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SHEDDING LIGHT ON NEW FACTORS RELATED TO BURNOUT AMONG NURSES : A MIXED-METHODS STUDY
Full text linkThesis (M.A.)--Michigan State University. Media and Information--Master of Arts, 2025Background: Burnout is characterized by profound physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion that is common among nurses. Discrimination and Sexual Harassment may cause burnout, but existing scales do not address this, which can limit understanding and contribute to inequities. More research is needed to determine how discrimination and Sexual Harassment may cause burnout. Methods: I used a novel data source: the \u2018Nursing\u2019 subreddit on Reddit in this study. I used mixed methods approach to analyze the results. Keywords were defined and I developed a Python script for automatic extraction of posts. I used BERTopic model analysis, a Machine Learning Technique, for data analysis. This topic model analysis groups together similar posts and assigns a label to it. As part of this study, I analyzed a total of 770 posts. Results: The analysis reveals that nurses of different race, ethnicity, gender, age, and religion often face unexpected and uncomfortable interactions with patients, patient\u2019s family, and co-workers. For instance, a nurse shared an experience where a patient not only made remarks about the nurse's race but also refused care from the nurse based on racial bias. The analysis also reveals that nurses, irrespective of gender, face sexual harassment both physical and verbal from patients, patient\u2019s family, and co-workers. For instance, a nurse mentioned in one of the posts how sexual remarks from a patient made them uncomfortable and made all subsequent interactions difficult. In both cases, nurses described how these encounters left them feeling emotionally exhausted, leading to burnout. Discussion: The data reveals that discrimination of any type, sexual harassment, and burnout are not separate individual conditions but are interconnected. This study suggests that discrimination and sexual harassment are not different from burnout but can instead act as triggers for it. Unfortunately, none of the existing burnout measuring scales include these two critical factors identified in this study. Therefore, I believe there is a need to update the current burnout scales to address health inequities withing the nursing workforce.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
Coil-Dominated Large Bore Superconducting Quadrupoles for High Rigidity Isotope Beams
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Physics - Doctor of Philosophy, 2025Future nuclear physic research requires the transport of high rigidity heavy ion beams. The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) requires such beams with high momentum acceptance for future nuclear physics research. This will require larger aperture magnets that can still provide efficient and accurate steering and focusing. This dissertation will discuss the electro-magnetic (EM) design, beam impact, and mechanical design along with prototyping and testing of a 18 T/m gradient and 0.2 meter diameter aperture coil-dominated quadrupole, which will serve as a future upgrade for FRIB's fragment separator.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
An Eclectic Collection of Essays on Econometric Methods
Full text linkThesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Economics - Doctor of Philosophy, 2025This dissertation provides the developments and extensions of methodologies in panel, nonlinear, and high-dimensional econometrics. Chapter 1 of the dissertation introduces and summarizes the following chapters. Chapter 2 proposes a fixed-b approximation method for inference in a linear panel model with two-way clustering. Chapter 3 considers the same dependence structure in panel models with nonlinearity and high dimensionality. Chapter 4 revisits the use of linear models for binary responses, focusing on average partial effects. Chapter 5 considers models with endogenous controls and provides alternative identification methods for a large class of models.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
Synthesis of Commodity Chemicals from CH4 And CO2-Derived Acetylenecarboxylic Acid : Exploration of Tautomerase Catalysis
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Chemistry - Doctor of Philosophy, 2025As an alternative to petroleum and biomass derived starting materials, this dissertation proposes utilization of CH4 and CO2-derived acetylenecarboxylic acid (ACA) as feedstock for commodity chemical production. These commercial building block chemicals such as 3-hydroxypropionic acid are being targeted for production via biocatalytic methods over petroleum and biomass derived methods. We look to biotechnology as an alternative route to produce these valued chemicals through enzyme biocatalysis. Here we evaluate the tautomerase enzyme cis-CaaD, which almost exclusively converts ACA to intermediate malonic semialdehyde (MSA). MSA can then be further be enzymatically converted to high priority target chemicals. We also compare cis-CaaD to the previously evaluated tautomerase Cg10062, which largely decarboxylates to acetaldehyde and produces minimal MSA. In addition, although cis-CaaD produces predominantly