The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain an understanding of the patients’ perceptions of the lived experience as recipients of culturally competent nursing care related to their cultural values, customs, and health beliefs. A review of the literature revealed that culturally competent nursing care is the basis of providing holistic, individualized care. However, as culturally competent care has gained momentum in recent years, healthcare disparities in the United States remain, particularly among underserved minority and vulnerable groups of multicultural backgrounds. Literature suggests a link between culturally competent nursing care and improved health outcomes. This connection has been the motivation for nursing professionals to embrace culturally competent care and work to close the gap of incongruence of quality healthcare for all individuals. Van Manen’s phenomenological research method was used to reveal the essence of the lived experience of culturally competent nursing care as perceived by participants of Chinese ethnicity. The phenomenon was the experience of being in a hospital receiving nursing care as a patient from diverse cultural background. The context of the phenomenon was healthcare organizations that purport to provide exemplary culturally competent care. Following interviews of nine participants, transcripts were analyzed. Data analysis revealed four themes: (a) nurse’s presence; (b) feeling understood; (c) nice nurse, happy nurse, happy patient related to nurses’ caring behaviors and the impact on one’s perception of their health; and (d) gratitude. The concept of connectedness was an overarching theme within each of the four identified themes, serving as the thread among all interviews and themes. Watson’s Human Caring Science Theory of Nursing provided a framework for the themes and overarching theme. In this qualitative study, participant interviews contributed to building the body of knowledge about culturally competent care that shed light on Chinese participants’ meaningful nursing care experiences.

Creativity often involves combining existing ideas and knowledge in novel ways. As such, individuals’ access to diverse information and knowledge via social networks has been considered an important determinant of creativity. In this dissertation, I propose another factor to explain why some individuals are more likely than others to generate creative ideas: their ability to bridge disconnected cultural frames inside their organization. I draw on the cultural holes argument (Pachucki & Breiger, 2010) that cultural frames are connected through the persons that employ them (DiMaggio, 1987), and disconnections between cultural frames (i.e., cultural holes) can inhibit the exchange of ideas and knowledge among individuals. Thus, I conceptualize organization’s culture as a cultural network where the nodes represent the cultural frames its members use and the connections between two nodes represent the overlap of their users. I argue that while cultural holes inside an organization can present barriers for the exchange of ideas and information for those that do not share cultural referents, they also create opportunities for generating novel ideas for those that can bridge them. Bridging cultural holes, or cultural brokerage, enables individuals to utilize a wider range of information that is available, and recognize opportunities and combinations of information that others may not be able to see. The heart of this dissertation is this notion that individuals’ position in the cultural network and the patterns of cultural frames they use affect the diversity of information and knowledge they can process and as a result, their ability to generate creative ideas. In Chapters 3 and 4, I test this theory in two very different contexts: (1) an e-commerce company located in South Korea; and (2) two executive MBA groups at a U.S. university. I employ novel methods for measuring individuals’ use of culture and map out the cultural networks as well as the cultural holes inside the organizations. In both studies, controlling for social network brokerage and cultural fit, I find that cultural brokerage leads to the generation of creative ideas. More specifically, individuals who use loosely connected cultural frames were more likely to generate creative ideas compared to those that use cultural frames that are cohesively connected. In Chapter 5, I explore the question of who becomes cultural brokers with data collected from the two studies introduced in Chapters 3 and 4. I find both personal and contextual factors that are associated with cultural brokerage. Overall, these findings provide insight into how individuals’ different use of their organization’s culture affect the diversity of information they can utilize inside the organization and as a result, their ability to generate creative ideas.

In recent decades, the field of assessing speaking has seen an increasing emphasis on ‘interaction’. In defining the construct of interactional competence (IC), both the theoretical formulation and empirical evidence suggest that the competence is coconstructed and context-specific. This poses a multitude of conundrums for language testing practitioners and researchers, one of which is the extent to which we can extrapolate candidates’ performance in the target non-testing context from their performance in a test. This thesis considers these questions in the case of the Group Interaction (GI) task in the School-based Assessment (SBA) for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE). Validation studies on the SBA Group Interaction task to date have generated somewhat contradictory results as to whether the task elicits authentic oral language use. Moreover, studies to date have not compared students’ interactions under different task implementation conditions (such as the amount of preparation time), or have investigated in detail what exactly students do during preparation time and how that might impact on their subsequent assessed interaction. This study explores what kinds of interactional features constitute interactional competence; how IC is co-constructed in discourse, and what complexities there might be in assessing the competence through a group interaction task. It also investigates whether the SBA GI task elicits authentic oral language use, and how the task implementation condition of preparation time might influence the validity of the task. Video-recordings of the assessed group interactions were obtained from two schools, with students given extended preparation time in one school but not the other. The assessed group interactions are analyzed using a Conversation Analytic approach, supplemented by data from mock assessments and stimulated recall interviews with student-candidates and teacher-raters. This study contributes to the construct definition of interactional competence – its components and the specific ways they are performed in discourse. Drawing on findings about students’ overhearer-oriented talk, it also problematizes the assumption that a group interaction task is necessarily eliciting and assessing candidates’ competence for interacting in a peer group only. More specifically to the SBA GI task, this study has produced evidence that group interactions with and without extended preparation time are qualitatively different, and has identified some of the ways in which extended preparation time might compromise the task’s validity in assessing interactional competence.

