Youth who are exposed to more adversities in life and at-risk for engaging in delinquent behaviors have been found to be less likely to have a caring adult in their life. Mentoring is among one of the most evidence-based preventative interventions/supports applied to at-risk youth in order to promote resilience/protective factors. Youth mentoring…

An emerging literature base suggests that symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) persist beyond adolescence and are associated with unique psychosocial impairment for adult populations. The purpose of this study is to examine the clinical characteristics of ODD symptoms in a young adult population. Three-hundred and five young adult…

The media is an important source of sexual information for young people, and exposure to media content influences how young people interpret and behave in sexual situations in real life. The media the youth attend to depicts alcohol use and sexual activities together, however, alcohol use is one of the major risk factors of sexual assaults, and…

Mental health professionals working in community mental health agencies are at high risk for burnout. The impact of this may lead to poor health and wellbeing of the employee, costly resources for the agency that continues to struggle with staff turnover, inconsistent service delivery and potentially poorer patient outcomes. The purpose of this…

This dissertation investigated the relationship between Linguistic Empathy and Psychological Empathy by implementing a psycholinguistic experiment that measured a person's acceptability ratings of sentences with violations of Linguistic Empathy and correlating them with a measure of the person's Psychological Empathy. Linguistic Empathy…

Children born preterm constitute one of the largest populations of children at risk for the development of language impairments. A little over one in ten pregnancies result in a preterm birth and approximately 25% of these children go on to experience subsequent difficulties with language (CDC, 2015; Foster-Cohen, Friesen, Champion, &…

The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to determine the strength of the relationship between teacher self-efficacy and discipline referrals. Participants completed the Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale, which was used as an operational definition of teacher self-efficacy. A Spearman's correlation coefficient measured the…

Sexually transmitted diseases (STD) are preventable conditions for which treatment failure (specifically in gonorrhea) is becoming problematic. U.S. young adults (20-29 years) have high rates of STD incidence and prevention of these diseases, but reaching them to provide primary prevention educations is challenging due to low perceived…

Rationale: Binge eating puts individuals at risk for dropout of weight loss treatments and weight regain after treatment. However, treatments for binge eating have not been successful at influencing weight. To improve obesity treatment, research needs to examine binge eating with new theoretical approaches, interdisciplinary paradigms that span…

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental correlational study was to determine if cumulative risk is associated with undergraduate student institutional commitment. Additionally, moderate to vigorous physical activity was investigated as a moderator of the association between cumulative risk and institutional commitment, specifically…

Purpose: The purposes of this study were first to identify and describe transition to adulthood pathways of youth with Serious Emotional Disturbance (SED) in regards to the timing and order of transition to adulthood task completion (e.g. completing education, gaining employment, living independently, marrying/close personal relationship, and…

The purpose of this study was to determine which of the three reading fluency subskills were most strongly correlated with reading comprehension in adolescent at-risk readers. The participants were 82 adolescent males (ages 13-19) who had been committed to a juvenile detention facility. Archival data from a two-year period was collected from a…

Human-service professions are at high-risk for burnout including the teaching profession. Work-related burnout is a gradual process widespread among many professionals and is in response to stressful events. Some of the current research has been focused on teachers with work-related burnout. An area of limited research has been the potential…

After an extensive literature review, results indicated research has been conducted examining the links between traditional bullying and suicide, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) identification and cyberbullying, as well as LGBTQ identification and suicide. However, it appears as though there is a dearth of studies…

Cancer can be one of the most serious diseases that can result in a costly reduction in the quality of life. Among a number of cancer risk factors, tobacco use has been identified as the leading preventable cause of deaths. Prior research has suggested that cancer information seeking may be a pre-step to adopt health protective behaviors that can…