<p> Using a sample of 251 college students, it was found that 1) when differentiation (D) of work values was calculated using three indices,&nbsp;high-low D, Iachan D, and variance D,&nbsp;only Iachan D positively related to indecision but&nbsp;high-low D and variance D did not,&nbsp;2) none of the three indices of D&nbsp;related to career maturity, 3) work values profile elevation (PE) positively related to extraversion, openness, and negatively related to depressive symptoms and career indecision but was unrelated to career certainty and&nbsp;neuroticism and 4) work values PE moderated the relationship between Iachan D and career indecision. The findings from this study benefit both vocational counselors and clients by improving the utility of individuals&rsquo; work values results so that they can provide additional information to understand a person&rsquo;s work values profile.</p><p>

<p> Current literature confirms that self-efficacy, academic self-concept, and participation in undergraduate research influence the academic performance and aspirations of students. However, a gap in the literature remains as research has yet to explore whether students who have participated in research have a higher sense of research self-efficacy and academic self-concept than students who have not participated in these activities. In addition, it is unknown whether undergraduate researchers pursuing STEM degrees differ from students pursuing non-STEM degrees, nor if they vary by gender. </p><p> The purpose of this study was to investigate the research self-efficacy and academic self-concept of undergraduate researchers, compare these beliefs to non-researchers, and to examine how these measures differ by gender and field of study (i.e. STEM and non-STEM fields) among undergraduate researchers. Additionally, this research identified various factors that predict research self-efficacy and academic self-concept. </p><p> This quantitative study was conducted at a public university located in the Southeast region of the United States. Using survey methods participants&rsquo; background information, academic self-concept, and research self-efficacy was collected. Participants were students who had participated in undergraduate research as well as students who had not participated in research activities. Both groups completed the same survey. This study gained insight into the research self-efficacy, academic self-concept, field of study, and gender differences among undergraduate researchers and how they compare to non-researchers. Research findings may assist colleges, universities, and offices that promote undergraduate research in recruiting students to participate in research activities. Findings also contribute to literature supporting undergraduate research as an element that contributes to student success in undergraduate education.</p><p>

<p> The present study examined the impact of self-esteem, the desire for lighter skin, and gender on levels of depression, anxiety, and stress among university students in Thailand. The study included 761 students from two universities in a northeastern province of Thailand who participated voluntarily. Results indicated that although the desire for lighter skin is prevalent among Thai university students, this desire alone does not significantly impact levels of depression, anxiety, or stress. Self-esteem was a significant predictor of depression, anxiety, and stress. School year showed a significant positive correlation with depression, anxiety, and stress. Academic performance as measured by GPA showed a significant positive correlation with self-esteem and a significant negative correlation with depression. Mental health professionals are advised to explore ways to improve Thai university students&rsquo; self-esteem and to examine the influence of academic and graduation-related pressures in order to positively impact students&rsquo; overall mental health. Additional implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research are discussed. </p><p>

<p> The primary purpose of this clinical scholarly research project is to determine whether there are undiagnosed symptoms of depression among the residents in a small population Long Term Care facility (LTC). Caregivers at the LTC receive specific knowledge regarding older adult late-life depression and then apply said knowledge by surveying the LTC residents (LTCR&rsquo;s) using the Geriatric Depression Scale instrument (GDS-15). The secondary purpose is to determine whether the LTC caregivers perceive this training as beneficial. Using two-sample t-test statistical analysis, the results of this study indicate a positive correlation with the alternative hypothesis; the number of LTCRs with previously undetected depressive symptoms increased. H_a: &mu; LTCR with depression or delirium &ne; &mu; LTCR with depression or delirium. In this study, the number of LTCRs with symptoms of depression or delirium increased by 60.4 percent. The P (T&lt;=t) two-tail value is less than 0.001. In the literature, this difference is extremely statistically significant. The mean of the medical records examined minus the mean of the number of medical records with an indication of depression or delirium is 0.60. For a 95% confidence interval, this difference must fall between the ranges of 0.45 to 0.76. These data confirm the alternative hypothesis. </p><p> Additionally, the caregiver participant&rsquo;s satisfaction outcome survey results reported the training was substantially beneficial. </p><p>

