Although there currently exists an in-depth empirical understanding of parents experiences and involvement in youth sport, there is an absence of published field-based intervention research specifically with sport parents (Harwood & Knight, 2015). In order to address this gap in the literature, this thesis developed a psychosocial parent education programme for British Tennis. The first study identified the education and support needs of tennis parents operating within British high performance centres (study one). Adopting a grounded theory design, data were collected through informal chats, observations, and formal interviews with parents, coaches, and ex-youth players (n=29) during a six-month period of fieldwork. Findings revealed how parents education and support needs occur across multiple levels of functioning (i.e., social, organisational, developmental, and intra-interpersonal) and are influenced by the developmental stage that parents operate in. This theoretical framework was then used as the basis for a group-based tennis parent education programme (study two). Using a qualitative organisational action research framework seven workshops were run over a 12-week period for parents with children between the ages of 5 and 10 years. Participant diaries, social validation feedback forms, and post programme focus groups (n=19) revealed perceived improvements in parents knowledge, affect, and skills across a range of learning objectives. In an attempt to improve accessibility and extend participation, the final study utilised a convergent parallel mixed methods design to examine the effectiveness of an online education programme for British tennis parents (n=38) and their perceptions of engaging in the programme (study three). Quantitative findings revealed positive directional changes in tennis parent efficacy, general parent efficacy, emotional experiences, and achievement goal orientations after completing the programme. Qualitative data provided complementary and unique insights into what worked, how, and why. Taken together, the studies within this thesis are the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of face-to-face and online sport parent education programmes. Findings also extend and advance existing recommendations and guidelines in relation to the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of education programmes for sport parents. In particular, studies illustrate the importance and value of providing sport parents with accessible, proactive, structured, and developmentally appropriate education and support which addresses their stage-specific needs.

abstract: In the last decade, the number of people who own a mobile phone or portable electronic communication device has grown exponentially. Recent advances in smartphone technology have enabled mobile devices to provide applications (“mHealth apps”) to support delivering interventions, tracking health treatments, or involving a healthcare team into the treatment process and symptom monitoring. Although the popularity of mHealth apps is increasing, few lessons have been shared regarding user experience design and evaluation for such innovations as they relate to clinical outcomes. Studies assessing usability for mobile apps primarily rely on survey instruments. Though surveys are effective in determining user perception of usability and positive attitudes towards an app, they do not directly assess app feature usage, and whether feature usage and related aspects of app design are indicative of whether intended tasks are completed by users. This is significant in the area of mHealth apps, as proper utilization of the app determines compliance to a clinical study protocol. Therefore it is important to understand how design directly impacts compliance, specifically what design factors are prevalent in non-compliant users. This research studies the impact of usability features on clinical protocol compliance by applying a mixed methods approach to usability assessment, combining traditional surveys, log analysis, and clickstream analysis to determine the connection of design to outcomes. This research is novel in its construction of the mixed methods approach and in its attempt to tie usability results to impacts on clinical protocol compliance. The validation is a case study approach, applying the methods to an mHealth app developed for early prevention of anxiety in middle school students. The results of three empirical studies are shared that support the construction of the mixed methods approach. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2016

In this study the mixed methods research design was used to determine the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of secondary school science teachers in the implementation of the new Swaziland Junior Secondary Science Curriculum (SJSSC). The interactions between the teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, and classroom practices were also investigated. A total of 37 Form-1 Science teachers from 20 purposively selected schools in the Manzini region of Swaziland participated in the study. The 20 schools were located in urban, peri-urban and rural settings. The teachers responded to a survey questionnaire and a few selected teachers were interviewed and then observed teaching the new curriculum in their classrooms. The data for the study were analysed using both quantitative and qualitative techniques. The findings for the study showed that teachers generally have good basic knowledge of the curriculum. A majority hold positive attitudes towards it. However, the classroom practices for almost all the teachers are inconsistent with the requirements and demands of the curriculum. Generally, the teachers’ knowledge was not transferred to their classroom practices largely because factors such as inadequate school physical resources, large class sizes, and traditional teaching methods appeared to still influence the classroom practices and mediate the relationship between the teachers’ knowledge and their classroom practices. / Dissertation (MEd (Curriculum and Instructional Design and Development))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Curriculum Studies / unrestricted

