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No description available.

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

This study was designed to investigate 1) the cultural factors involved with Mexican citizens' attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help and 2) Mexican citizens' explanatory models of mental distress. Questionnaire data from 110 Mexican college students indicate that those who report a higher tolerance for stigma report lower endorsement of both the construct of personalismo and the machismo. Respondents who reported more interpersonal openness also reported a lower endorsement of the machismo construct. Participants from a large city reported significantly more stigma tolerance than those from a small city. Regression analyses reveal machismo as a significant predictor of stigma tolerance. Qualitative data was collected to provide additional in-depth information. Study results could be used to provide culturally appropriate mental health services.

Attitudes toward mental illness and the willingness to seek psychological treatment for their children among ethnic minority group parents were investigated. Participants consisted of black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian parents. All parents were given the Terrell and Terrell Cultural Mistrust Inventory, Cohen and Struening Opinions About Mental Illness Scale, Reid-Gundlach Social Services Satisfaction Scale, Fischer-Turner Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Help Scale, and Ahluwalia Parents' Psychological Help-Seeking Inventory. A multiple regression model was used to explore the purpose of this study. Parental mistrust level, ethnicity, education, income level, and opinions about mental illness served as predictor variables. The criterion variables consisted of scores on the Social Services Satisfaction Scale and Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale. The results indicated that the most significant predictor of psychological help-seeking was parental cultural mistrust level. Parents with higher cultural mistrust levels were less likely to seek help. Education was also predictive of black and Native American parents' help-seeking attitude and willingness to seek psychological help for their children. Black and Native Americans with lower levels of education were less willing to seek treatment for their children than members of those ethnic groups with higher levels of education. Ethnicity was also related to parental willingness to seek help for their children. Hispanic and black parents expressed more willingness to seek help than Native American and Asian parents. Finally, parents' opinions about mental illness were found to be significantly related to help-seeking attitude. Parents with positive opinions about mental illness were more likely to utilize professional psychological help than those parents with negative opinions about mental illness. Some clinical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Based on theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence, the present study examined the unique and shared effects of attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, and acculturation on attitudes toward seeking professional help among Latino college students. The research participants included 149 bilingual Latino college students from a large, public southwestern university. Results of a multiple regression analysis indicated that attachment avoidance was positively associated with both the recognition of need for psychological help and stigma of seeking professional help. Acculturation to American society was found to be statistically insignificant in predicting help-seeking attitudes in this sample of the population. Findings from exploratory questions suggested that Latino individuals would most likely seek help from parents, close friends, and then professionals. This study suggested that Latino individuals with high attachment avoidance acknowledge the potential benefit of professional help-seeking but distrust the process of approaching others for help. Limitations, implications, and future research directions will be discussed.

<p>As pedagogical innovations continue to be developed and adopted in engineering education, it is important to understand how these innovations affect the students’ experiences and achievements. A common data analysis practice when evaluating educational innovations is to aggregate the data from all of the students together. However, this data aggregation inherently biases the results toward the characteristics of the dominant student group, leaving the experiences of minority groups largely unexplored. In this dissertation, I investigate the students’ experiences and achievements in an undergraduate dynamics course, and I intentionally use analysis methods that disaggregate the data to better understand the behaviors and performance of smaller subgroups of students, not just the majority.</p> <p> This dissertation presents three studies that examine: 1) the validity, reliability, and fairness of a standardized set of conceptual questions on the final exam, with a focus on gender fairness, 2) how and why the students use the available resources, and 3) how the students’ holistic resource usage patterns relate to their academic achievement. My motivation for choosing these studies was that conceptual assessments and customized resources are two key components of the learning environment for the dynamics course. However, the quality of the conceptual exam questions used for the course had yet to be evaluated. Similarly, the learning environment for the course incorporates many customized resources, including a custom-written “lecturebook” (a hybrid of a textbook and a workbook) and an extensive online library of videos, but little was known about how the students used these resources, or how the students’ pattern of resource usage related to their performance in the course. </p> <p> The first study in this dissertation used multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis to investigate item-level gender bias in a 12-item Abbreviated Dynamics Concept Inventory (aDCI), which was a set of standardized conceptual questions included on the final exam. The results suggested that two items were slightly biased against women, with stereotypically-masculine contexts and content as possible sources of the bias. The bias in the aDCI items likely unfairly lowered some women’s final exam scores, highlighting the need for engineering educators to consider the fairness of their assessments.</p> <p> The second study used a cluster analysis of survey responses to identify nine archetypical patterns of resource usage, all of which differed from the average resource-usage pattern of the aggregated sample. An analysis of forty-four student interviews, organized by resource-usage cluster, determined that students exhibited their resource-usage behaviors largely because of how they perceived the resource’s availability, accessibility, and quality. The results illustrate that there is no “typical” way in which the students used the resources, so it is important for instructors to consider a wide array of usage behaviors when designing a course’s learning environment and resources.</p> <p> The third study utilized a multiple regression analysis to find that <i>on average</i> a student’s resource-usage pattern is not related to their achievement when controlling for many other demographic, cognitive, and non-cognitive factors that can affect resource usage and performance. However, two individual resource-usage patterns were significantly related to achievement. Students who primarily used their lecturebook and their peers for support performed better than their similar peers in other resource-usage clusters. Conversely, students who rarely used their lecturebook had lower course grades than their peers. Drawing from the results of the second study, general study-habit suggestions for the students in the course were extracted from the qualitative themes found in the interviews of the students in these two clusters.</p> <p> Overall, the results of these three studies highlight how the experiences and achievements of smaller groups of students would go unnoticed if analytical methods that only utilized aggregated data were used. While the setting of this research is specific to the assessments and resources of a given dynamics course, the methods used to disaggregate the data to gain insights about different subgroups of students are applicable to many engineering education contexts. My hope is that this work inspires more researchers to consider the experiences of all students, not just those of the majority.</p>