StFX Scholar (St. Francis Xavier University)
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Exploring prevalence and patterns of underreporting of depression and anxiety symptoms in student-athletes
No full textStudent-athletes must balance academic and athletic stressors over the course of an academic year. Stress, among other factors, may make student-athletes vulnerable to mental health disorder symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety). As part of routine screenings, many sport healthcare professionals (e.g., athletic therapists, mental performance consultants) use self-reported questionnaires to flag student-athletes for mental health disorder symptoms and refer them to clinical mental health services where necessary. While such screenings are time-effective and feasible, they may only detect a portion of all athletes who may benefit from additional care. A recent meta-analysis suggested that student-athletes tend to underreport depressive symptoms in non-anonymized screenings, missing almost 50% of athletes who would flag under anonymized conditions. Yet, original research has yet to be conducted to confirm these findings, which was the purpose of the present thesis. One hundred and eighty-eight student-athletes (female n = 91, 48.7%, Mean Age = 19.8, SD = 1.6) were recruited and invited to partake in a regular, non-anonymized mental health screening using self-reported questionnaires (PHQ-9; GAD-7), as a deception. Once the screening was completed, the deception was solved, and participants were invited to complete a second, anonymized screening of the same measures. The scores from the non-anonymized and anonymized screenings were subsequently compared statistically. Dependent t-tests indicated significantly higher mental health symptoms on the second, anonymized screenings for both depression (t(187) = 8.62, p < .001, d = .63) and anxiety (t(187) = 4.83, p < .001, d = .35). Follow-up qualitative interviews revealed a variety of barriers (e.g., stigma, denial) and facilitators (e.g., trust, transparency) of reporting symptoms. The findings yield important implications for sport healthcare professionals who wish to screen their student-athletes for mental health disorder symptoms
Deconstructing colonial land relationships through development and grassroots mobilizations
No full textContemporary land relationships are deeply colonial, entrenched in colonial comfortability and commodified conceptualizations of land. Decolonizing these land relationships entails abolishing embedded racial, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist structures, deconstructing knowledge and power hierarchies, and re-humanizing relationships among people and between people and the natural world. My thesis seeks to learn from land-based grassroots mobilizations and externally imposed land-based social and economic development programming and their decolonial potentials. My thesis considers the coloniality of contemporary land governance, the relationships local and Indigenous, as well as colonial and settler peoples have with the land, and the necessity of decolonization in order to formulate an analytical framework, which is then applied to the Land Back movement and the World Bank Land 2030 Global Partnership Umbrella Program. Through a comparative analysis of these two cases, my thesis problematizes the colonial nature of top-down development and grapples with the possibility of development initiatives being truly decolonial
Movement behaviours of university students involved in sport and not involved in sport
No full textLess than 10% of university students attain CSEP 24-Hour Movement Guidelines (Weatherson et al., 2021). Students Involved in Sport (SIS) engage in more physical activity (PA) than Students Not Involved in Sport (SNIS) but have worse sleep (Driller et al., 2017). This study characterizes the movement behaviours (i.e., PA, sedentary time, sleep) of university students, including in-season, team sport SIS and SNIS. Methods: Participants include 52 students [50% SIS; 50% women, 20.3(0.9) years old]. Participants wore a Fitbit Charge 5 on their wrist for 7 consecutive days. Variables of interest included moderate to vigorous PA (MVPA), light PA (LPA), sedentary time, and sleep duration. Data were reported as Mean(SD) and comparisons were made using a one-way ANOVA. Results: Eighty-eight percent of participants achieved weekly MVPA guidelines [SNIS: 353(192) min/wk vs SIS: 476(192) min/wk], 4% met sedentary time guidelines [SNIS: 10.6(1.3) hrs/day vs SIS: 10.2(1.2) hrs/day], 71% achieved sleep guidelines [SNIS: 8.2(0.8) hrs/night vs SIS: 8.0(1) hrs/night], and 2% met all three guidelines. SIS [259.6(68.8) min/day] engaged in 20.9(89.4) min/day more LPA than SNIS [238.6(57.0) min/day] [F(1,50) = 1.428, p = 0.238]. SIS [59.3(32.5) min/day] engaged in 20.3(45.3) min/day more MVPA than SNIS [79.7(31.6) min/day] [F(1,50) = 5.256, p = 0.026]. There was a strong negative correlation between LPA and sedentary time (r = -0.662, p < 0.001) for the entire sample. A strong negative correlation was found between LPA and sleep duration (r = -0.601, p = 0.001) for SIS, while there was no correclation for SNIS between the same variables (r = -0.252, p = 0.215). Conclusions: In-season, team sport SIS participate in more daily MVPA than SNIS, likely due to training demands of their sport. The strong negative association between LPA and sleep found for SIS may be related to LPA occupying more of their day, taking away from sleep time, a relationship not identified in SNIS
The original wicked witch: empowering wickedness, motherhood, and domesticity in Baba Yaga and modern witches
Get PDFIdeas of “good” and “bad” women leave no room for ambiguity. Andrea O’Reilly argues that women who don’t fit into the mould of the “perfect woman,” a concept instilled by the patriarchy, are considered “bad” women. In applying O’Reilly’s feminist scholarship to witches, I argue that Baba Yaga’s ambiguity challenges the patriarchal definition of witches as wicked. Baba Yaga is defined by her ambiguity, which makes her stand out as a witch figure and defies the binary of “good” versus “wicked” witches. The early European witch trials as well as the later American witch trials worked within a patriarchal tradition and cemented the idea of wicked witches. By limiting women to these moral expectations, the complexity of ambiguous representations of women are lost. Yet, Baba Yaga (Slavic, 8th century to present day) challenges this very polarization of good versus bad women. Baba Yaga offers a historical and literary starting point for examining what witches—and women—could be outside of patriarchal definitions of “good” and “bad” women. Unlike other monstrous characters in fairy tales and folklore, Baba Yaga’s role is in constant flux from text to text: she can play the role of villain, donor, trickster, or sage. In “Ivanushka”, she is a wicked witch, whereas in “Finist the Bright Falcon II” she plays a benevolent maternal guide. Speaking to this multiplicity, she sometimes plays as many as three characters in one story. My thesis will gesture towards twenty-first century examples of more ambiguous witches, such as Elphaba in Wicked, who resist the polarization of good and wicked
ChatNPC
No full textModern advancements in generative text models are revolutionizing how humans interact with technology and improve productivity. This Masters of Science thesis explores the idea of a dialogue system enhanced by said generative text models. A background on natural language processing is provided to ensure the terms and ideas are understood. My work on the natural language inference task and how it ties into a dialogue system is also discussed. Leveraging an external database, a contradiction detection system, a fact rephrasal system, and a unique approach to ranking similar records, ChatNPC allows users to have conversations with fictitious characters through a website — whilst allowing said characters to retain information from previous conversations
