Ph.D., Antioch University, 2025, Leadership and Change

Domestic violence profoundly affects multiple facets of a survivor's life. While most existing literature on survivorship addresses the immediate aftermath of domestic violence, this study delves into the extended process following the trauma of abuse to attain “thrivership,” a new concept in the scholarly and practice literature that emphasizes enduring well-being and flourishing. This dissertation examines the journeys from surviving to thriving for 13 women who transformed themselves and their lives to achieve well-being after traumatic domestic violence. Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory was applied to examine the multiple layers of environmental influences on an individual's development, including the micro, meso, and macro systems. This framework provides a tool for a comprehensive understanding of how factors interact within and between different levels of a survivor's environment that can impact their journey towards thrivership. Employing a qualitative phenomenological approach with a novel analysis technique called exploratory situational thematic analysis, this study explored the essential, interconnected elements at the micro, meso, and macro levels that facilitated thriving for survivors of domestic violence. Incorporating Tedeschi's concept of post-traumatic growth, the study emphasized the positive psychological changes that can occur as a result of struggling with and overcoming highly challenging life circumstances. This perspective on post-traumatic growth highlights the potential for survivors to develop new understandings of themselves, others, and the world around them, leading to a more prosperous and meaningful life. By investigating the process of becoming a thriver after experiencing domestic violence, this research underscores the pivotal role of post-traumatic growth and the long-term nature of the process in survivorship. The findings point to the need for comprehensive, trauma-informed, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: J. Beth Mabry PhD (Committee Chair); Philomena Essed PhD (Committee Member); Susan M. Omilian JD (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Mental Health; Organizational Behavior; Personal Relationships; Public Health; Public Policy; Rehabilitation; Social Psychology; Social Research; Social Work; Womens Studies

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2009, Leadership and Change

Communities of Practice (CoPs) have become a widely used method to enhance knowledge management, knowledge transfer, innovation and learning in large, complex organizations. Since first introduced by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, the concept has been widely discussed in the private, public and educational sectors. Much of the literature has focused on either the abstract, theoretical underpinnings or the structural elements of CoPs with little attention paid to the actual experience of individual participants in CoPs - in effect reflecting the perspectives of the architects and builders of a home but not the occupants. This Grounded Theory study uses a combination of both Situational and Dimensional Analysis to explicate the experience of the participants in a number of CoPs functioning in the British Columbia Public Service. The intent is to offer a deeper understanding of the internal dynamics within CoPs for those interested in facilitating successful CoPs. The British Columbia Public Service (BCPS) is a large, knowledge-based organization delivering a wide variety of programs and services across a large, economically and culturally diverse, jurisdiction. The challenges faced by the BCPS are similar to those faced by other knowledge-based organizations. The use of CoPs is wide-spread in the BCPS displaying a range of structure from highly formalized to relatively informal. This research, based on 21 unstructured interviews and supported by other documentation, presents a model that helps to clarify both the relationship between CoPs and other organizational sub-groups as well as capturing the dynamic, member-driven nature of CoPs. It is anticipated that individuals interested in CoPs will find this modeling helpful in understanding how CoPs function from the perspective CoP participants. The dissertation also attempts to draw linkages to other pertinent theory related to group dynamics, hu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Holloway PhD (Committee Chair); Peter Vaill DBA (Committee Member); Donald Polkinghorne PhD (Committee Member); Michael Carroll PhD (Other) Subjects: Management; Organization Theory; Organizational Behavior; Public Administration

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2008, Leadership and Change

Evolving Learning: Educators' Inner Experiences of Engaging in Service-Learning with Undergraduates is an exploratory, qualitative study of faculty members' learning, growth, and development in service-learning contexts. Through two, interwoven forms of constructivist grounded theory – situational mapping and dimensional analysis – this dissertation brought voice to a once ‘private' perspective, making explicit what all is happening as participants make meaning of their experiences engaging in service-learning with college students. A three-phased series of recursive, comparative interviews and concurrent analysis resulted in the development of a grounded theory best captured by a core, organizing perspective – evolving learning. This perspective is comprised of five intersecting dimensions: (1) bearing witness, (2) navigating, (3) reconciling expectations, (4) resolving and reorienting, and (5) locating self in humanity. Both novel and exploratory, this dissertation adds extensively to extant literature, contributing significantly to our understanding of how educators adapt, transform, or make meaning of their own engagement. Also, the study unveils a number of opportunities for qualitative and mixed methods inquiry on faculty teaching, learning, engagement, and development.