MSA, Cg10062 is more catalytically efficient. In our efforts to construct a highly catalytic MSA-forming cis-CaaD enzyme we used kinetic studies and protein crystallography to understand the cis-CaaD mechanism and gain a deeper understanding for the different product profiles these two enzymes produce. Previous efforts have shown the in vitro production of 3-hydroxypropionic acid from ACA. Here we look at in vivo production. Earlier experimental trials have shown that E. coli as well as many other bacterial species are not viable with ACA as a sole carbon source. However, the use of a tautomerase modified fusion protein allows the conversion of ACA to MSA in media followed by the uptake of MSA by E. coli cells. This will allow ongoing in vivo biocatalytic conversion of MSA to high priority chemicals.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
Study of pulse length limitations and current density measurement optimization for low-\u3b2 electron beams
Full text linkThesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Physics - Doctor of Philosophy, 2025Velvet cathodes are a popular emitter choice for high current electron beams and are utilized at several high dose radiography facilities, such as the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test facility. Electron emission from a velvet surface has been studied for nearly 40 years and is shown to be a result of surface flashover. These cathodes produce stable, high current pulses on timescales less than 0.3\u3bcs. After this time frame is exceeded, cathode performance is altered and becomes increasingly unreliable. A test stand has been developed to investigate the emission characteristics of a variety of cathodes with pulse lengths up to 2.2\u3bcs.In this thesis, we evaluate the temporal evolution of velvet cathodes over pulse durations ranging from 0.3 - 1.5\u3bcs and explore the dependence on diode geometry. Charge accumulation on the velvet surface results in excess electron emission that presents as intense transients or arcs in the measured current. Additionally, the expansion of the hydrogen plasma formedon the face of the cathode causes a decrease in the gap distance between the cathode and anode shrouds. The combination of these effects makes velvet an unreliable emitter choice for long pulse applications. For future radiographic facilities, cathode candidates should produce stable current pulses up to 3\u3bcs with current densities on the order of 100A/cm^2.A critical element for diagnosing the quality of a particle source is measuring the extracted current density. Popular methods utilize invasive diagnostic screens. Electron beams produced on the cathode test stand are non-relativistic, where \u3b2 = 0.5 - 0.75, and the resulting current density measurements are strongly affected by electron scatter and Cherenkov limits. Various measurement methods are evaluated including X-ray scintillation and Cherenkov emission. The limits for each measurement method and optimal measurement range are discussed for each technique and are confirmed with Monte Carlo modeling.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
Moral Humility : An Antidote to the Dark Side of Morality
Full text linkThesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Psychology - Doctor of Philosophy, 2025Morality has a dark side. Our moral tendencies breed rigidity, conflict, extremism, hate, intolerance, and violence. In this project, I proposed moral humility as one antidote to these dark features of our morality. Given that moral humility is a largely empirically unexplored phenomenon, across ten studies (N = 10,978) in this project, I investigated its measurement and structure, its nature and correlates, and its implications in a context characterized by the dark features of our morality. To these ends, I first developed a moral humility scale using psychometric factor analytic methods (EFA and CFA), which comprised of three factors\u2014moral fallibility, moral openness/learning, and moral superiority. Second, I probed its nomological network, specifically testing its relationship to personality, religiosity, ideology, political extremity, moral grandstanding, and other relevant constructs. Moral humility was associated with other constructs in expected and sensible ways, such as higher openness to experience and modesty, and lower moral grandstanding and political extremity. Third and importantly, I tested its predictive validity in the context of political polarization in the US. Polarization was chosen as the context because research has suggested that it is a moralized context with features associated with the dark aspects of morality. Across correlational studies, I found that moral humility was associated with lower levels of polarization across a range of outcomes. It was associated with lower antipathy and antagonism towards outgroup, lower rigidity in one\u2019s own political views, and lower rejection of compromise and contact, amongst other outcomes. These findings provided strong evidence to suggest that moral humility could be ameliorative in contexts that bring out our dark moral nature. These studies also established moral humility\u2019s incremental validity over related and important constructs like moral relativism and intellectual humility, indicating that moral humility is likely a