Library research studies have provided evidence that teacher-librarians (TLs) impact student academic success; nevertheless, TLs statewide and internationally are at a critical juncture due to stakeholder groups' ambiguous perceptions regarding their influence on student achievement. The problem in this study involves a local independent school district's lack of conclusive evidence to demonstrate TLs' contribution to student achievement on standardized testing. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of TLs, classroom teachers (CTs), and administrative staff (AS) concerning student achievement as instructed by local TLs. Using Piaget's cognitive theory and Mezirow's transformative learning theory, this qualitative case study explored the perceptions of 15 participants and acquired clarification regarding the TLs' instructional practice. The interview questions focused on perceptions of 5 CTs, 5 AS, and 5 TLs regarding the instructional role of TLs on students' academic success as well as the evidence provided by these stakeholders regarding the value of school libraries. Data collection with semi-structured interviews followed by an open coding thematic analysis revealed 7 themes: (1) involvement in curriculum, (2) flexibility of schedule, (3) preconceived misconceptions, (4) using an evidence-based practice approach, (5) collaboration, (6) access to materials, and (7) a conducive learning environment. The resulting project consisted of a policy recommendation created for augmenting stakeholder perceptions. The project contributes to social change by fostering an informed societal positive perception of the TLs' instructional influence on student academic achievement and by offering a measurable interpretation of the TLs' educational value to the learning community that may transform stakeholder perception locally and worldwide.

Bullying has long been associated with school children. In recent years, however, more attention has been paid to the bullying that has reached beyond the playground and into the workforce. One population facing this problem is staff nurses. To date, no one has found an effective way to address workplace bullying in the healthcare field, nor have effective methods been found for retaining trained nurses affected by this problem. The focus of this dissertation was on understanding nurses' lived experiences and how nurses decided to remain in their current working position despite these problems. Taking a phenomenological approach and using the conceptual framework of resilience, the study included telephone interviews of 2 pilot study participants and 12 main study participants. Recorded and transcribed participant responses to interview questions were coded thematically and analyzed. Three main themes emerged: stories of working with workplace bullying, challenges of the lived experiences of being bullied, and special techniques of nurses being bullied. Three subthemes also emerged: despair, love of being a nurse, and resilience. This study gave a voice to nurses affected by this problem, revealing special challenges they encounter and coping strategies they employ. Hospital administrators can use the findings of this study to create social change within nurses' working environment by implementing policies that will keep their nurses safe and happily employed. Future research should focus on workplace bullying in the nursing field and how it affects patient safety.

Base closures and relocations reduce costs to the Department of Defense but necessitate the relocation of personnel, organizations, and functions. When Fort McPherson closed, Fort Bragg received the organization's personnel and equipment. The problem in this study was the lack of knowledge and understanding within the U.S. military, especially among civil service and contractor employees affected by realignments and closures, regarding (a) the decision process to accept or reject offers to relocate, (b) the potential health effects related to relocating, and (c) the effect that personnel relocations and losses have on the military mission. This study is essential because no scholarly research exists that would help individuals to make sound decisions and enable military leadership to understand the impacts to people and missions. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to delve deeply into the personnel issues among those affected by an actual relocation. The conceptual framework included cognitive learning theory, social learning theory, and the theory of planned behavior, all focused on how individuals make decisions. Purposeful sampling was used to select 24 DoD employees from different career fields for semistructured interviews. Transcripts were analyzed, showing that family, retirement, health, and financial factors were the most frequent themes in the decision-making process. The implication for social change is to improve the awareness of all stakeholders in the relocation process regarding the challenges faced by personnel, both assisting people making the decision to relocate and improving communications by military leadership to those affected. The outcome would be a smoother, more effective, and more efficient relocation process and minimal impact on the military mission.