Committee: Alan E. Guskin PhD (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Holloway PhD (Committee Member); Eugene Rice PhD (Committee Member); Devorah Lieberman PhD (Other) Subjects: Developmental Psychology; Education; Educational Psychology; Educational Sociology; Educational Theory; Higher Education; Sociology; Teaching

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2007, Leadership and Change

The theory of relationship formation developed in this study tells a coherent story about the relational work of service initiation in technology outsourcing. The study is focused on the contractually defined period of time at the beginning of outsourcing service delivery. As with a play-within-a-play, this work goes on primarily behind the scenes, away from the concurrent task of launching the inter-firm relationship between the client and the provider that will extend for the term of the full contract. This grounded theory study was completed over an eight-month period. The findings are grounded in interviews with 25 individuals who were actively involved in the work of service initiation. Additionally, data sources included extensive observation and access to documents and other artifacts. Data analysis was completed with the analytic processes of dimensional and situational analysis. The situational analysis describes five continuously shifting aspects of the situation that create the context, or supporting structure, for relationship formation. The dimensional analysis builds from the situational analysis to describe four deeply interrelated dimensions: (1) Helping, (2) Veiling / unVeiling, (3) Having Expectation, and (4) Responding to Turbulence. The study then presents a conceptual model of a grounded theory of relationship. It is through the enactment of this total model that relationship formation can be recognized as a vehicle for accomplishing work. An understanding that relationship formation depends on a way of recognizing and honoring the power of relationships and the role they play in supporting the everyday tasks of service initiation emerged from this work. As a result, this study does not strive to define relationship as one thing or even a group of things. Instead, it proposes a conceptual model through which relationships are formed and can be recognized as such.

Committee: Elizabeth Holloway (Advisor) Subjects:

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2024, Leadership and Change

This dissertation project used an interpretivist qualitative research design to study how the right-to-read claim made by seven teenagers attending Detroit public schools in 2016 reflects, addresses, or describes contemporary discussions about educational access. Using situational analysis (SA) as a theory/method, the entirety of the claim comprises the situation of the social phenomenon being studied, not the people. This research combines critical race theory (CRT) with Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems and uses situation analysis to map historical discourses to conduct a study that examines the history of a present situation of inquiry as presented by this question: How does the 2016 right-to-read claim made by high school students in Detroit, Michigan reflect, address, or describe contemporary discussions about educational access? The study collected data to allow me to construct a prosopography that articulates an answer to the question that claims access to literacy is a public school policy right. Because situational analysis (SA) is designed to open research data to aspects of a circumstance that may have been overlooked, marginalized, or silenced, I was not certain the research results would answer this exact question. Additionally, critical theory and SA were used to conduct this qualitative research, examining historical data that addresses the right-to-read claim as a Foucaultian programmatic social problem. As such, it seeks to understand the complexities of recurring and historically situated education practices that limit actualizing U.S. education policies that embrace access to basic literacy skills as a human right. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Committee: Philomena Essed PhD (Committee Chair); Harriet Schwartz PhD (Committee Member); Shawn Bultsma PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Adult Education; African American Studies; African Americans; African History; African Literature; American History; American Literature; American Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Community College Education; Community Colleges; Continuing Education; Counseling Education; Curricula; Curriculum Development; Early Childhood Education; Education; Education Finance; Education History; Education Philosophy; Education Policy; Educational Evaluation; Educational Leadership; Educational Psychology; Educational Sociology; Educational Theory; Ethnic Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Gifted Education; Higher Education; Higher Education Administration; Hispanic American Studies; Hispanic Americans; History; Multicultural Education; Philosophy; Political Science; Preschool Education; Public Administration; School Administration; Teacher Education; Teaching

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2023, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Information Technology

