UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Real Partnership is Powerful: Understanding What Women Want and What They Know About Family Work and Communication
    (2024) Trovato, Karoline Joy; O'Brien, Karen M; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Women provide the vast majority of unpaid family care, resulting in relationship dissatisfaction, depressive symptoms, thwarted career advancement, and diminished earning power (Cooke & Hook, 2018; Jung & O’Brien, 2019; Woods et al., 2019). The PARTNERS video intervention (Trovato & O’Brien, 2022) was created to educate heterosexual college women about family work distribution and healthy partner communication. The intervention was effective in improving knowledge of family work and communication and enhancing confidence in communicating with a partner for 303 college women. This study builds upon prior research by Trovato and O’Brien (2022) to assess specific differences in knowledge of family work, desired partner characteristics, and communication resulting from the PARTNERS intervention, as well as to identify ways to improve the PARTNERS intervention. Results of this study indicated that that the PARTNERS intervention educated undergraduate women about family work inequity between women and men and the effect of family work distribution on women’s relationship satisfaction, changed their desired partner characteristics to align with communication-related factors, and taught women key PARTNERS communication strategies. Future directions for research and clinical implications are discussed.
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    Career Barriers of College Women across Racial/Ethnic Groups: Examination of The Perception of Barriers Scale
    (2018) Kim, Young Hwa; O'Brien, Karen M.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of the study was to examine the factor structure, measurement invariance, and psychometric properties of a commonly used measure of perceived career barriers (The Perception of Barriers Scale; Luzzo & McWhirter, 2001) with a sample of racially diverse college women. The results supported a nine-factor structure of the Perception of Barriers Scale indicating different sources of barriers. In general, configural, metric, and scalar invariance of the Perception of Barriers subscales were found across Asian American, African American, Latina American, and White American college women for the nine-factor structure. All three groups of women of color reported higher career barriers due to racial discrimination, higher educational barriers due to finances concerns, and higher educational barriers due to lack of confidence and skills than White women. The results also demonstrated the potential difference in salient barriers across Asian American, African American, and Latina American women. The reliability estimates were satisfactory and construct validity was supported by negative associations among the scores on several Perception of Barriers subscales and a career-self-efficacy measure. The findings suggested that college women experience barriers from various sources when pursuing their career and educational goals.