The challenge of leadership in the public sector has far reaching implications for the entire society given its role in the regulation of the affairs of any society. The complexities of the public sector decision making and operations as well as their implications require good leadership. Therefore the identification of leadership potential at all levels is crucial in order to design the interventions to develop the potential further. Studies have shown that there is not a lot of research done in the area of leadership potential identification especially in the public sector. This is also because, until recently, there has been no widely accepted framework for identification of leadership potential that is applicable at all levels. A model of identifying leadership potential has recently been published and this model has been applied in the identification of leadership potential in the Australian public sector. This study aims to assess the leadership potential of the public sector managers from an intentional change perspective. This was done through a determination of the relationship between the three concepts of ideal self, leadership potential as well as the current performance of managers in the public sector. Furthermore, an assessment of the required organizational support to improve awareness of ideal self by the employees and managers was done. 95 responses from a variety of middle and senior managers in the Department of Environmental Affairs, South Africa were collected and analysed. The analysis included Principle Component Analysis and Correlations to assess the relationships between these three constructs. Also 12 interviews with middle managers (level 11-12) across most departmental functions were conducted and analysed. The results indicated that there does not appear to be any statistically significant relationship between performance scores and ideal self as well as performance scores and leadership potential. They, however, indicated that there is a statistically significant relationship between the ideal self and the leadership potential. Furthermore, the results showed that to improve the awareness of the ideal self by the employees and managers and thereby increase their leadership potential, the organization needs to consider a few things. Those are, training and organizational culture; conversations with managers; coaching and mentoring; clear succession planning and rotation; opportunity or space to innovate. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / lmgibs2015 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / Unrestricted

The transition from partnership to parenthood can be a time of excitement and rapid change for couples. After the birth of a first child, many couples also experience declines in relationship satisfaction leading to increased risk of relationship dissolution, postpartum depression, and negative child outcomes. Considering the frequency of this transition and the connection between parent relationship quality and health, it is surprising that relatively few intervention programs have focused on preparing couples for this life transition. Hence, I have developed a four week relationship enhancement intervention entitled the Mindful Transition to Parenting Program. This program is based on interpersonal neurobiology, which states that mindfulness training can change brain structures that can lead to increased attunement abilities and sustained improvements in relationship quality. The program focuses on improving mindfulness, empathy, emotionality, and relationship satisfaction for couples expecting their first child. In this research study, I determined the outcomes for couples who participate in this program through mixed methods research with a randomized experimental design. Thirty-three couples were randomly assigned by a coin-toss to either a waitlist control group, or the Mindful Transition to Parenting Program treatment group. Results demonstrated that men in the treatment group significantly improved in relationship satisfaction, negative affect, and mindfulness when compared to the control group. Women had no significant treatment effects, though treatment group women had small effect size improvement in three measures of empathy. The emergent qualitative themes for participants in the program included: (1) positive changes for self, (2) improvements in couple relationship, (3) feeling more prepared for baby, and (4) male involvement. Mixed methods analyses revealed that men in particular benefited from the social support, increased connection with their babies, and more identification with the role of father that the program provided. These are promising results, showing that a brief intervention including mindfulness and skill-based learning can have positive effects on couples in the transition to parenthood. I conclude by discussing clinical implications and future research directions. / Ph. D.

Helping and aggressing behaviors are important to study in adolescence because they relate to adaptive and maladaptive developmental outcomes. These behaviors take place within the social context and their impact may be determined by the nature of the dyadic relationship between the agent and the recipient of the behavior. Relative power may be a critical aspect of dyadic relationships as evidenced by the research on bullying and related outcomes. However, a review of the helping and aggression literatures shows that relative power between agents and recipients of behavior has largely been neglected, perhaps because measurement approaches focus on individual tendencies over time rather than single behaviors at one point in time. I propose a theory that includes relative power as a critical dimension in the conceptualization of aggression and helping in dyadic interactions. I define dyadic interpersonal behavior based on two bipolar continua: impact (extremely beneficial impact [helping] through no impact to extremely harmful impact [aggressing]) and relative power imbalance between dyad members (lower-power through balanced-power to higher-power). In this dissertation, I tested whether my theory fits with adolescents' conceptualizations of helping and aggressing behavior in dyads using a mixed-methods approach. Focus group data collection occurred from two sessions with 13 and 11 adolescents in order to create gender-relevant and school-relevant vignettes of helping and aggressing behavior. Vignettes varied in intensity of impact (extremely beneficial, moderately beneficial, neutral, moderately harmful and extremely harmful), relative power between agent and recipient (i.e., high to high, low to low, high to low, and low to high power dyads), and power type (i.e., academic power and social power). The quantitative phase involved the rating of paired vignettes based on similarity by 203 students from the same high school as the focus group participants. Similarity scores were aggregated within gender and the type of power (academic or social). Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to test whether the proposed theory of power-relevant helping and aggressing is supported by adolescents' similarity ratings. The models of boys' interpersonal behaviors show three-dimensional solutions whereas those for girls reflect four-dimensional solutions. The first dimension of benefit and harm, which was proposed in my theory, emerged in all four sets of analyses (academic-boys; academic-girls; social-boys; social-girls). The secondary dimension proposed in the theory, relative power, only emerged for girls in regard to social power, as the fourth dimension in that solution. Qualitative analyses of focus group transcripts suggest that school atmosphere, power in the school, and bullying were primary themes salient in adolescents' thinking about helping and aggressing behavior. Relative power did not emerge as a theme or a concept in these qualitative analyses, suggesting that relative power is not a salient concept in adolescent thinking for helping and aggressing. Thus, neither quantitative nor qualitative analyses support the secondary dimension proposed in my theory. This mixed-methods study advances theory and research by: 1) demonstrating that adolescents conceptualize helping and aggressing as opposite ends of a single dimension at the behavioral level, 2) demonstrating that power at the individual level with a group referent and collective dyadic power are more salient than relative power in adolescents' perceptions of helping and aggressing behavior, and 3) situating the conceptualization and measurement of interpersonal behavior within the relational context. / Ph. D.

By conducting both qualitative and quantitative analysis of data from interviews and game content, I examine representations of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary video-game narratives. I use data from interviews to show how they view their representations in this medium and to set categorical criteria for an interpretive content analysis. I analyze a sample of top-selling narrative-driven video games in the United States released from 2016-2019. My content coding incorporates aforementioned interview data as well as theoretical-based and intersectional concepts on video game characters and their narratives. The content analysis includes measures of narrative importance, narrative role, positivity of representation, and demographic categories of characters, though the scale of this study may not allow for a full test of intersectional theory of links between demographics and roles. Interview and content analysis results suggest an overrepresentation of white characters and extreme under-representation of non-white women. / I examine representations of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary video-game narratives. I use data from interviews to show how people view their representations in video games and to set a guide for analyzing the games themselves. I analyze a sample of top-selling narrativedriven video games in the United States released from 2016-2019. My content coding incorporates aforementioned interview data as well as theoretical-based and intersectional concepts on video game characters and their narratives. The content analysis includes measures of narrative importance, narrative role, positivity of representation, and demographic categories of characters, though the scale of this study may not allow for a full test of intersectional theory of links between demographics and roles. Interview and content analysis results suggest an overrepresentation of white characters and extreme under-representation of non-white women.

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Food insecurity has emerged as a leading health care problem in the United States, impacting college students’ health, well-being, and academic performance. The aims of this study are: 1) to assess the prevalence of food insecurity at Mississippi State University, 2) to explore the coping mechanisms employed by students faced with food insecurity, and 3) to identify college students' perceptions about food access resources, 4) to identify ways in which a scenario that requires social distancing impacts food security in a college student population, and 5) to explore students' expressed needs from the university in improving food security status for all, whether they are learning on campus or in a distance environment. A mixed methods approach was used to assess the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the study aims. An online survey to gather demographic information and assess food security status using the 6-item version of the U.S. Household Food Security Scale Module (HFSSM) was administered. Next, qualitative focus groups with subsets of participants was conducted to gain further insight into the perceptions, coping mechanisms, and resource utilization issues related to food insecurity. Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on focus group data collection, an open-ended qualitative questionnaire was designed and sent to original survey participants to gather further data. This study found 34.1% of undergraduate college students to be food insecure. The strongest predictors of food insecurity were having received some type of food assistance in the past year and having received free- or reduced-lunches in elementary or secondary school. The data demonstrates that students with a meal plan are less likely to be food insecure. Qualitative data identified key influencers of food insecurity: 1) personal beliefs, 2) life skills, and 3) the university. The results of this study contribute to the literature focused on food insecurity prevalence in college students and help to fill in gaps in understanding food insecurity from the university student perspective. This will allow relevant interventions to be developed that are congruent with students’ needs, enhancing resource utilization to increase food security status among college students.