Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationCaring communities support the healthy growth of young people by fostering caring one-on-one relationships as well as a sense of connectedness to the overall community. Through these mechanisms, caring communities are critical context;s for positive youth development. Day camps may be uniquely situated serve as caring communities, particularly through effective program design and staff implementation. Little is known about the ways these processes foster positive youth outcomes, especially youths' perceptions of a caring community. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effects of program design and staff implementation on campers' sense of day camp as a caring community. A quasi-experimental, mixed repeated-measures design was used to assess the impact of program design and staff implementation on campers' sense of caring community. Caring one-on-one relationships between campers and camp staff facilitate a positive camper climate which in turn promotes an overall sense of connectedness to camp. Caring and connectedness, then, were the dependent variables in this study. The independent variables were a staff training targeting program design and a training targeting implementation. The design-based training oriented camp staff to a set of Caring Activities that staff members incorporated at camp. The implementation-based training focused solely on staff members' ethic of care. Three municipal day camps participated in this study, two of which received the trainings and one was a comparison condition. Campers from all three sites completed the instrumentation three times during the summer: Time One assessed baseline levels of caring and connectedness and Times Two and Three assessed the impact of each of the training sessions. Analysis of the dependent variables revealed three notable findings. First, a profile analysis of caring revealed a significant time by treatment interaction, which suggested that campers' sense of camp as a caring community depends on whether their counselors received staff training or not. A follow-up planned comparison on caring revealed a significant difference between treatment and nontreatment conditions at Time Two but not at Time Three. Profile analysis of connectedness revealed a significant but negative trend over time in both treatment and nontreatment conditions. The findings and their implications for caring communities are discussed

Scaffolding: A Promising Approach to Fostering Critical Thinking

Many undergraduate students struggle when asked to engage in critical thinking. One approach we have found useful in fostering critical thinking is scaffolding, a process that involves the use of prompts, supports, and modeling to build a removable structure from which students can learn complex thinking skills. Through the development of these critical thinking skills, students are better able to analyze and formulate recommendations for real world applications. This paper discusses how to incorporate a critical thinking scaffold to guide the design and facilitation of a case-based learningdiscussed

Strengthening the Relationship between Undergraduate Professional Preparation Programs in Parks, Recreation, and Tourism and Graduate Leisure Studies

This article stems from a conversation among academic leaders of graduate-oriented departments of parks, recreation, and tourism across North America who participated in an administrator summit at Zion Ponderosa Resort in southern Utah September 23-26, 2010. The University of Utah’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism hosted the summit, and among the many topics discussed was the need to strengthen the relationship between undergraduate professional preparation programs in parks, recreation, and tourism and graduate leisure studies. In many respects, the tension between undergraduate and graduate programs reflects the tension between research universities and the world of professional practice. We examine this tension in both contexts and recommend specific courses of action to relieve it

Training Staff to Create Caring Communities: Promises and Challenges

Caring communities support the healthy growth of young people by fostering caring youth-staff relationships as well as a sense of connectedness to the people and norms within that setting. Out-of-school-time (OST) programs may be uniquely situated to serve as caring communities, particularly if staff are trained to facilitate caring activities and employ an ethic of care when interacting with youth. These processes can also be described as program design and staff implementation. Program design, which refers to the structured aspects of a program, differs from implementation, or the ways staff interacts with youth throughout the program, because design factors are typically robust to differences in individual staff members’ style. Implementation, on the other hand, varies with respect to the individual staff member. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a two-part staff training intervention focusing on program design and staff implementation on youths’ sense of caring community. Findings from this study and their implications for managers of OST programs are discussed

Special Issue: Perspectives on the Value of the Camp Experience

This special issue brings attention to a broad range of current research that explored the varied contributions of the camp experience to positive youth development. The camp experience described in these articles included many types of programs (e.g., nature-based, sports, arts), duration (e.g., day/overnight, multi-day/multi-week), settings (e.g., wilderness, public and private natural areas), and audiences (e.g., urban/rural, children with medical needs, low income). The articles addressed topics such as 21st century skill development through camp, developmental outcomes related to career/college readiness and life success for campers and staff, developmental values of camp for specialized audiences such as medically-oriented campers, leadership development in young staff, relationship of quality programming to youth development, and relationships between nature-based experiences and youth development. All of the articles offer practical implications and applications for practice as well as contribute to theory and the body of knowledge. As with all good research, this special issue leaves the reader with new information but also identifies relevant questions for future research and evaluation

The Future of Leisure Studies in Research Universities: Administrators\u27 Perspectives