This study explores perception analysis via the lenses of machine learning and natural language processing. To reflect the efficacy of machines in analyzing crisis situations, the research incorporated the concepts of knowledge discovery and inference generation through three interconnected studies. The first study demonstrates the capability of an intelligent system to capture human perception toward COVID-19. This intelligent system features text preprocessing, identification of cues in a sentence structure, and the use of the TextBlob tool to gauge the perception of the identified cues. The second study tackled one of the limitations of the first research - the issue of negation and multiple negatives in natural language processing. To solve this problem, the study employed a negation disambiguation framework when dealing with negations and multiple negatives. The third study combines the benefits of the first two studies in gauging human perception by taking into account sentence structure, contextualization, text transformation, and, most importantly, people's views with respect to a causative agent (entity). The three studies show a transition from one solution to another, an indication that an automated system can achieve better accuracy in classifying crisis-related data and ultimately improve response techniques available to various stakeholders.

Committee: Jess Kropczynski Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Chengcheng Li Ph.D. (Committee Member); Shane Halse Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kelly Cohen Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Information Technology

Doctor of Organization Development & Change (D.O.D.C.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Organization Development

The purpose of this dissertation was twofold; first to advance the Use of Self (UoS) construct by examining the dimensions of UoS, then to develop an instrument for people to self-assess how they view and use themselves in the workplace. The validity and reliability of the Use of Self Survey Instrument (UoS-SI) were analyzed using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and reliability analysis. A preliminary EFA was conducted using principal component analysis with a Promax rotation method which supported the three factor-structure of the instrument. The three dimensions of Self-Awareness, Situational Awareness, and Intentional Action were comprised of 55 initial items that were reduced to 33 (eleven per factor) after the items that did not load, cross-loaded, or were substantially the same as another item that loaded higher were removed. The final three-factor structure was run using PCA as the extraction method with a Promax rotation method with the remaining 33 items. The resulting structure loaded cleanly with the three factors of Self-Awareness, Situational Awareness, and Intentional Action, explaining 53.09% of the variance in the relationship patterns of the items and the factors correlating at r > .51. This supports the assertion that the three factors are part of the larger UoS construct, while also being unique and highly reliable with Cronbach alphas a >.90. This also supports that the UoS-SI is a valid and reliable instrument. This research is important because it further extends the empirical evidence on UoS and contributes to the body of knowledge within organizational contexts. Much of the UoS literature focuses on helping-type professions and specifically in the therapy and Organization Development & Change (OD&C) fields. However, little empirical research has been conducted on UoS and there is no known research on how professionals outside of these helping disciplines in organizations use UoS in the workplace. Addressing this limitation is importa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steven Cady Ph.D (Committee Chair); Jari Willing Ph.D (Other); David Jamieson Ph.D (Committee Member); Colleen Boff Ed.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Management; Organization Theory; Organizational Behavior; Personal Relationships; Social Research

Ph.D., Antioch University, 0, Leadership and Change

Preceptors play a vital role in supporting nursing/midwifery students and new employees' transition and assimilation into their new role. Furthermore, with the increasing focus on educating more qualified nurses and midwives to meet health-related United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, there is a need for a more standardized and coordinated approach to preceptorship training. As former Head of the Nursing/Midwifery Training Institution in Ghana, I observed first-hand that the system of preceptorship needs improvements. Published literature on preceptorship has shown that the practice plays a vital role in healthcare delivery. However, most of the existing literature preceptorship is from developed countries, with little research from developing countries like Ghana. This study explored the practice of preceptorship in selected nursing/midwifery and healthcare institutions in Ghana. Situational analysis was used to examine the complex dynamics of the preceptorship program. It consists of three main procedural tools: situational maps, social worlds/arenas maps, and positional maps. Several important factors were found to impact preceptorship in Ghana. Key ones were motivational (monetary) challenges, lack of training of preceptors, politicking related to the development of preceptorship manuals, supervision, and outdated procedure guidelines for on-the-job teaching students. The study offers a series of recommendations to improve preceptorship practice at micro, meso, and macro levels. Additionally, they may enable regulators and policy makers in Ghana to formulate policies leading to a more robust preceptorship program to strengthen the skills of nursing/midwifery profession. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Committee: Aqeel Tirmizi Dr. (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Holloway Dr. (Committee Member); Mary Asirifi Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Adult Education; Nursing