distinct construct and has unique explanatory value. Finally, I designed five moral humility interventions and tested its impact on moral humility and polarization using experimental design. I found that some interventions worked more consistently in increasing moral humility \u2013 providing evidence that moral humility can be targeted and increased using interventions. These interventions also lowered polarization, such as decreasing antipathy against political outgroup and increasing willingness toward cross-cutting exposure, thus further supporting moral humility\u2019s predictive and causal role in moralized and high-conflict situations. The experimental studies also established moral humility\u2019s discriminant validity from close constructs like moral relativism and intellectual humility, reinforcing that moral humility offers a distinct and meaningful mechanism through which moralized conflicts and contexts can be understood and addressed. This project also highlighted gaps in the current understanding of moral humility and laid the groundwork for future inquiry into the nature and significance, such as its impact on moral behaviors and moral improvement, mechanism underlying change and development of moral humility, and contextual and cultural variations in moral humility. Taken together, this project is the first comprehensive investigation into moral humility. By developing a validated measure, mapping its conceptual network, and demonstrating its predictive and causal role in moralized context like political polarization, this research establishes moral humility as a theoretically meaningful and practically consequential construct. It provides insight into how moral humility could help counter the dark and ugly aspects of our morality and quell the rigidity, intolerance, and antagonism that often accompany moralized intergroup conflicts. Finally, it opens doors for a deeper understanding of moral humility across outcomes, individuals, context, and cultures.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
Comparing the Effects of Video Model and In Vivo Prompt Procedures on Teaching Vocal Mands to Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Full text linkThesis (M.A.)--Michigan State University. Applied Behavior Analysis - Master of Arts, 2025Deficits in language and communication skills are defining attributes of an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis. Therefore, explicit instruction is often required to help children with ASD develop vocal mand repertoires. The present study extended Plavnick and Vitale\u2019s (2016) study comparing the effects of two mand training procedures. Using an adapted alternating treatment design, the present study compares the effects of in vivo modeling and video modeling on the acquisition and mastery of vocal mands in two preschool aged children with ASD attending an early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) center. The results showed that both in vivo mand training and video-based mand training were effective in teaching children with ASD a variety of vocal mands. These findings indicate that when effective, an in vivo model is likely the most efficient and convenient method for teaching vocal mands. However, a video model may be appropriate in mand training when individuals have a history of vocal prompt dependency or when a child is struggling to acquire mands using in vivo mand training procedure.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
STRIKES VERSUS SCORES : A COMPARISON OF TWO VERSIONS OF THE GOOD BEHAVIOR GAME AND THE IMPACT OF INTERVENTION ON GENERAL EDUCATION STUDENTS AND STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL EDUCATION NEEDS
Full text linkThesis (M.A.)--Michigan State University. Applied Behavior Analysis - Master of Arts, 2025Disruption in classrooms presents challenges to both teaching and learning. A common and well-researched Tier 1 support to address disruption is the Good Behavior Game (GBG), however little research exists on impacts of this intervention on students with special learning needs in a mainstream general education setting. This study utilized a single case research design replicated across four students, two of which have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), to determine the differential effects of two different versions of the GBG. Visual analysis of intervention results was used to draw conclusions about differences in effectiveness in increasing on-task student behavior. Results suggest little difference in effectiveness for the two general education target students, and mixed results for the two target students with ASD. This study suggests that more research is needed on the effects of universal interventions on students with special learning needs to understand what modifications may need to be made to improve effectiveness. Implications for practice and other suggestions for future research is also discussed.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
Large Language Model (LLM)-Based Health Coaches in Virtual Reality (VR) : Effects of AI Agents\u2019 Nonverbal Behavior on Rapport and Health Outcomes
