Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Horticulture, Forestry, and Recreation Resources / Candice A. Shoemaker / Public health research shows that targeting behavior directly when promoting healthy behaviors is not as effective for sustainability. Instead the recommendation is to integrate a theoretical framework that identifies factors which affect the targeted behavior and develop the intervention aimed at those factors. The objectives of this dissertation were to measure the healthful benefits of gardening for youth. Strategies were developed for creating an after-school garden club curriculum to target healthy eating, physical activity, sedentary behavior, and gardening. Accelerometers were used to determine physical activity intensity during a garden club session following a curriculum developed to promote physical activity through gardening. In a separate experiment, a portable gas analyzer was used to measure energy expenditure of youth while gardening. The constructs of Social Cognitive Theory were used to provide a guide with strategies for developing a curriculum with a theoretical basis for an after-school garden club targeting overweight prevention. Strategies presented include activities for targeting the theoretical constructs as well as for implementing evaluations. Fourth and fifth grade students at four randomly selected elementary schools in Manhattan, Kansas were invited to join the garden club. Students with parental permission attended the club for ten weeks in the fall and twelve weeks in the spring. During the second year of implementation students with parental permission participated in the accelerometer study. For six days students wore an accelerometer and completed a daily activity log detailing their activities during that time. Students in the fourth and fifth grades from eight Manhattan, Kansas elementary schools were invited to participate in the energy expenditure study during the summer of 2010. Students who participated in this study (n=20) wore a portable gas analyzer and heart rate monitor while performing four gardening tasks. Data were used to calculate energy expenditure of youth while gardening. A theoretically-based after-school garden club curriculum was developed to target increasing youth healthy behaviors. Results from the accelerometer study showed that students were significantly more physically active at the moderate and vigorous intensity level and significantly less sedentary at garden club compared to not at garden club. For students who participated in the energy expenditure study, the gardening tasks (transplanting, weeding, cultivating, and raking) were moderate physical activity (3-5.99 METs). Gardening can be a valuable tool for promoting and increasing physical activity in youth.

Master of Science / Department of Journalism and Mass Communications / Joye Gordon / Obesity in the U.S. has become a national epidemic. The military, in particular Military spouses are not exempt from the challenging issue of obesity. Understanding risk perception and health behavior is key to reducing the obesity epidemic, however insufficient research has been conducted among U.S. military spouses to understand their perceived risk and health behaviors. This quantitative study was conducted among 291 military spouses using the Extended Parallel Process Model and Social Cognitive Theory as the conceptual frameworks. The results indicated that perceived susceptibility of obesity and obesity related illness among overweight and obese military spouses while reinforcing both response and self-efficacy is the focal area for communication. Key barriers to weight loss and health goals were identified and the setting of health goals is identified as important. The researcher provides a digital intervention recommendation to address the findings of this study.