Multicultural practitioners promote cultural competence among individuals to create awareness and tolerance of others who are culturally different. Yet, current research on cultural competence education primarily focused on practitioners in the traditional school setting instead of individuals in nonschool settings. This basic qualitative study investigated how multicultural practitioners in nonschool settings experience their attempts to develop cultural competence in constituents. Bennett's intercultural sensitivity, Koehn and Rosenau's multicultural competence, and Quappe and Cantatore's cultural awareness models informed the semi-structured interviews with 8 multicultural practitioners obtained via snowball sampling. Data were manually coded and analyzed to develop themes. Results indicated four ways participants conceptualized cultural competency, a five-part approach to cultural competence promotion, seven varying efforts to develop cultural competence, seven challenges that hindered their work, and four areas of success. Future studies might investigate differences in cultural competency efforts used by specific cultural groups and multicultural practitioners' growth as professionals to help to determine professional development programs that warrant implementation. This study will generate interest in developing cultural competence in groups and settings beyond the reach of traditional educational settings, thereby contributing to social change.

For my senior thesis, I am planning to blend my mathematical studies with my second field of study, psychology. In particular, to develop and test various scoring methods for a multidimensional, psychometric measure of social skills/competence. I would work with the Social Skills Inventory (see below) and an existing data set, using statistical modelling to design a more representative total score measure. The current total score measure does not appear to take into account balances and value weights of the six inventory items.

The purpose of this quasi-experimental, longitudinal study was to measure the effects of reflective practice coaching on 35 participants, as compared to participants who did not receive coaching. Data was collected over a period of eight weeks. A secondary purpose was to examine the effects of a standardized case conceptualization training lecture on 84 participants. A third purpose was to examine the relationships between counselor trainee demographic variables, their attitudes towards evidence-based practice, disposition towards reflective reasoning, and competence in writing case conceptualizations. This was the first study to contribute to the reflection in counseling literature. A convenience sample of N = 84 participants participated in two standardized case conceptualization training lectures. An intervention group (N = 35) received an additional three one-on-one reflection coaching sessions. The comparison group (N = 49) received the training lectures and no coaching. Participants from both groups attended two 3-hour training lectures, which taught the integrative case conceptualization model developed by Sperry (2010). Intervention group participants took part in three additional one-on-one reflection coaching sessions. Pre- and post-training lecture case conceptualization skills were assessed using the Case Conceptualization Evaluation Form (CCEF) 2.0. Levels of reflective thinking were measured with pre-, post-, and post-post-administrations of The Reflection in Learning Scale (Sobral, 2005). Variance in case conceptualization competence was analyzed using a MANOVA. Intervention group participants’ mean CCEF 2.0 scores were significantly higher than those of the comparison group (M = 72.64 and M = 46.81, respectively). Reflective thinking was determined not to be a mediating or moderating variable. Mean CCEF 2.0 scores from the first training lecture increased from the pre-test to the post-test (M = 11.20 and M = 24.10, respectively) for all participants. Mean case CCEF 2.0 scores also increased from the pre-test to the post-test in the second training lecture (M = 21.33 and M = 52.29, respectively) for all participants. Additionally, a paired sample t-test showed improvement on the Reflection in Learning Scale (Sobral, 2005) between the post-test and post-post test for the intervention group. Results were significant (|t| = 1.91, df 34, p < .001, one-tailed). / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Young children who stutter have shown the capability of developing an awareness of stuttering as early as age two (Ambrose & Yairi, 1994; Yairi & Ambrose, 2005; Boey et al., 2009; Ezrati-Vinacour, Platzky, & Yairi, 2001). The child's awareness of both his communication difficulty and the response of listeners to his speech has the potential to adversely affect his cognitive and social-emotional development, as well as his self-perception of overall competence. The purpose of this study was to examine self-perceived general competence and social acceptance in children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS), and to assess the extent to which temperament, speech disfluency, expressive and receptive language abilities, and home environment both co-vary and predict children's perception of their own competence. Participants included 16 CWS and 16 CWNS between the ages of 4;0 and 5;10. Results of the MANOVA revealed no significant between-group differences in perceived competence or social acceptance, language abilities, temperament, or home environment between the two groups; because stuttering severity and time since onset of stuttering were not calculated for CWNS, these two values were not included in the MANOVA. Results of the backwards linear regressions revealed that the best two-regressor model for predicting perceived general competence in all subjects included the temperament constructs of surgency and negative affectivity; in CWS only, surgency and expressive language together were the most predictive of perceived general competence. The best two-regressor model for predicting perceived social acceptance in all subjects included negative affectivity and receptive language; in CWS only, receptive language and stuttering severity together were most predictive of perceived social acceptance. However, none of these relationships reached significance. Taken together, results suggest that as a group, CWS present with similar temperamental profiles as CWNS, and that a child's speech and language skills are linked to his perception of peer acceptance, while a tendency for risk taking and a generally positive view of new situations may be more important for self-perception of overall competence in the world. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

This thesis addresses how personal therapy for therapists, with specific focus on social workers, is personally and professionally beneficial. A thorough review of the literature highlights the efficacy of psychotherapy, risks facing mental health professionals, and an examination of the relationships between personal improvement and professional development. My own research into the attitudes toward and experiences with personal therapy among MSW's in South Dakota expands upon the existing literature, further discussing the association between personal and professional as shown in the quantitative and qualitative data that emerged from my study. Finally, this paper explores the ways in which the personal value of self-care and the professional value of care-for-clients interact vis-à-vis ethical obligations to self, client, and colleagues, and competent social work practice.

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