STUDENT: Morgan Sewack

PROJECT ADVISOR: Xialing Lin

ABSTRACT

Cleanliness and making good hygiene a practice, during this Covid-19 pandemic, is crucial for staying safe, throughout the rest of this pandemic. The purpose of this project is to propose various communication strategies and channels, in order to further the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Clean Hands Count Campaign’s message. The Clean Hands Count Campaign was originally created to not only bring awareness about hand hygiene, but also to inform their healthcare providers and their patients about the practices, recommendations, and importance of hand hygiene. The Clean Hands Count campaign is significant, as it helps bring awareness to this issue, in order to lower the risk of getting contaminated with diseases or infections from unwashed hands. Within this project, I will be discussing different methods the CDC can use, in order to reach their message to different age groups through varying communication channels and platforms.

Keywords: Cleanliness, hand hygiene, CDC, communication channels, communication platforms.

STUDENT: Alexandria Galbraith

PROJECT ADVISOR: Renae McNair

ABSTRACT

This study aims to test whether or not resilience is an innate experience and if resilience impacts how well infants who require intensive care respond to therapies and their outcomes. This study will be a longitudinal study and will look to see if infants who exhibited more resiliency in infanthood continue to exhibit more resiliency in adulthood. 500 infants requiring critical care will be evaluated for resilience. The selected infants will have bloodwork drawn on a weekly basis to measure cortisol and adrenalin levels while the monitors will record vital signs. Behavioral cues such as shaking or crying will be observed and noted. In adulthood, the patients that consented will be asked complete CD-RISC assessment, NAQ-R and WHO-5 assessments to see if there is a correlation between their resiliency exhibition in the NICU and in adulthood.

Second Place in Category #4 – Social Science

STUDENT: Emily V. Mattes

PROJECT ADVISOR: Renae McNair

ABSTRACT

Trauma can be experienced in several ways, either directly or indirectly, that cause an individual to respond emotionally. The purpose of this conceptual research is to compare how direct and indirect trauma affects an individual to be resilient when focusing on the trauma experienced through sexual violence among adults. Through conceptual research on victims who experienced trauma directly and individuals who have experienced trauma indirectly through sexual violence will be exposed to several measurement scales: Connor-Davidson Resiliency Scale (CD-RISC), Impact or Event Scale- Revised (IES-R), Happily (N)ever After Survey, and semi-structured telephone interviews to test the resilience among four groups of participants; Group 1 (DG1) participants who have experienced trauma directly, Group 2 (IG2) participants who have experienced trauma indirectly in the form of family/friend, Group 3 (IG3) participants who have experienced trauma indirectly by working with victims, Group 4 (IG4) participants who do not have a personal/professional relationship to a victim but have experienced trauma indirectly through media. Results showed when exploring literature, that direct and indirect experienced trauma did not affect resiliency, but the level of impact, indirect individuals’ relationship to induvial who experience trauma through sexual violence, and re-traumatization over time affect an individual’s ability to be resilient.

STUDENT: Caitlyn Powell

PROJECT ADVISOR: Renae McNair

ABSTRACT

People with major depressive disorder undergo many diverse types of treatment to help them cope with symptoms of their depression and more effectively handle everyday functioning. Throughout the course of treatment, resilience to mental health and environmental struggles may be fostered. This research will examine two commonly used treatments, psychoanalysis and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), to assess whether one is more conducive to resilience-building than the other. This research will include a longitudinal study of adults with major depressive disorder diagnoses based on DSM-V criteria, who have not received treatment for more than two weeks since the time of their diagnoses. Participants will be selected from Amazon’s MTurk. Participant depression and resilience will be measured using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), respectively. Measures will be taken every 4 months for two years. This research seeks to support or disprove three hypotheses: H1 — Psychotherapy and CBT will foster resilience in patients with major depressive disorder, H2 — More resilience, on average, will be fostered by CBT than psychotherapy in individuals with major depressive disorder, and H3 — Patients in remission will have the greatest levels of resilience, followed by patients with less severe cases of major depressive disorder, with more severe cases showing the lowest levels of resilience throughout the course of treatment. Literature review suggests partial support and partial rejection for H1, support for H2, and was inconclusive for rejecting or supporting H3.

Keywords: depression, Major Depressive Disorder, resilience, psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, mental health, Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, Beck Depression Inventory

STUDENT: Ashley Gay

PROJECT ADVISOR: Renae McNair

ABSTRACT

The United States releases approximately half a million people from state and federal prisons every year which means research regarding offender reentry has continued to hold relevance (Rade et al., 2017, para. 1). This study seeks to contribute to the current scientific knowledge database about the effects that long-term resilience training can have on the reentry/reintegration results of formally incarcerated adults by proposing a research-driven conceptual study proposal and theoretical analysis based on existing literature and new data collected from two groups of formerly incarcerated adults. Both groups are asked to undergo evaluation via questionnaires and interviews during various time periods following incarceration release while only one group is asked to undergo resilience training throughout that time. Data from these two groups are then individually assessed and compared. It is expected, based on the results, the data will show a higher level of societal reintegration for those who have undergone the long-term resilience training following incarceration release of the participating adults.

