The purpose of this quantitative research study was to determine if differences exist in academic achievement based on student SES as measured by grade point average (GPA), credit hours earned, and completion of the academic year for rural community college students enrolled during the 2018-19 academic year. The study used existing data from a multi-campus rural community college located in the Southeastern region of the United States. To answer the research questions, existing data were collected from this community college. The independent variable collected was SES, as measured by Pell grant eligibility. The dependent variables collected included GPA, credit hours, and completion. T-tests were conducted to answer research questions 1 (GPA) and 2 (credit hours earned). A Chi-Square Test for Independence was used to answer research question 3 (completion). Results for research question 1 indicated no statistically significant difference in GPA based on SES. Results for research question 2 indicated a statistically significant difference for credit hours earned based on SES, but not in the way literature supported since low SES students had higher credit hours earned. Results for research question 3 indicated no statistically significant relationship between completion of the 2018-19 academic year and SES. As a result of the study, recommendations to the leadership of the community college were given in hopes that it will lead to the betterment of the college.

Research suggests that there are many factors that are related to students' academic achievement. For this study, socioeconomic status, parenting styles, and family relationships are investigated in relationship to academic achievement, as identifying variables that may be related to academic achievement may prove important in implementing interventions that are used to increase academic achievement. Participants (N = 169, 3 5 males and 134 females) at a large Southeastern university are presented with a series of questionnaires that measure demographic information (including academic achievement as measured by participants' grade point average and standardized test scores), parenting styles, family relationships, and motivation to achieve academically. Results suggest that socioeconomic status is not related significantly to parenting styles or family characteristics but is related marginally to academic achievement. Results also suggest that fathers ' authoritarianism is related to participants' academic achievement in terms of what they aim for. Results of this study further indicate that various family characteristics are related significantly to academic achievement. These findings emphasize the importance of research investigating the relationships among socioeconomic status, parenting styles, family characteristics, and academic achievement.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Kristy Archuleta / This dissertation explores the association of culture with financial satisfaction. Social identity theory, a successor of symbolic interaction framework (Mead, 1930) serves as the theoretical framework for this study, conceptualizing the impact of culture on identity formation through the values, norms, and beliefs of cultures adopted by individuals. Social identity theory also provides an understanding of the power and influence of reference groups supplied by culture through the context provided for the internal determination of satisfaction. The cultures examined (e.g., geography, socioeconomic status, religiosity), each had associations with life domains which influence satisfaction according to well-being research. The associations of cultures with financial satisfaction is a largely unexplored area of research, perhaps due to the difficulty in defining and measuring culture, as well as the challenges associated with influencing financial satisfaction. Data for this study was obtained from the 2012 General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center. This study found the geographic characteristics of home ownership and living in a single family home were associated with financial satisfaction and individuals living in the same state as they did when age 16 had more points of association with financial satisfaction than those not living in the same state. Further, of the SES measures in the study, income was found to be consistently associated with financial satisfaction. Religiosity, including religiosity by religious text (e.g., Bible, Torah, Quran) and prayer were not found to be associated with financial satisfaction. However, frequency of attendance at religious services had a statistically significant association with financial satisfaction and was found to be a moderator of the financial satisfaction of those living in the Eastern and Western U.S. Regions. Understanding the association of culture with financial satisfaction may provide planners with insights into factors which contribute to a client’s values, beliefs and attitudes about their finances. An awareness of the power of cultural values, beliefs and values to influence satisfaction may make a positive contribution to the quality of conversation between planners and clients as they work toward establishing authentic goals and objectives for the client and develop plans to achieve those goals.

The purpose of this study was to identify factors that contribute to women delaying seeking treatment for obstetric fistula. A stratified random sampling technique was used to select 384 study participants. A cross sectional analytical research design was used; data was collected by structured, closed ended questionnaires. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression models were applied. Results show a significant correlation between traditional treatment and delay in seeking treatment (P-Value = 0.012). The presence of parents has a significant correlation in reaching treatment centres (p-value = 0.013), those women who are speaking about their fistula have less chance of delay in seeking treatment (p-value = 0.008), having no income significantly associated with delay in seeking treatment (AOR = 0.28) and women living closer to the treatment centres have less chance of delay (p-value = 0.008). Therefore, there are a number of factors that significantly influence women from early seeking of treatment for their fistulae. / Health Studies / M.A. (Public Health)