Normative conceptions of age, as with other social markers such as gender, inform how persons are perceived by self and others. This thesis provides a critical view of ways in which age intersects with gender in the context of higher education in Britain. Located with the backdrop of discourses such as 'successful' or 'active' ageing and ‘Lifelong Learning’, experiences of older age are explored in the context of undergraduate study. Drawing on the accounts of twenty-one undergraduate students and six recent graduates, the thesis explores social constructions of older people, and of undergraduate students, and how these constructions play out in participants’ subjective experience of higher education. All (27) participants were aged over forty and twenty were aged over fifty. Foucault’s notions of Technologies of the Self , including his concept of power, is used here to explore how participants are positioned by, and also resist, normative discourses of age and gender. Judith Butler’s concept of performativity is mobilised to explore how performance of age varies according to gender and between subject roles such as student, friend or partner. I argue that the performativity of age is exposed within undergraduate courses. I contend that the presence of older undergraduate students disrupts constructions of what undergraduate study is, and should be, what it means to be a student, what it means to be a mature student and what it means to be older. The data are organized in three chapters: starting university, being at university and, then, life outside of university. The study reveals how older students’ claimed space in the university. I show that neoliberal imperatives, such as are contained in discourses of ‘Lifelong Learning’ and 'Active Ageing', become the standards by which individuals are measured and measure themselves. I find that participants’ age-associations, and identity-conceptions as an undergraduate student, have implications for relationships outside of the university and involve changed and changing identities. The participant's stories reveal varied experiences of student life, and thus unsettle notions of the 'traditional student' in new ways, calling attention to the complexities of what being an undergraduate student is like in contemporary Britain. In uncovering links and contradictions between old age and undergraduate study, I seek to illuminate the experiences and concerns of older undergraduates and to contribute to debates in both the sociology of education and social gerontology.

This study examined four research questions: (1) Are there group differences in working memory between students with ADHD and non-ADHD students matched for grade, reading and sex? (2) Are there strategy efficiency differences between a group of students with ADHD and a group of non-ADHD students? (3) Can a group of students with ADHD gain more on the Swanson Cognitive Processing Test (S-CPT) than a group of non-ADHD students when offered specific strategies to solve problems on the S-CPT? and (4) Can learning be improved for students with ADHD more than for non-ADHD students when teaching both groups specific learning strategies? The Swanson-Cognitive Processing Test (S-CPT) was used to measure working memory, strategy efficiency and gain scores. In Phase I, a between-subjects design, matching students by age, gender and CBM reading quartile level, was used to answer research questions one, two and three. In Phase II, a within-subject, baseline-treatment (A-B) design, was used to determine if students with ADHD who scored low on the Swanson-Cognitive Processing Test (S-CPT) could improve their classroom performance by being taught specific strategies in spelling and arithmetic to answer research question four. The independent variable for research question four was specific learning strategies and the dependent variables were curriculum based measures (CBM) in spelling and arithmetic which were administered three times a week for the eight week period of time the study covered. The results indicated that there was a significant difference in the working memory of students with ADHD, compared to non-ADHD students, in favor of the non-ADHD students, on the S-CPT. This finding supports Barkley's New Theory of ADHD (1997). There was no significant difference between students with ADHD and non-ADHD peers in terms of their Strategy Efficiency Index (SEI) scores on the S-CPT; however, there was a significant difference in their Gain scores on the S-CPT for students with ADHD. Finally, CBM data from Phase II were analyzed. Overall, there was no apparent gain for either the students with ADHD or the non-ADHD students between baseline and treatment phases. However, there were individuals who did have significant gains in the treatment phase.

This phenomenological study explores the lived experiences of five individuals who shifted their work and career from the business world to the nonprofit service sector. Through in-depth personal accounts, I show how the research participants made sense of "work" and "career" as they moved through, and after they completed the transition out of the business setting; and the degree to which their subjective experiences in the nonprofit work environment transformed their prior perspectives on “work life” and “career” that had been shaped by their experiences in the business world. According to the literature of subjective career development (how people shape their personal identity through their work over a lifetime) and transformative learning (how people change their worldview perspective to accommodate significant changes in their life circumstances), people who shift from business careers to nonprofit jobs are likely to be confounded by certain realities in the nonprofit world that cannot be readily understood or explained through past experience in the business workplace. The real-life personal stories of five such career shifters manifest clear differences in the “discourse of work and career” across the two sectors, resulting in an apparent disorienting paradox between the profit-driven “business mindset” (where the fundamental motivation is survival of the enterprise and objective personal advancement) and the mission-driven “nonprofit worldview” (where the fundamental motivation is service for a better world and subjective personal meaning-making). An analysis of these paradoxes of discourse suggests that the mission-driven nonprofit discourse (“we work for a better world”) offers a valuable and constructive counterpoint to the more dominant enterprise-driven business discourse (“we work to sustain the company”) that pervades the organizational landscape of our society. The implications of these findings as reviewed in the last chapter are significant for policy, practice and research in both nonprofit management and business organizational development. The work concludes with the suggestion that the nonprofit mindset opens the possibility for re-orienting one.s ¡°career¡± to a life-long process of self-actualization, where one works to find meaning and purpose through making a difference toward improving quality of life for a better world.