Dual-diagnosed female offenders (DDFOs) present direct care providers with complex psychosocial needs and challenges that result in a serious lack of motivation to attain, sustain, and continue treatment after release from prison. Unsuccessful treatment of DDFOs represents a significant public health and safety risk including continuing criminal acts, increased health care costs, accidents related to substance abuse, and poor reintegration. Through in-depth semistructured interviews with direct care providers, this phenomenological study's focus was on examining the motivational facilitators associated with treatment adherence, barriers to treatment adherence, and approaches for enhancing treatment motivation. Nine major themes emerged from this research, including the importance of an empathetic approach and a strong therapeutic alliance as motivational facilitators; lack of insight and acceptance of the need for treatment, lack of resiliency, and the role of external system factors in barriers to treatment adherence; and using an empathetic approach, building rapport, instilling hope, and avoiding confrontation as approaches for enhancing treatment motivation. These findings may inform theory and practice related to the treatment of DDFOs in U.S. prisons. These findings contribute to social change by identifying outcomes related to treatment attendance, continuity of care, and completion and may help reduce recidivism associated with DDFOs, decrease costs of care, and lower public risks such as accidents related to substance use. The study provides reference points that may inform recommendations to state correctional departments regarding effective programming strategies for DDFOs.

Victims of childhood trauma are vulnerable to substance abuse due to their inability to develop coping skills following trauma, which can lead to criminal and violent behavior. Guided by the ecodevelopmental theory, this phenomenological study attempted to relate the perceived experiences of violent behaviors as a result of methamphetamine use in women to the types of childhood trauma the women experienced. Fourteen women were recruited using purposive sampling in collaboration with the South Brunswick Counseling Center, based on inclusion criteria that included being over the age of 18; having abstained from methamphetamine use for at least a year; having experienced a childhood trauma including physical, sexual, emotional/verbal abuse or neglect; and having perpetrated violence against others as an adult while under the influence of methamphetamine. Data were analyzed using Moustakas' qualitative analysis method and revealed 5 themes: unresolved anger over childhood trauma, 'roller coaster of emotions,' lack of coping resources, initial negative influences, and therapist influence. The participants confirmed previous research findings that unresolved anger over past childhood trauma is the main consequence associated with methamphetamine-induced violence. The study impacts social change by adding to the body of knowledge regarding the shared experiences of these women between childhood trauma and methamphetamine-induced violence. These findings could aid in the development of community-based prevention and intervention programs for victims of childhood trauma, mental health professionals establishing evidence-based interventions, and victims' parents, who are susceptible to substance abuse and resulting violence.

Few colleges and universities have adopted the practice to provide credits for the majority of undergraduate coursework for military career training. Easing the transition from military to civilian life has become a priority for the Department of Defense, yet there is a significant gap in empirical knowledge regarding the potential benefits of a college degree on soldiers exiting the military. The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experiences of Army Medics who have transitioned back into civilian life after graduating from a college degree program that grants significant credit for military training. This phenomenological study used a conceptual framework derived from Schlossberg's adult transition theory. Data were collected from a focus group, semi-structured interviews, and interviewer notes. Seven participants were identified through purposive sampling. Interview transcripts and interviewer notes were analyzed using the Van Kaam method and yielded 4 pre-transition and 6 transitional themes. Findings indicated that the participants' initial fears of the transition were replaced with higher perceptions of self-worth and confidence, which benefitted them as they assimilated back into civilian society. The implications for positive social change include informing the Department of Defense and policymakers who are supporting soldiers transitioning to civilian life about study participants' increased feelings of self-worth and confidence upon degree completion.

Research suggests that teaching in international settings fosters professional growth and promotes tolerance for working in multicultural and linguistically diverse classrooms for U.S. teachers upon returning to the U.S. to work in schools. These studies portray teaching abroad as an unproblematic and neutral project, and narrowly focus on the benefit to the individual teacher during their temporary stay in a foreign country and when returning home to the U.S. Absent from these studies are two groups: 1) teachers from the U.S. who work in non-governmental organizations and private school settings abroad, but have no pedagogical training, and 2) host country citizens (unless they serve a purpose for the U.S. teacher, such as providing growth, teaching cultural nuances, etc.) These studies also lack an analysis of how international teaching, especially in bilingual and English-language contexts, affect the local community outside the bounds of the study’s setting. Scholars of transnational feminist theory suggest consideration of how these relationships shape not just the people who travel across nation-state borders, but also those who are affected in the local context. Scholars of critical pedagogy remind teachers that education is not only pedagogical, but also political and ideological. Grounded in these two theoretical frameworks, as well as Critical Discourse Analysis, this study examines English-language education and teaching in the Central American country of Honduras. The findings suggest that host country citizens express reservations about these partnerships. Although U.S. and international teachers second-guess the utility of English-language education in Honduras, they justify their presence teaching there because of their ability to speak English, and they define what success means in the future of their students.