The development of children’s language skills during the preschool years plays a crucial role in subsequent reading and school success. Some children may enter kindergarten with oral language skills that lag behind their peers’. Two such groups are children from low-socioeconomic status (SES) families and those who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). Study 1 considered parents’ linguistic input during interactions with their Head Start pre-kindergarten children in two conversational contexts. The first, shared storybook reading, has featured prominently in early language interventions but proven less efficacious among low-SES samples. The second, shared reminiscing, offers a theoretically promising setting in which to promote child vocabulary skills but lacks empirical support. This study examined features of parental language known to relate to children’s vocabulary, including parents’ quantity of speech, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and intent to elicit child language. Parents’ and children’s expressive vocabulary knowledge was also considered. Forty parent-child dyads’ conversations during storybook reading and shared reminiscing were audiorecorded, transcribed, analyzed, and coded. Paired t-tests revealed that, while parents talked more during book reading, they used greater levels of syntactic complexity and language-eliciting talk during shared reminiscing. Parents’ own vocabulary knowledge was related to their children’s but not to linguistic input in either context. Study 2 considered the oral narrative skills of DHH preschoolers relative to language-matched hearing children. School-age DHH children often experience delays in the development of narrative skills compared to their hearing peers. Little is known about the narrative abilities of DHH children during the preschool years. This study examined 46 DHH and 58 vocabulary-matched hearing preschoolers’ overall language production, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and narrative comprehension skills. DHH children produced a similar number of words and demonstrated similar levels of narrative understanding compared to their hearing peers. However, DHH children’s narratives contained significantly less complex syntax. Gains in lexical diversity differed by group, with DHH children demonstrating less growth over the course of the school year despite making more gains on a standardized measure of vocabulary. Implications for instruction, assessment, and future research are discussed for both low-SES and DHH children.

For generations, researchers have been examining attributes that make low socioeconomic status students resilient. Attributes that help one become resilient are known as protective factors. The purpose of this study was to describe the protective factor(s) that contributed to the first-generation, low socioeconomic status students’ enrollment at The University of Kentucky. The population for this study consists of the University of Kentucky First Scholars participants during the 2015 – 2016 academic year. The researcher examines the existing literature on low socioeconomic status effects on post-secondary education. Recommendations were made for the University of Kentucky’s First Scholars Program on how to further enhance their program and continue promoting low socioeconomic status students with opportunities in higher education.

This study examined the effects of a learning environment (embodying many of De Corte et al.’s, (2004) CLIA-model components) on secondary students’ mathematical beliefs. Such mathematical beliefs have been of interest to the research community due to their expected impact on students’ willingness to engage in mathematical problem-solving. This research adopted an action research methodology using a quasi-experimental sequential explanatory mixed methods design. Data was collected using the Mathematics Related Beliefs Questionnaire (MRBQ) and a number of focus groups and individual interviews were undertaken. The sample selected (age 13-14) was from a population of convenience. There was one treatment class (N=22) and three control classes (N=45). The classroom intervention was of six months duration and was carried out by the researcher teacher in a secondary community school. Findings revealed no significant positive effects on students’ beliefs from the new learning environment about the teacher’s role in the classroom, their personal competence and the relevance to their lives and mathematics as an inaccessible subject. A more negative outcome for the fourth factor of the MRBQ scale, ‘mathematics as an inaccessible subject’, resulted for all participants (experimental and control combined) with a moderate effect of eta2=0.09. Findings from the qualitative data indicated the experimental participants found mathematics to be a difficult but useful subject. Findings, overall, revealed no significant differences between the experimental and control classes, indicating the new learning environment had not had a positive impact on the beliefs examined. Possible factors identified were the length of the intervention, the ages of participants and the socio-economic status of the majority taking part in this study. Qualitative data also indicated participants in the treatment class had found some of the activities used in the intervention to be interesting and enjoyable. Responses to the use of group work indicated participants were both willing and able to enter into communities of learners. Other results showed that participants with the highest achievement scores appeared to be the most confident learners of mathematics. Participants appeared to accept the need to have patience and perseverance when solving difficult problems but this was not translated into action in the classroom. The importance of understanding mathematics appeared to be accepted by participants. Implications for methodology, research and practice are discussed in light of these findings.