Five caregiver-related variables were examined to assess their predictive power relative to several academic and behavioral outcome measures in an intervention study designed to prevent academic failure and behavioral problems in an at-risk population. Subjects included 117 children and their primary caregivers from four child-me centers in a medium-sized metropolitan area in western Massachusetts. Subjects came largely from low-income families and were primarily from minority ethnic backgrounds. The predictor variables included perceived caregiver social support caregiver life-stress, caregiver relationship satisfaction, caregiver depression, and caregiver's ratings of general psychiatric distress. An assumption was made that these variables are related to the level of psychological resources that caregivers would be able to devote to intervention participation. It was hypothesized, therefore, that predictive relationships between these caregiver-related and outcome variables would be mediated by caregiver compliance with the intervention. An unexpected finding emerging from this study was that higher levels of caregiver depression predict increased compliance with the behavioral portion of the intervention which, in twin, predicts fewer Home AD/HD symptoms at post-test. This was the only predictive relationship in which a mediating role for compliance was supported at a level approaching statistical significance. However, several direct predictive relationships between caregiver-related variables and outcome measures were supported by the data at a statistically significant level. Results are discussed and directions for future research are suggested. Several methodological issues pertinent to this study are also considered.

Some of the positive social benefits found to accrue among participants of peer tutoring programs were investigated in mentally retarded subjects who were characterized by aggressive behavior. Twenty-five institutionalized adults were randomly assigned to be tutors or nontutuors. All subjects were trained to play with an experimental apparatus that delivered pairs of edible rewards following its correct operation. Subjects were taught to share one of the edibles with the trainer. During the experimental treatment, nontutors were allowed to operate the apparatus and to share with the trainer as before. However, tutors were prompted to demonstrate their skill to a peer and then to share an edible with them. As expected, the scores on posttreatment experimental tests of both sharing and helping were significantly higher for tutors (p $<$.05). In addition, tutors were found to be significantly less aggressive than nontutors on one measure of aggression (p $<$.05). The results are congruent with previous research and suggest that the positive effects of tutoring may extend to the mentally retarded. Potential biases in the procedure, as well as a number of alternative explanations for the results are discussed.

The problem addressed in this study was the limited available knowledge of why people volunteer. There had been an apparent lack of research among populations of volunteers based on current theory. The purpose of this study was to identify a theory of motivation appropriate for application to volunteers or develop such a theory if one did not exist, and to utilize that theory to explore motivation in a sample of volunteers. Related purposes were to develop an instrument which would be useful in subsequent research among volunteers and to pilot that instrument. A thorough review of the literature pertaining to volunteers and to motivation was conducted, and a model for organizing motivation theories was identified. The organizational model was adapted, and offered as a theory of motivation appropriate for application to volunteers. The theory was based on the individual's value system, and the thesis that an individual will undertake action to preserve and/or create that which is believed to be good and beneficial. A comprehensive list of reasons for volunteering was developed from the literature. Eighty-seven questions pertaining to potential reasons for volunteering were developed, offering respondents a range of seven responses from "not a reason" to "an extremely important reason" for volunteering in 4-H. These questions were combined with questions pertaining to demographic information to compile a self-reporting research instrument. The instrument was administered by mail to 453 volunteers in the Massachusetts 4-H program, and yielded in a response rate of 76%. The theory was found to be operationally useful. Analysis of responses confirmed the importance of values in reasons for volunteering. Visual inspection of rank ordered means of responses revealed that reasons clustered in groups corresponding to values, and factor analysis revealed that individuals responded to questions regarding motivation in accordance with individually held values. Subgroups based on motivation were identified within the sample. Every motivational construct was rated a motivator by some respondents and not a motivator by others. Additional findings included the existence of subgroups identifiable by their transiency versus longevity, and inclination in the sample towards continuity and perpetuation of present practices. Recommendations for further research included exploration of differences among motivators regarding causing people to agree to accept a volunteer role, to remain in that role over time, to increase productivity, to improve quality, and to change practices in that role.