Translation of efficacious programs into real-world settings is an important step in ensuring improved public health outcomes. Yet, the process of translating evidence-based interventions (EBIs) according to fidelity is fraught with challenges. Organizational factors, specifically organizational communication, have been shown to influence translation processes.
To date, there is limited research...
School-based comprehensive sex education (CSE) can reduce adolescent sexual health problems. However, only 49-55% of adolescents receive CSE that meets national standards. African American youth (AAY), particularly males, are less likely to receive CSE. AAY evidence a high prevalence of STIs/teen pregnancy. Internet-based CSE offers a supplemental option. We examined...
The use of electronic cigarettes (often referred to as vapes or e-cigs) has grown rapidly in the past decade. While these devices may not deliver the same level of carcinogens and toxicants as combustible cigarettes, they can deliver nicotine (a known developmental toxicant) as efficiently. Previous work suggests that, during...
Healthcare discrimination is associated with various health-related attitudes, behaviors, intentions, and outcomes including provider avoidance, underutilization or increased use of healthcare services, use of alternative means of healthcare, delays in medical care, less satisfaction with care, poor health behaviors, and poorer health outcomes. Since 2001, Muslims and Arabs in the...
Sexual assault is a major public health concern in the U.S, and college students are particularly vulnerable to victimization. A health issue that affects nearly one in four women (Fisher, Cullen, & Turner, 2000; Karjane, Cullen, & Turner, 2005) and that is associated with severe negative health outcomes, including depression...
Weight-based stigmatization (WBS) exists in healthcare and can be categorized as direct, indirect, or structural. WBS is harmful to individual’s health and contributes to worse healthcare engagement, including reduced care satisfaction, patient-centered communication (PCC), and utilization of services. Little is known about young adults’ experiences of WBS in healthcare. Young...
In the U.S., the number of people waiting for an organ donation is increasing exponentially while the number of registered donors is slowly rising. This discrepancy leads to a great number of people dying while waiting for an organ donor. The opt-in system, lack of education around donation, and having...
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MargaretDolcini, Committee Member, representing the College of Public Health and
Human Sciences
Background. The prevalence of pediatric dental caries (PDC) is 55.7% nationally, 52% in Oregon, and 73% in Southeastern Oregon. We examined prevention programs, clinical services, and water fluoride levels in Southeastern Oregon to understand the high PDC prevalence.
Methods. We conducted telephone surveys and used secondary data to assess water...
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Peggy Dolcini, Committee Member, representing the School of Social and Behavioral
Health
Through this dissertation, the quality of freely available physical activity promotion web articles that lay adults would likely locate online was critically appraised and theoretically analyzed. Three broad categories were considered. They were 1) message consistency with national health guidelines for physical activity; 2) suitability for health-related communication; and 3)...
Low-Income urban African American (LIU-AA) youth are at high risk for HIV/STIs and adolescent pregnancy. Sexual health websites (SHWs) offer an inexpensive, easy-to-disseminate, and potentially highly-accessible method of improving sexual health knowledge, awareness, and help-seeking. The present study examined engagement regarding sexual health websites for at-risk, LIU-AA youth. We conducted...
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M. M. Dolcini, Committee Member, representing College of Public Health and
Human Sciences
This study posited that maturational growth in emotion regulation should be associated with reduction in hyperactivity during the transition into adolescence. The longitudinal design assessed emotion regulation and hyperactivity in an urban community sample of children in three waves, at ages 10.6, 11.6, and 12.6 years. A parallel growth curve...
The prevalence of sexual violence among the college student population has become a significant public health issue. The real magnitude of the problem is unknown since most students do not report incidents of sexual violence. However, some studies have estimated that 1 in 5 students experience sexual violence while in...
This study contributes to our understanding of positive adult development by examining resilience processes in adulthood. Resilience is often considered to be an individual-level trait. However, the child development literature has consistently shown that support from parents and caring others is a critical component of resilience. Less is known about...
Health care providers, including complementary and alternative medical (CAM) practitioners, exert a significant influence on parental pediatric vaccination decisions. Use of CAM therapies is increasing in Oregon. Concomitantly, there has been a decade-long increase in parental vaccine refusal in Oregon, rising from 1 to 5 percent from 2000-2009. For example,...