The purpose of this study was to develop a theory grounded in the health experiences of rural adolescents. By exploring the embodied experiences within a unique population of rural Iowan adolescents, many who are overweight/obese and/or of Hispanic descent, the developed theory was also used to inform a tailored health intervention for middle school students. The review of the literature revealed that the study of adolescent physical activity and body image concerns is largely measurement driven, and often explored from a deficit perspective. Thus, there remains a gap in the literature regarding the contextualized experience of health. This project used a qualitative approach to generate a theory grounded in stories adolescents shared regarding their health. Eighteen adolescents (13-15 years old) participated in one-on-one interviews. Grounded theory principles were used to understand how personal health experiences were socially constructed and explored the meanings participants derived from such experiences. An unstructured interview guide was used to gather information on health, physical activity, nutrition, and body image. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using Charmaz's (2006) version of grounded theory. A total of 28 codes emerged from the data to construct the Theory of Embodied Health and Wellness. The complex interplay of personal health behaviors, eco-sociocultural influence, and everyday experience mold adolescents' embodied health and wellness experiences. Participants reported a wide range of personal, social, cultural and environmental influences on their health experiences. Feeling in control, connected, and competent were major themes in how participants experienced, maintained, or challenged their health experiences within their sociocultural environment. In addition to constructing the Theory of Embodied Health and Wellness, this project engaged adolescents in conversations related to their own health experiences to develop a sociocultural tailored health intervention. This project provides a practical example of how the target population of an intervention can be included during the formative research phase to ensure the intervention is tailored to meet their needs and interests.

The purpose of this study is to assess issues that arise in the context of epistemological claims in narrative educational research by means of narrative analysis and epistemological evaluation. The research questions which guided the study were: 1) To what extent is epistemology considered by narrative educational researchers?; 2) What issues do narrative educational researchers perceive when capturing participant testimony?; 3) What procedures do narrative educational researchers carry out which assure of methodological rigor?; and 4) What additional procedures, either before, during or after a study, can narrative educational researchers carry forth to assure that the research is the most meaningful for the researcher, the participant and anyone else who reads the research study? I applied multiple methods to address these questions, narrative thematic analysis and epistemological evaluation. Research participants included four narrative educational researchers. First, based on interviews, and after two rounds of open coding, narrative thematic analysis provided several themes which emerged based on the testimony provided by the research participants. Following the creation of themes, I completed the narrative thematic analysis by discussing how participant responses fit within the themes. Second, I epistemologically evaluated the quality of narrative educational research by relying on epistemological theory and concepts found in philosophical literature. The theoretical foundation for this work arose from developments that largely build and extend from classical reductionist and nonreductionist positions on the epistemology and social epistemology of testimony. Results from the evaluation provided a mix of strengths and weaknesses epistemologically, and therefore methodologically, in narrative educational research. Positively, I found strength in the methodological approach of building a close relationship between researcher and participant, and strength is found in a level of triangulation to address validity concerns. For weaknesses, I found that too much trust is offered by the researcher to the participant, both in themselves as well as in their testimony. Relatedly, accuracy in recall from memory and the dearth of concern about truth also presented issues. I recommended that in working to assure that trust is offered and justified by both the speaker and hearer, with greater concern to accuracy and truth, testimonial beliefs are more likely to be warranted. Future studies can focus on the inclusion of teachers, students and principals to provide additional insight, and a combining of a rich conceptual framework with a rigorous analytic approach to maintain the strengths of narrative research in education while addressing the weaknesses.

We characterized the group of linear operators that preserve sign-nonsingular matrices over ��(ℝ). Then we extended these results to n show that a linear operator T that strongly preserves L-matrices over ��,�(ℝ) if and only if T preserves L-matrices and T is also one to one on m,n the set of cells. We also characterized the group of linear operators that strongly preserve L-matrices. In addition, we characterized the group of linear operators that preserve super L- matrices, the subset of L-matrix. Also we investigated linear operators that preserve totally L-matrices, the subset of L-matrix. Chapters 1 and 2 of this dissertation contain some material of the work done by other researchers on the linear preserver problems and the properties of sign-nonsingular matrices and L-matrix. Characterizations of linear operators in Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 of this dissertation are new.