<p>In Colombia, as in the US, higher education institutions are charged with the twofold responsibility of training well-rounded professionals and pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Faculty enact this dual responsibility through their teaching and research duties, among other job-related functions. Also like in the US, research has increasingly become the foremost function of faculty at most prominent Colombian universities. As the emphasis on research increased, teaching became regarded as a simpler activity that requires less effort and resources. Moreover, while discussions about the importance of quality teaching and the need to better train faculty to enact their teaching function are common, promotion and rewards systems at Colombian universities fail to reflect a real commitment to quality teaching. Research has taken precedence over teaching, and often is perceived as the only scholarly function of faculty. While this continued perception cannot be attributed to a single reason, I hypothesize that how faculty conceive of their teaching role impacts our ability to make a compelling case for the scholarly nature of teaching.</p> <p> </p> <p>Testing this hypothesis requires a systematic approach to exploring faculty’s conceptions of teaching within a context. To that aim, I pose this research question: What are conceptions of teaching held by Colombian engineering faculty interested in improving their teaching? I advance a framework for exploring conceptions of teaching drawing from Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory and previous scholarly works on faculty’s conceptions and beliefs about teaching. Drawing upon this framework, I explore the beliefs, practices, and contextual factors of Colombian engineering faculty at three institutions. While these faculty members differ in terms of their disciplinary backgrounds, teaching experience, and research activity—both disciplinary and educational, they all share an interest in improving their teaching practice. This exploration first takes an analytic approach to identify the pieces that constitute participants’ conceptions of teaching, and then knits those pieces together to look at participants as wholes.</p> <p><br></p><p>The literature on conceptions of teaching has usually classified them between traditional teacher-centered to more sophisticated student-centered views. However, I believe that there is a continuum worth exploring defined by these extreme views. In fact, I argue that there are multiple continua—or dimensions—that merit exploration. Such dimensions include perceptions about the role of teachers, the role of students, the nature of knowledge, the purpose and means of assessment, and the outcomes of education—previously explored in the relevant literature—and views of the interaction between college teaching and research—a dimension distinctive of the present study. My findings suggest that while the role of the teacher and of students, and the nature of knowledge can be described by the teacher- to student-center and knowledge-transmission to knowledge-construction continua, the latter three dimensions are better described along different scales. Moreover, while there are certain correlations between these dimensions (e.g., perceptions of the role of the teacher as a guide correlate with perceptions of a more active role of the students) none of them alone can accurately describe the nuances of an individual’s conception of teaching. </p> <p> </p> <p>Conceptions of teaching uncovered and characterized in this multidimensional way can inform professional development programs that go beyond the diffusion of pedagogical innovations to a perspective transformation among participants. Specifically, my findings corroborate that changes in faculty views of assessment toward more formative stances foster positive transformations in faculty’s overall conception of their teaching role and duties. My findings also suggest that faculty members intrinsically interested in improving their teaching constitute the seed to start educational reform. Community-building efforts to bring together these faculty should, in the long term, help transform the views of academic administrators, thus fostering lasting reform in the perception and recognition of teaching as a scholarly function of faculty.</p>

There are repeated calls in the literature for the implementation and evaluation of evidence based HIV prevention programmes. This study aimed to evaluate a life-skills theatre performance for adolescents promoting safer sex behaviour against aspects of an established AIDS risk reduction theory. The study used a quasi-experimental research design, and was operationalised through the use of a questionnaire measuring knowledge, attitudes and perceptions conducive to HIV/AIDS risk reduction. Bandura’s (1990) Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) provided a conceptual framework for the development of the instrument. A further aim of the study was to establish whether the instrument would yield a factor structure that could be linked to Social Cognitive Theory using a principal components factor analysis. A sample of 392 adolescent high school learners in Grades 10 and 11 at two high schools in Naledi, Soweto completed the evaluation instrument. A sample of 165 learners were exposed to the play prior to completion of the evaluation instrument. A sample of 227 learners completed the questionnaire before the play was scheduled to be performed and were thus considered a control group. The effects of exposure to the play, gender, age, grade and whether the learners reported that they were sexually active formed the independent variables in the analysis, which were examined for their influences on the theoretical constructs measured by the instrument through analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results indicated that learners at both schools had a reasonably high level of knowledge, attitudes and perceptions conducive to HIV/AIDS risk reduction. However, learners at the control school scored significantly higher on the factors tapped by the questionnaire than learners attending the school exposed to the play. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed in the report. The results also highlighted significant differences between Grade 11 and Grade 10 learners in knowledge, attitudes and perceptions conducive to HIV/AIDS risk reduction. The physical age of the learner did not appear to be as important as educational level and/or possible social peer group norms on responses to the instrument.