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2021, Leadership and Change

The U.S. intelligence community is a critical mission industry responsible for protecting lives and safety in ways that impact the global security environment. Research on the deleterious impact of toxic workplace behavior on other critical mission fields, such as health care and the U.S. military, is robust. However, intelligence scholars publishing within the unclassified arena have been silent on the phenomenon, how personnel respond to it, and how it may impact the intelligence function. This lack of scholarship has afforded an opportunity to understand what constitutes toxic behavior in the intelligence environment and how it may affect U.S. national security objectives. This study presents a theoretical model of response to toxic workplace behavior among intelligence officers in the U.S. intelligence community that centers on a single goal: Holding Self. Using grounded theory methodology and situational analysis in two segments, the study examines how intelligence officers responded and the role that efforts to hold onto self-concepts played in those responses. The findings included three psychological dimensions, three action dimensions, and two inter-dimensions of response. The findings also included identification of the broader ecological situation conditioning response and how those choices operationalized into the business of being intelligence officers. The final model serves as a foundation for future empirical research on the topic. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, https://aura.antioch.edu/, and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/.

Committee: Elizabeth Holloway Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Aqeel Tirmizi Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jan Goldman Ed.D (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Cognitive Psychology; Gender; Personal Relationships; Political Science; Psychology; Social Research

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2020, Leadership and Change

The world of women in law enforcement is a thought-provoking one that has received increasing attention both in academia as well as in practice over the past few decades. Even more intriguing, and despite advances in the profession, is the low number of women in executive leadership positions in law enforcement. There is a vast underrepresentation of women in top executive leadership positions across the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the complex journey of women to top executive policing leadership positions. Embracing a positive psychology approach, the study used grounded theory in combination with situational analysis to answer one overarching question: What have been the experiences of women leaders in policing as they have progressed in the profession to executive rank? This allowed for a comprehensive exploration of the micro, or individual level factors, alongside the meso or macro factors, encompassing larger group interactions, social structures, and institutions, that from the women's perception had been critical in their leadership experiences. The study offers a theoretical model—A Web of Intersections—as a framework for understanding the complex journey of women, and the social processes and multiple intersections they have learned to navigate that can in combination, help them to advance to top executive policing leadership positions. The women in this study are agentic and not simply following the lead. They are active, deliberate, and intentional participants in their own journeys, making critical and strategic decisions that can gain entry to policy decision-making that can result in sustainable change. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/

Committee: Elizabeth Holloway (Committee Chair); Lize Booysen (Committee Member); Dorothy Schulz (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Criminology; Gender; Gender Studies; Management; Organizational Behavior; Social Research; Sociology; Womens Studies

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2020, Leadership and Change

This single, exemplar case study explored the context and social processes that shape person- and family-centered culture in a long-term care (LTC) home, using grounded theory and situational analysis for the data collection and analysis. Findings revealed one core dimension: needing to be heard, valued, and understood, and five key roles: personal support workers (PSWs), executive director (ED), senior leadership, nurse managers, and residents and families, which informed five dimensions, each focused on enhancing care for residents: (a) attending to residents' daily care needs (PSWs), (b) advocating strategically (ED), (c) translating vision into programs and policies (senior leadership), (d) ensuring quality of care on the unit (nurse managers), and (e) seeking social connection and meaningful stimulation (residents and families). These interactions left PSWs with little autonomy, feeling rushed, focused on tasks, and prevented from building relationships with residents. The PSW perspective was often missed in decision-making, as decisions were made for this group rather than with them. A complex theoretical model of the interactions and the systemic blind spot they have unintentionally created is presented in the discussion. The results suggest that empowering PSWs is pivotal to improving quality of care in the LTC sector. Further research is needed to determine which methods of empowerment are most meaningful and effective. Future studies could also explore LTC homes of different sizes and with different types of governance, the competencies required by the different roles to foster a person- and family-centered LTC culture, and the criteria for relational practice and leadership in LTC. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/, and is accompanied by one supplemental file.