Keywords: Resilience, Reentry/Reintegration, Long-term

STUDENT: Michael Foder

PROJECT ADVISOR: Renae McNair

ABSTRACT

The major purpose of the research being conducted is to determine if there’s a certain extent of stress/bullying/harassment that college/pro athletes can handle through social media platforms such as twitter, Instagram, and Facebook before it starts to affect them on the field/court or even their personal lives. More specifically, I want to show how athletes at these levels seem to have higher resilience than most people, and how they usually are able to use the hate and rude messages for motivation, but it has been able to get athletes into a depression to the extent of harassment and the pressure put on them to perform at those levels. This research was conducted through use of prior research and studying normal people, division 1 college athletes, and pro athletes. The Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire and Connor-Davidson Resilience scale were used as measurement methods and the results showed that athletes at these levels have higher resilience than most people but further research must be conducted to see what level they can take before it truly starts to affect their performance and even personal lives outside of their sport.

keywords: Resilience, bullying, social media, athletes

STUDENT: Maggie Podunajec

PROJECT ADVISOR: Renae McNair

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine the relation between resilience levels in human trafficking survivors and survivor depression and suicide rates. This study examines resilience levels using the Connor and Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), depression rates using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and suicide risk using the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS) and a suicide ideation questionnaire. A negative correlation between resilience levels and depression and suicide rates would suggest that resilience provides human trafficking survivors with a defense against negative psychological outcomes when compared to survivors with low levels of resiliency. With a founded correlation between resiliency and depression and suicide rates, this research can change the way that behavioral scientists approach treatment of human trafficking survivors. Treatment can focus more on resiliency, leading to a possible decrease in survivor suicide and depression rates.

Keywords: Resilience, human trafficking, depression, suicide

STUDENT: Paige Good

PROJECT ADVISOR: Renae McNair

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this research is to look at resiliency of a parent after a miscarriage or a loss of their premature child. I want to investigate how they overcome this loss, if they ever can, and examine how they got there along with how long it took them to get there. I think it would be interesting to explore this loss at each trimester as well. I also want to look at the parent’s relationships after this occurs. I would expect that the earlier in the pregnancy, this would be easier to overcome and that their relationship would still be the same as it was prior to the pregnancy. I specifically want to find answers to the questions, how do parents who suffered in a loss of baby by a miscarriage or premature labor overcome this loss? How does this effect their relationships with one another? Do these factors differ depending on how early or late in the pregnancy this occurs? When a parent goes through a loss of a child prematurely or by miscarriage, it will damage their relationships with one another and affect their family, as well as have a long time of overcoming this afterwards. I think it will be less damaging and a shorter period if it is in an earlier trimester. It will be tougher later in the pregnancy. We found families through online parent groups and pages. Each family consisted of only the mother and father of the loss child, or either only the single mother or father if one was unavailable.

Keywords: Resiliency, Parents, Premature Birth, Miscarriage, Loss of child, Parental relationships

STUDENT: Jason E. Chumard

PROJECT ADVISOR: Renae McNair

ABSTRACT

Conceptual research and literature reviews were conducted to assess whether resilience can act as a buffer regarding employee job satisfaction and subjective well-being when experiencing workplace bullying. Operationally defined for this research, workplace bullying can be considered harassing, offending, socially excluding, and/or negatively affecting someone’s tasks during shift hours. The aim of this research is to measure resilience within individuals and gather information on how higher levels of resilience act as buffers to the negative affects of workplace bullying. Several scales were used to measure resilience, workplace bullying, job satisfaction and subjective well-being such as the Connor-Davidson Resilience scale, the NAQ-R, the WHO-5 well-being index, and the Job Satisfaction scale. Results concluded that resilience does not act as a buffer regarding the negative affect of workplace bullying pertaining to subjective well-being, however negative correlations were found between bullying affecting job satisfaction. This evidence can conclude that resilience does not act as a stand-alone effective resource to buffer workplace bullying. Further research can implement this data to formulate workplace bullying intervention programs as well as resilience building workshops for employees among organizations.

Keywords: Resilience, Workplace Bullying, Job Satisfaction, Subjective Well-Being.

STUDENTS: Zachary Larioni, Justin Ruby

PROJECT ADVISOR: Renae McNair

ABSTRACT

A serious injury is one of the biggest challenges a professional athlete can face. Some of the greatest athletes in the world have had their career derailed by injury. Yet, there are several examples of athletes who have recovered from injury and continued to perform at elite levels. This study compares injury recovered athletes’ resilience scores to resilience scores of the general population. Male professional athletes (M= 35 years old) and female professional athletes (M= 33 years old) were subjected to the Connor-Davidson Resiliency Scale (Connor & Davidson, 2003), the Generalized Self-efficacy Scale (Sibilia et al., 1995), and the Original Resilience Scale (Wagnild & Young, 1993). Their scores were compared to male non-athletes (M= 34.6 years old) and female non-athletes (M=33.8 years old). The professional athletes had significantly higher resilience scores than those of the non-athletes. This result of this study could potentially help explain why certain athletes are able to recover from injury and succeed afterward. Future research could compare recovered athletes to athletes who struggled to fully recover from injury.

Keywords: Resilience, Major Injury, Recovery, Professional Athletes, Non-Athletes