This thesis was constructed on the foundation of two broad theoretical criticisms levelled against Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory. The first was the lack of clarity about what constituted the building blocks of the theory and the second was the lack of clarity about how these constituent components interacted in consistent and predictable ways as an integrated model of human behaviour. These ‘theory-level’ criticisms, which detracted from the empirical testability of social cognitive theory, seemed to have filtered down to the level of its individual building blocks. Therefore, moral disengagement, which constituted the focal variable of interest in this investigation, was not unaffected by them. Bandura’s (1986) theoretical presentation of moral disengagement as either an eight or four-dimensional construct and the empirical treatments of moral disengagement by Bandura and his colleagues as a uni-dimensional (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara & Pastorelli, 1996a; Bandura, Caprara, Barbaranelli, Pastorelli & Regalia, 2001b) and a four-dimensional variable (McAlister, Bandura & Owen, 2006), raised questions about its dimensionality. The first objective of this study was to examine moral disengagement’s dimensionality and the stability of its internal factor structure (i.e. longitudinal measurement invariance) over time. The general lack of clarity about how the constituent components of social cognitive theory were expected to cohere as an integrated framework of human behaviour had specific implications for the moral disengagement construct and its temporal position relative to other social cognitive variables. The second objective of this study was to examine moral disengagement’s temporal sequences relative to select social cognitive constructs (viz. proficiency-based self-efficacy, intention, and past and future behaviour) in order to comment on the likely temporal positions of these constructs relative to each other in the context of a model for predicting antisocial behaviour. Due to the exclusive activation of moral disengagement in antisocial contexts, the examination of its dimensionality and temporal sequences was contingent on an antisocial context. Software piracy, as a specific instance of antisocial behaviour, served as the context in which moral disengagement was researched in this study. A pilot investigation was conducted to test the psychometric properties of the scales that were developed to measure moral disengagement, proficiency-based self-efficacy, intention and behaviour in this study. Once their psychometric robustness was established, these scales were used in the context of a main longitudinal investigation separated by a three to four month time-lag in order to achieve the two main research objectives. Using the structural equation modelling family of data analysis techniques (specifically, confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis), the results of the main longitudinal study revealed that moral disengagement emerged as most meaningful as a uni-dimensional construct which consisted of four aggregated sets of items which represented the clusters of moral disengagement mechanisms that were likely to be activated at the four points in the self-regulation process envisaged by Bandura (1986). The findings suggested that this factor structure was longitudinally invariant when moral disengagement was measured across two assessment waves. Moral disengagement appeared to temporally precede intention and future behaviour and to temporally follow past behaviour. Self-efficacy, however, seemed to temporally precede future behaviour and to temporally follow past behaviour but unlike moral disengagement, self-efficacy appeared to temporally follow intention. Therefore, intention appeared to completely mediate the interaction between moral disengagement and proficiency-based self-efficacy in this study. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings were examined and directions for future research were proposed.

With the expansion of online communities, extant research in multiple disciplines has attempted to investigate its adoption and use among individuals. However, the biggest challenge encountered by managers of these communities is supplying knowledge, particularly, the willingness to share knowledge among the members. It is extremely important to maintain committed members in terms of active participation. Yet their level of participation might vary based on some social, behavioral and environmental factors that eventually affect their intentions on whether to participate actively or not, in fact some users choose to discontinue participating totally in the community. Cancers figure among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, with approximately 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer related deaths in 2012. The number of new cases is expected to rise by about 70% over the next 2 decades. Among men, the 5 most common sites of cancer diagnosed in 2012 were lung, prostate, colorectal, stomach, and liver cancer. According to the world cancer report, among women the 5 most common sites diagnosed were breast, colorectal, lung, cervix, and stomach cancer. For this reason, there is an ever-increasing need to establish communities to offer empathic support to patients. Though peer support groups have been known to offer adequate support to patients with cancer and are considered to be an important complement to the formal health care system, however, practical barriers such as time, mobility and geography limit their use, this is where the online communities serve an advantage, as they have the potential to overcome barriers posed by regular offline communities. To achieve its objectives, this study mainly adopts the Social cognitive theory and two components of the social influence theory. According to the SCT, user behaviour is influenced by two factors: personal cognition and environment. Social influence model postulates that individual behaviour in a community can be affected by the social environment and three factors constitute this, they are compliance, identification and internalization. The study aims to provide insights on how and why patients diagnosed with cancer (and their relatives) seek social support using the Internet and social media. In particular, we seek to understand the motivation for joining these groups and the values derived from the community for the users both active and non-active.

African American women's HIV incidence rates are disproportionately higher than other population groups in the United States. Social cognitive theory concepts were used to perform a quantitative content analysis of the magazines Essence, Ebony, and Jet, which are sources of health information and vicarious learning, to evaluate the quality of the HIV/AIDS prevention messages for 2000 to 2006. The data reveal some positive reflection of health messages, but many articles focus more on dramatic risk factors and less on providing useful information and proposed behaviors for African American women. Environmental risks and gender-specific risks are not emphasized. The public health community should use the media messages that are already present to build a media advocacy campaign that provides more comprehensive information and bring about social change.

