Graduate Theses and Dissertations
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The Library is undergoing a migration to Spartan Search, where the UoTIR will be integrated in with our catalog. Current capstones, theses, and dissertations will be housed in the Digital Collections found here: https://ut.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01UTAMPA_INST:SpartanSearch
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Item Role Strain and Job Satisfaction in Registered Nurses(Nursing Department, The University of Tampa, 1996-06-27) Schmidt, Lee Alan; Patricia Schultz, RN, EdDThis study investigated role strain as an extra-work correlate of job satisfaction in the registered nurse population. Prior investigations of job satisfaction in registered nurses have limited the focus of inquiry to factors within the work environment or the context of the job itself This study moved beyond these environmental and contextual factors and examined the relationship between the strain produced by occupation of multiple roles and global job satisfaction. For this inquiry, role strain was conceptualized as a subjective response of tension or frustration which occurred when role demands conflicted. Global job satisfaction was defined as an overall evaluation of the job itself, processed through individual norms, values, and expectations. Ninety eight randomly selected registered nurses participated in the study. Respondents completed a mailed survey which assessed role strain, global job satisfaction, the number and type of roles occupied, the percentage of time spent in these roles, and their perceived satisfaction with performance in roles. Demographic information related to this study and the population of registered nurses in general was also collected. Findings noted significant, inverse relationships between role strain and global job satisfaction and between role strain and self-reported satisfaction with performance in roles. A significant relationship between role strain and the number of roles occupied was also demonstrated. The relationship between role strain and the total percentage of time spent in roles was not significant. These .findings provide some support for the position that job satisfaction is not limited to the contextual elements of the work environment or work itself Rather, job satisfaction may be affected by factors outside the organizational structure. This information should be useful to administrators as they plan programs directed at enhancing the job satisfaction of registered nurses.Item The Impact of a Videotaped Educational Tool on Medical Directive Choices(Nursing Department, The University of Tampa, 1999-07-29) Bonnie A., RiceAgreement on the appropriateness of the use of medical technology should be the standard for healthcare providers and consumers. An inventory and dialogue regarding end-of-life decisions between providers and consumers prior to the onset of illness avoids the potential for confusion and prevents compromised care. This quantitative experimental study collected data regarding the impact of a videotaped teaching tool describing commonly used critical care interventions on a medical directive. The term medical directive describes an advance directive document with specific interventional preferences linked with potential patient outcomes. The educational packets were divided into experimental and control. The control packet contained a trifold with the medical directive, a letter of introduction, a demographic data questionnaire, a teaching brochure, and informed consent. The experimental packet also contained the educational videotape in addition to the other documents. 811 packets were distributed in the Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area. 175 medical directives were returned (93 experimental & 72 control). The hypothesis tested was that the number of negative responses will be higher in the experimental group when predicted outcomes are poorer. The null hypothesis stated that the percentages of yes and no answers would be equal between the control and experimental groups. The overall differences in the percentages of affirmative answers in recovery scenario #1 and #2 (no disability and minor disability) revealed no statistical significance (p=0.738 & p=0.408 respectively). There were statistically significant differences (both p=<0.001) between the control and experimental groups in recovery scenarios #3 and #4 (mod. disability and severe disability). This places the differences in responses in direct relationship to the potential outcomes. The most desired intervention in both control and experimental groups was antibiotics, and the least desired was endotracheal intubation. CPR was also consistently listed as more desirable in the control group than the experimental group. These data suggest additional education regarding critical care interventions may result in more informed decision-making.Item FLESH IS NARRATIVE: a collection of poems(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2013-11-15) Duncan, Catherine MooreThis manuscript contains 64 poems, written in primarily open verse with some use of meter and measure in the line, as well as a blending of forms. The collection is comprised of variations on the theme “loss” within the presented subjects of family relationships, marriage and motherhood; loss and recovery; betrayal and forgiveness. One focus is the duality of our existence, sweet/bitter, sorrow/joy, mind/body connections, and explore that balance in poetry by making use of imagery and layers. The collection can be viewed as a lifespan within a female voice, somewhat chronological. This progression is echoed in the title “Flesh is Narrative” as well. In some poems, the body is overt; in others, the probing spills from woman into the natural world, though even poems that depict landscape often do so in bodily terms: the ash tree as a woman’s beauty, a rosebud becomes a vagina, and the wild violets’ leaves are outstretched hands. The collection is a composition about a life in progress and is varied accordingly. Any development in the poems has been toward the idea of exploring the narrative life of mind and emotion in the more tangible experiences of the flesh.Item THINGS I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO SAY: A Mosaic Memoir(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2013-12-31) Wanser, Mary M.This creative thesis project is a collection of personal essays that constitute a memoir manuscript. Intermingled among traditional essay forms in this collection are experimental layouts, including several fragmented pieces made of abbreviated snapshots in time that when pieced together form a larger picture. There is a braided piece that entwines two different stories set in two different time frames, an alphabetical list, and even a personal letter. Several relevant photos are scattered throughout the book making this work a true mosaic. Each chapter has a confessional quality, and the self-revelation merges into a didactic tone in some of the later chapters. Beneath the overarching themes of secrets and taboos are instances of abandonment, abuse, and death by various means. The bulk of the content is bleak, but reasons for hope abound in the end. The uniqueness of this memoir lies in the author’s ability to weave seamlessly in and out of time with the use of historic present tense verbs alongside past tenses. This effect of drawing a reader into scenes that occurred distant in time is the single most fascinating lesson the writer carries away with her from The University of Tampa’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program.Item Rules and Other Broken Things: A Novella and other short stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014) Grilli, KatItem Dark Humor Thesis(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Garbatini, MatthewThere is humor in everything. Not necessarily “ha ha” humor, but humor nonetheless. My topics of interest all derive from this theory. The mere absurdity of my characters and their situations are what make my stories entertaining. I consider myself to be a dark humorist, not to be confused with black humorists, who I have come to learn are completely different. Though I may write about the most taboo of topics, I do so in a way that touches on them from a comedic standpoint. Instead of just pointing out the drudgeries of life I choose to celebrate them. Dark humor is just that. It is dark. But what most people fail to realize is that even in darkness there is light. It is when you go black that you turn off that light completely.Item Harry and Mary, Dancing the Twelve Steps(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Richstone, Barbara A.Item The Suicide House: A novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) O’Sullivan, KymJamie Lorne doesn’t understand why her mother is abandoning the family. This isn’t the first time her mother has left, after all. The last time was fourteen years ago when Jamie was three years old. She doesn’t remember much about that situation, except that her older brother was angry, her baby brother was cared for by a surly nanny, and her father turned to alcohol to drown his loneliness. These hidden memories begin to awaken when Jamie and her friends explore the site of a recent suicide, manifesting themselves as shadows and voices that urge her to hurt herself. Fortunately, many forces help Jamie stay both safe and sane. