Browsing by Subject "Readiness"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Battered women’s help-seeking: a turning point from victimization to readiness.
    (2009-05) Park, Eonju
    This exploratory qualitative study investigates battered women's help-seeking on the continuum of their victimization and readiness. This study starts with a conceptualization of battered women's help-seeking strategies and identifies positive and negative help based on twelve women's perceptions of those services. Finally, this study suggests a conceptual model for battered women's help-seeking from formal social services. In-depth interviews with twelve survivors of domestic violence revealed that these battered women sought help from formal social services toward the end of their abusive relationships, and utilized diverse help-seeking strategies from various help sources including but not limited to seeking protection from the criminal justice system. They especially perceived formal social service agencies and personnel as positive if the personnel valued self-determination, validated that the abuse was not the women's fault, and provided resources to (re)build their self-sufficiency. In addition, formal social services were often able to protect them from the abuse. In this regard, positive help from formal social services influenced the women's readiness to change by affecting the construction of a turning point. Negative help from formal social services kept battered women in the status quo only before they approached their turning point. Not wanting to minimize the importance of the criminal justice system's response in fostering the batterer's accountability, this research found that it is also essential to focus on battered women's varied and self-identified needs and to increase their accessibility to these resources. This study suggests that formal social services help women end the abuse by respecting women's self-determination and promoting women's readiness to reach a turning point.
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    Consumers and Makers: Exploring Opposing Paradigms of Millennial College Readiness
    (2017-04) Jackson, Matthew
    The political and technological circumstances of the past two decades have culminated in opposing epistemic paradigms of college readiness, where millennial students’ conceptual understanding of “learning” is both narrowed to meet the demands of school systems bound to accountability and amplified by a rapidly evolving digital world. The researcher theorized that students situated within these paradigms may have developed dispositions toward the purpose of learning as primarily either consumption-oriented (consumers) or creation-oriented (makers). This study hypothesized that correlations existed among these consumer/maker dispositions and millennial college students’ epistemic beliefs and key learning skills. The researcher developed an original survey instrument that was provided to a sample of 625 first year students (primarily 18-19 years of age) at a Midwestern liberal arts university. Quantitative, statistical analyses of responses were completed to develop constructs, understand variables, and determine the nature of relationships between variables. The results of these analyses found that respondents were 3-to-28-times more likely to demonstrate consumer dispositions than maker dispositions. The data supported the hypothesis of this study: statistically significant, positive correlations were present in 13 out of 24 instances, suggesting that as one approached the likelihood of having a maker disposition, one was also more likely to exhibit sophistication of epistemic beliefs and to have initiated or developed key learning skills through both high school experiences and the use of information-communication technologies.