This article summarizes the content of a three-day administrative summit held at Zion Ponderosa Resort in southern Utah in late September 2010. Department chairs, heads, and deans representing 13 universities across North America offering leisure studies doctoral degrees, master\u27s degrees, and undergraduate professional preparation degrees gathered to entertain eight multifaceted questions pertaining to their future. The questions were generated by a Delphi Process, and responses to the questions were recorded and analyzed following the summit by a team of doctoral students and professors from the University of Utah. The article concludes with a brief discussion of an administrator\u27s responsibility in leading leisure studies departments in times of fiscal austerity, and recommending a to-do list to ensure the future of leisure studies in public research universities

GABAergic currents in RT and VB thalamic nuclei follow kinetic pattern of α3- and α1-subunit-containing GABAA receptors

Inhibitory postsynaptic currents (IPSCs) of the thalamic reticular (RT) nucleus are dramatically slower than in the neighboring ventrobasal (VB) neurons. It has been suggested that α3-subunit-containing receptors underlie slow IPSCs in RT neurons, while rapid synaptic currents in the VB nucleus are due to γ-aminobutyric acid A receptors (GABAARs), including the α1-subunit. In our recent study [Barberis et al. (2007) Eur. J. Neurosci., 25, 2726–2740] we have found that profound differences in kinetics of currents mediated by α3β2γ2 and α1β2γ3 receptors resulted from distinct binding and desensitization properties. However, a direct comparison between kinetics of neuronal GABAARs from RT and VB neurons and α3- and α1-subunit-containing receptors has not been made. For this purpose, current responses to ultrafast GABA applications were recorded from patches excised from neurons in VB and RT areas. Deactivation kinetics determined for RT and VB neurons closely resembled that in currents mediated by α3β2γ2 and α1β2γ2 receptors. In RT neurons, currents elicited by non-saturating [GABA] had a remarkably slow onset, a hallmark of α3-subunit-containing receptors. In VB and RT neurons, single-channel currents elicited by brief GABA pulses had similar characteristics to those of α1β2γ2 and α3β2γ2 receptors. However, in stationary conditions, similarity between single-channel currents in neurons and respective recombinant receptors was less apparent. We propose that the non-stationary kinetics of GABAergic currents in VB and RT nuclei mimic that of currents mediated by α1- and α3-subunit-containing receptors. The dissimilarity between stationary kinetics of neuronal and recombinant receptors probably reflects differences between GABAARs mediating phasic and tonic currents in these neurons

Estimating EQ-5D utilities based on the Short-Form Long Term Conditions Questionnaire (LTCQ-8)

Purpose: The aim of this work was to develop a mapping algorithm for estimating EuroQoL 5 Dimension (EQ-5D) utilities from responses to the Long-Term Conditions Questionnaire (LTCQ), thus increasing LTCQ’s potential as a comprehensive outcome measure for evaluating integrated care initiatives. Methods: We combined data from three studies to give a total sample of 1334 responses. In each of the three datasets, we randomly selected 75% of the sample and combined the selected random samples to generate the estimation dataset, which consisted of 1001 patients. The unselected 25% observations from each dataset were combined to generate an internal validation dataset of 333 patients. We used direct mapping models by regressing responses to the LTCQ-8 directly onto EQ-5D-5L and EQ-5D-3L utilities as well as response (or indirect) mapping to predict the response level that patients selected for each of the five EQ-5D-5L domains. Several models were proposed and compared on mean squared error and mean absolute error. Results: A two-part model with OLS was the best performing based on the mean squared error (0.038) and mean absolute error (0.147) when estimating the EQ-5D-5L utilities. A multinomial response mapping model using LTCQ-8 responses was used to predict EQ-5D-5L responses levels. Conclusions: This study provides a mapping algorithm for estimating EQ-5D utilities from LTCQ responses. The results from this study can help broaden the applicability of the LTCQ by producing utility values for use in economic analyses

Mapping 123 million neonatal, infant and child deaths between 2000 and 2017

Since 2000, many countries have achieved considerable success in improving child survival, but localized progress remains unclear. To inform efforts towards United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3.2—to end preventable child deaths by 2030—we need consistently estimated data at the subnational level regarding child mortality rates and trends. Here we quantified, for the period 2000–2017, the subnational variation in mortality rates and number of deaths of neonates, infants and children under 5 years of age within 99 low- and middle-income countries using a geostatistical survival model. We estimated that 32% of children under 5 in these countries lived in districts that had attained rates of 25 or fewer child deaths per 1,000 live births by 2017, and that 58% of child deaths between 2000 and 2017 in these countries could have been averted in the absence of geographical inequality. This study enables the identification of high-mortality clusters, patterns of progress and geographical inequalities to inform appropriate investments and implementations that will help to improve the health of all populations