosophy as the art of living and its emphasis on exercises can be successfully applied to the college classroom. In this research, students were given time on a regular basis during class to be in silence, confront Socratic-style questions that encouraged them to examine and care for themselves, practice self-writing to heighten their ability to think and pursue the aim of self-care, and then read to engage with philosophical texts to support their self-care. Students consistently and rigorously engaged with these exercises. Their time spent in silent practice provided an opportunity for therapeutic, meditative, and peaceful reflection. Educators should consider implementing these exercises in introductory philosophy classes and beyond as ways to offer self-care to students who may be struggling with their mental health, as so many are.