Committee: Elizabeth Holloway PhD (Committee Chair); Donna Ladkin PhD (Committee Member); Madelyn Law PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Gerontology; Health Care; Health Care Management; Organizational Behavior

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2019, Leadership and Change

The purpose of this study was to unearth how adolescents with substance use disorders achieve the task of identity formation and the construction of self-concept in the midst of the drug culture and society that exists. It sought to uncover the social constructs designed to ignore and/or remove human complexities and allow an intersectional approach to be brought to a study on this population. Historically, there has been a failure to investigate the underlying social attitudes and behaviors that impact the very delicate and vulnerable process of finding self. Psychosocial and relational adjustment are strongly influenced by the extent to which adolescents successfully develop a coherent and structured sense of identity. One's life pathways and decisions are guided by a consolidated sense of self. An understanding of key identity literature led to a methodological design using both Grounded Theory Methodology and Situational Analysis to provide a thorough description and understanding of the entire situation around identity development for adolescents with substance use disorders. The detailed analysis of the interviews provided by 20 adolescent females served as the basis for the development of a theoretical model depicting the findings from both the dimensional analysis and situational analysis. The research provided empirical evidence that adolescents in this situation form a pseudo-identity to achieve a sense of belonging that has pervaded their existence due to familial, social, and cultural factors. This pseudo-identity is reinforced by acceptance into drug-seeking and substance-using groups, as well as by leadership and practices in treatment, therapy, healthcare, criminal justice, and other macro forces. The research provides practical implications for prevention and intervention practices, as well as leadership practice. Recommendations for future research invite further exploration into whether the situation for the participants in this study hold true acr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lize Booysen DBL (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Holloway PhD (Committee Member); Karsten Lunze PhD, MD (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Behavioral Sciences; Clinical Psychology; Counseling Education; Criminology; Curriculum Development; Demographics; Developmental Psychology; Early Childhood Education; Education Policy; Educational Leadership; Families and Family Life; Health Care; Mental Health; Personality Psychology; Pharmacology; Psychotherapy; Public Health; Public Health Education; Public Policy; Social Work; Teacher Education; Therapy

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2009, Leadership and Change

Healthcare is a complex and dynamic environment containing a plurality of social forces and perspectives that shape the organizational culture and the nature of the leadership. As leadership is a social phenomenon, it is important to understand the complex social processes that mediate our perceptions and that in turn influence processes of leader attribution. The central purpose of this study has been to illuminate the nature of culturally specific processes that emerge within a specific organizational setting and that fuel leader attribution and the social construction of leadership. Accordingly, this qualitative study has developed a Grounded Theory utilizing Situational Analysis to study leadership in a comprehensive healthcare organization. The electronic version of this dissertation is at OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd.

Committee: Elizabeth Holloway PhD (Committee Chair); Mitch Kusy PhD (Committee Member); Donald Polkinghorne PhD (Committee Member); Nick Nissley EdD (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Community; Health Care; Management; Organization Theory; Organizational Behavior; Social Psychology

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2008, Leadership and Change

This study concentrates on the voice of registered nurses as they describe their experiences of leadership within the nontraditional, non-institutional, non-hospital environment of assisted living. It further expounds upon regulatory and corporate information as context for the nurses' leadership experiences. The desire to hear nurses describe their personal experiences of leadership influenced the decision to use grounded theory as a methodological process. The belief that voice requires context to be most effectively understood influenced, in turn, the addition of a situational analysis approach to the grounded theory methodology. As a result, interviews and scrutiny of contextual elements form the core of this study. The expectation that registered nurses will assume a leaderly presence has increased during the past 20 years as significant changes in the overall climate of health care have taken place. The study identifies many of the factors included in this change, specifically an alteration in the locus of care from hospitals exclusively to more diverse settings. Because of the limited presence of physicians in the extra-hospital world, nurses and administrators now form a leadership dyad in these settings and are charged with managing organizations delivering complex chronic patient care. Assisted living is a creative residential option that has been developed for elders who prefer individual choice in addition to physical care support. This study analyzes the themes and overriding influences explicated in personal interviews with nursing leaders in a variety of assisted living communities in one state. It also describes the contributing elements inherent in the healthcare and assisted living environments for their contextual implications. One important aspect of this study is its separation of nurse and physician leadership elements. It seeks to highlight those factors that emerge as supporting or denigrating nursing leadership experiences in an environment (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Holloway PhD (Committee Chair); Peter Vaill DBA (Committee Member); Laurien Alexandre PhD (Committee Member); Heather Young PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Health Care; Nursing