Osteoporosis (OP) is a disease characterized by low bone mass and structural breakdown of the skeleton. The disease may be prevented through weight-bearing, moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA), which is important for peri- and postmenopausal women who are at great risk for OP. However, most women do not participate in activity according to guidelines, which can negatively impact bone health. A better understanding of multidimensional factors that influence MVPA may help inform physical activity interventions aiming for OP prevention. The purpose of this study was to utilize social cognitive theory (SCT) to understand the associations between social cognitive factors and MVPA among peri- and postmenopausal women. Eighty-seven peri- and postmenopausal women (aged 43 to 65) completed this study. Participants completed demographic, health, calcium, and SCT questionnaires. SCT variables assessed included task self-efficacy (SET) and barrier self-efficacy (SEB), perceived social support from friends (SSFR) and family (SSFA), and perceived access to facilities (ACF) and home equipment (ACH). Participants wore an NL-1000 pedometer for one week to assess total steps per day and minutes spent in MVPA. Past year MVPA, past week leisure MVPA, and past week occupational/ transport MVPA were assessed with the Modifiable Activity Questionnaire. Stepwise regression analysis was used to identify the direct relationships between cognitive variables and each of the physical activity outcome measures. Moderation-mediation analysis was conducted to determine if significant interaction effects or confounding effects existed between social cognitive variables and each physical activity variable. Age, income, BMI, and highest level of education were controlled for in all analyses. Results showed significant relationships between social cognitive factors and each physical activity outcome, supporting the use of such variables for understanding physical activity behavior in peri- and postmenopausal women. For steps per day and MVPA minutes per day, 32% and 26% of the variance in activity was explained. For past year MVPA, past week leisure MVPA, and occupational/ transport MVPA, 39%, 26%, and 27% of the variance in activity was explained, respectively. The combination of variables entering the models was different for each physical activity outcome, but overall, SEB consistently emerged as the most prominent factor. Moderation analyses revealed a three way interaction effect between SEB, SSFR, and ACF for steps per day, and two-way interaction effects between SEB and SSFR for past year MVPA and past week leisure MVPA. Mediation analysis indicated SSFA confounded the relationship between SEB and past year MVPA. Results of this study indicate social cognitive factors are directly and indirectly associated with total and MVPA in peri- and postmenopausal women. These relationships should be considered when aiming to develop physical activity intervention programs for prevention of OP in peri- and postmenopausal populations.

This qualitative grounded study explores the potential relationship between wildlife TV viewing and human-animal interactions for exotic pet owners. The method involved 13 in-depth interviews and a qualifying open-ended questionnaire with 37 individuals. The interviews gathered viewers' interpretations of two different human-wildlife interactions on TV and served as a launching point for discussion. Findings supported the literature in that wildlife TV was an important source of information, emotion, and contradictory messages. Themes also emerged regarding participants' characterizations of their relationships with their pets. Drawing from social cognitive theory, this thesis suggests the following potential motivators for participants to model animal interactions as seen on screen: 1) visual instruction that increases viewer efficacy; 2) identification with the spokesperson; and 3) emotional connection to the animal. The study concludes with preliminary recommendations for wildlife programming on TV.

Despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations to test patients ages 13 to 64 years for HIV at health care settings, routine HIV testing is lacking. As a result, many people are unaware of their HIV seropositive status. The purpose of this quantitative cross-sectional study was to examine relationships between HIV testing and provider type, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding HIV testing in the acute care setting. The study was informed by social cognitive theory. Using a convenient sampling method, a questionnaire derived from previous surveys (Society of General Internal Medicine and University of Washington) was sent to 600 eligible acute care providers from a suburban Chicago hospital who treated HIV-negative patients ages 13 to 64 years. Completed surveys were received from 88 participants. Chi-square and multiple logistic regression testing showed no significant relationships between HIV testing and provider type (p = .09), age (p = .91), gender (p = .84), experience (p = 1), and race/ethnicity. However, knowledge of HIV testing regulations and positive attitudes about HIV testing were significantly associated with the likelihood of offering an HIV test (p = .026, p = .004 respectively). Results have some clinical importance, but also indicated a lack of routine opt-out HIV testing. Results may be used to promote HIV testing among acute care providers which could reduce HIV-status unawareness in the population.