Human population-based studies of longitudinal design observe that higher intelligence in youth confers protection from premature mortality in adulthood. This field of study (“cognitive epidemiology”; Deary & Batty, 2007) has firmly established associations between intelligence and health outcomes, and has begun to address the likely mechanisms involved. The present thesis assessed some social, educational, and lifestyle factors that potentially confound and/or mediate the intelligence-mortality link. First, I carried out a systematic review of longitudinal cohort studies reporting intelligence differences in youth in relation to adult mortality risk, and in meta-analysis I aggregated the effect sizes from 16. A one SD advantage in intelligence scores was associated with 24% (95% CI 23% to 25%) lower risk of death, during 17- to 69-year follow-up; this magnitude showed no sex differential. Socioeconomic status in early life did not explain the effect. Rather, the person’s own occupational status in adulthood and educational attainment explained a third and a half of the association, respectively. One issue in controlling for education, in such models, is its strong correlation with intelligence test performance, which could lead to statistical overadjustment. A second aspect of this thesis, therefore, addressed the nature of the intelligence-education covariance in two behaviour-genetic studies of large general population-based samples of schoolchildren from England and The Netherlands. Previous studies that reported intelligence—education genetic covariances were potentially biased in their use of twin self-selection or pre-selection sampling. Moreover, the analysis in this thesis used a novel statistical approach, and included non-twin data to represent fully the variance in performance scores of a population. Analysis of the English cohort confirmed the top end of estimates from previous studies: 76% to 88% of the phenotypic correlation was due to heritability. The Dutch cohort showed greater variance for equivalent estimates (33% to 100%). The results indicate a limit to the extent to which education and intelligence might be causative of one another suggesting caution in interpreting some of the substantive attenuation effects by education reported in the literature. Third, I investigated pathways from intelligence to cardiovascular disease risk factors, given the consistent and robust finding that an advantage in intelligence relates to lower cardiovascular disease-outcomes. I used data from the 1958 National Child Development Study to investigate age-11 intelligence in association with inflammatory and haemostatic biomarker status at age 46 years. The results replicated inverse associations previously reported in an older age sample, and a one SD advantage in intelligence related to a 1.1mg/L decrease in C-reactive protein. The effect was largely mediated by lifestyle factors, including smoking, occupational status and abdominal obesity. In two further studies I used the west of Scotland Twenty-07 cohort, to investigate processing speeds among 16, 36 and 56 year-olds in relation to: (1) Inflammation, and (2) metabolic-risk, after 20 years. The advantage of experimental rather than psychometric measures of cognitive ability is their reduced cultural and social bias. Faster reaction time predicted lower systemic inflammation in the youngest male cohort, which appeared to be partially confounded by baseline smoking and socioeconomic status. Furthermore, advantage in reaction time performance in the young and middle-aged cohorts significantly predicted reduced metabolic risk. This was partially explained by occupational status, but retained statistical significance in some fully-adjusted models. A one SD advantage in age 16 simple reaction time variability, related to the 21% (95% CI 12% to 30%) reduced odds of metabolic syndrome by age 36 in the basic model, and this effect remained unchanged after controlling for all covariates. The growing evidence for specific social and behavioural factors that mediate intelligence-to-mortality pathways are discussed, in respect of indirect evidence that underlying system integrity or early life confounding may contribute incrementally to the effect.

Statistical learning (SL) is believed to be a mechanism that enables successful language acquisition. Language acquisition in turn is heavily influenced by environmental factors such as socioeconomic status (SES). However, it is unknown to what extent SL abilities interact with SES in affecting language outcomes. To examine this potential interaction, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) in 38 children aged 7-12 while performing a visual SL task consisting of a sequence of stimuli that contained covert statistical probabilities that predicted a target stimulus. Hierarchical regression results indicated that SL ability moderated the relationship between SES (average of both caregiver’s education level) and language scores (grammar, and marginally with receptive vocabulary). For children with high SL ability, SES had a weaker effect on language compared to children with low SL ability, suggesting that having good SL abilities could help ameliorate the disadvantages associated with being raised in a family with lower SES.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the developmental outcomes of Chinese American children's social competence in their transition to elementary school. In this study, I used a mixed-methods research design. The first part of the study was a secondary analysis of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. I examined cultural differences in the effects of parental warmth, parental SES, parent-child communication, and children's participation in peer-oriented structured extracurricular activities on the social development of European American and Chinese American children. For the second part of the study, I developed questions based on the findings of the quantitative analysis and conducted interviews to further explore how Chinese immigrant mothers' parenting beliefs and practices contributed to their children's development of social competence. The results showed that in Chinese immigrant families, parental SES influenced parent-child communication, which in turn promoted children's social competence. Parental SES, but not parental warmth, predicted their children's participation in peer-oriented structured extracurricular activities. Years of stay in the U.S. positively predicted children's participation in peer-oriented structured extracurricular activities, while it negatively predicted parent-child communication in Chinese immigrant families. The qualitative data suggested that Chinese immigrant mothers facilitated their children's social development by giving them verbal guidance for peer problems, encouraging conversations at home, and serving as role models for their children. Children's activity participation was restricted by the affordability of activities and parents' ability to provide transportation for their children. The Chinese immigrant mothers perceived taking on daily responsibilities and spending quality time together with their children as ways to express love toward them. These mothers' childrearing practices were influenced by the generational gap and acculturation. This study broadens our understanding of Chinese American children's development of social competence in their transition to formal schooling. It contributes new knowledge about 1) cultural differences in the effects of parental warmth and SES on parent-child communication; 2) the influences of parental SES on parent-child communication and Chinese American children's participation in peer-oriented structured extracurricular activities; and 3) the effect of years of stay in the U.S. on parent-child communication in Chinese immigrant families. / text