Full text linkThesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Communication - Doctor of Philosophy, 2025We used rapport theory as the framework to examine the effects of LLM-based embodied conversational agent (ECA)\u2019s nonverbal behaviors in the context of health coaching. To conduct this study, we built two types of LLM-based health coaches in virtual reality using the Unreal platform. The less rapport-building health coach displayed minimal nonverbal behavior during conversations (e.g., no direct eye contact, no upper body movement) while the more rapport-building health coach displayed various rapport-building behaviors (e.g., smiling while listening, upper body movement while responding). Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two types of health coaches and completed six coaching sessions with the same health coach in immersive virtual reality (VR). Findings showed that those who interacted with the more rapport-building health coach expressed greater attentiveness across all six sessions (measured via ratio of gaze on the health coach). Also, we found attentiveness and subjective rapport during the initial interactions (sessions 1 and 2) as the most promising predictors of human clients\u2019 overall satisfaction with the intervention at the end of all six sessions. Finally, the results indicated that the more people interacted with the health coach, the more they felt they benefited from the sessions, with effects even more pronounced for those who interacted with the more rapport-building ECA. These findings have significant implications for communication research and practice.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
Improving Grounding Ability of Vision and Language Navigation Agents
Full text linkThesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Computer Science - Doctor of Philosophy, 2025Understanding and following human instructions is crucial for intelligent agents to interact with humans in real-world environments. One formal problem setting designed to facilitate advancing this direction of research is Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). VLN requires the agent to carry out a sequence of actions in a photo-realistic simulated indoor environment in response to natural language instructions. Although significant progress has been achieved in this direction, navigation agents still have challenges understanding instructions and accurately grounding them in their visual perception.To elaborate, the challenges include 1) lacking explicit learning of spatial semantics in both text and vision modalities, 2) difficulties in handling ambiguous instructions and the lack of explainability, and 3) gaps in language understanding for navigation in realistic environments, such as continuous and 3D spaces. In this thesis, we develop new techniques to address these challenges. First, we explicitly model spatial semantics to improve the navigation agent\u2019s grounding by incorporating navigation progress, the alignments between textual landmarks and visual objects, and the corresponding spatial directions. Besides, we design specialized modules to capture distinct semantic aspects through corresponding pre-training tasks, enabling the effective acquisition of the respective skills. Second, to help agents deal with ambiguous instructions, we introduce a translator to convert the original ambiguous instructions into easy-to-following instructions considering recognizable and distinctive landmarks. The designed translator bridges the gap between the instruction given by humans and the agent's visual perception ability. Furthermore, to improve the explainability of the decisions made by the agent, we introduce a language generator for the navigation agent to equip it with the ability to generate explanations about navigation progress, navigation difficulties, and observed visual objects in the selected target view. Such explanations enable the agent to explain the situation from its own perspective, enhancing its ability to interact with humans effectively. Third, to advance navigation in a more realistic setting, we contribute to language grounding in continuous and 3D environments. For navigation in continuous environments, we introduce a dual-action-perception module that integrates a low-level action decoder, jointly trained with high-level action prediction. This design enables the VLN agent to learn and ground the selected visual view to the corresponding low-level controls. Additionally, in 3D environments, we develop techniques to enhance the agent's situated spatial understanding, further improving its navigation capabilities in 3D scenarios. We evaluate our proposed methods across different commonly-used navigation benchmarks and provide comprehensive quantitative results and qualitative analysis. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our explicit grounding modules, the proposed pre-training tasks, and the synthesized data incorporating recognized and distinctive landmarks, significantly enhance navigation performance, generalizability, and language grounding ability. Additionally, our novel architectures designed for continuous and 3D environments push the boundaries of navigation agent research to real-world scenarios. Notably, these advancements contribute to improved interpretability of the agent's decision-making process, offering deeper insights into the rationale behind its navigational actions.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references