In Zambia, there are approximately 920,000 people living with HIV/AIDS. Children are often referred to as a "window of hope" due to a low HIV/AIDS prevalence rate (UNAIDS/WHO, 2006). With growing numbers of infections and an increased strain on the social and economic structure due to HIV/AIDS there is a...
In the ever-evolving field of computer science (CS) education, the significance of teachers and their backgrounds have often been overshadowed by the predominant focus on students. Teachers in the K-12 often lack the necessary expertise and have limited support provided by existing CS-based curricula. While research on CS education effectiveness...
We have developed a framework for Web-based GIS/database applications which allow users to insert, update, delete, and query data with a map interface displayed by Web browsers. The framework was designed so that a Web-based GIS application that uses ArcIMS as a map server can be easily created, customized, and...
In this report, I first introduce three areas of interest to collaborative filtering researchers, namely: (a) how to solve the sparsity and scalability problems in recommendation systems; (b) how to rapidly develop and test collaborative filtering algorithms; and (c) how to apply collaborative filtering to unbounded numeric preference data. In...
"Collaborative filtering algorithms’ performances have been evaluated using a variety of metrics.
These metrics, such as Mean Absolute Error and Precision, have often ignored recommendations for
which they do not have data. Ignoring these recommendations has provided numbers which do not
accurately represent the user experience. Qualitatively we have seen...
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) enable software developers to utilize and create functionality that would otherwise take a lot of time and effort to build from scratch. Consequently, an essential part of software engineering training is for students to learn how to use APIs effectively. The existing jTutors system enables an...
Programming parallel machines has been a difficult and unrewarding task. The short lifespan of parallel machines and their incompatibility have made it difficult to utilize them. Our goal here is to create an environment for parallel computing which allows users to take advantage of parallel computers without writing parallel programs....
With the rapid advancement of educational technology and the need for personalized, engaging content to accommodate diverse learning needs, Virtual Reality (VR) holds promises for the present and future. However, VR applications suffer from challenges, including usability concerns, lack of pedagogical value, and evaluation standards. This thesis focuses on two...
Programming is integrated across the workflow of multiple domains where end-user programmers, those who need to program as a means to an end, regularly need to code. In the modern setting of collaborative development, end-user programmers have to interpret the intentions behind existing code to contribute and build solutions to...
In computer science, learning abstract fundamental programming concepts requiring students to understand memory management can be very difficult and lead to misunderstandings that carry on into advanced topics. This is especially true in data structures with abstract data types. Understanding how novice students think and reason about data structures is...
The design of programming tools is slow and costly. To ease this process, we have developed a design pattern catalog aimed at providing guidance about how to design tools for developers. This guidance is grounded in Information Foraging Theory (IFT), which empirical studies have shown to be useful for understanding...
The major purpose of this study was to determine if there were differences between well-trained pre- adolesents and untrained, but normally active counterparts in physical working capacity , body composition and blood lipids. The study hypotheses were that the trained subjects would have a lower mean body fat percentage, lower...
There has been little prior research reporting strategy usage in end-user problem solving, and even less using gender as a factor. Without this type of information, enduser programming systems cannot know the “target” at which to aim, if they are to support male and female end-user programmers’ debugging. As a...
The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of
teaching high school health by team teaching and traditional teaching
methods. For this study 114 second-semester sophomore health
students from Centennial High School in Gresham, Oregon were
used, distributed in three health classes as a control group, utilizing
traditional...
This study compared the perceptions of health education experts, principals and teachers regarding the ranking in order of importance of organizing school health programs within the elementary schools under the Jurisdiction of Bangkok Metropolis, Thailand. Of 604 subjects participating, 19 were health education experts from universities, Ministry of Public Health...
While there are many ways to evaluate a user interface design, the user's mental workload and situation awareness (SA) are particularly important considerations in the supervisory control of safety-critical systems. Typically, operators of these systems must monitor high-volume, time-sensitive status information. Interface design for this domain can be challenging and...
End users' programs are fraught with errors, costing companies millions of dollars. One reason may be that researchers and tool designers have not yet focused on end-user debugging strategies. To investigate this possibility, this dissertation presents eight empirical studies and a new strategy-based end-user debugging tool for Excel, called StratCel....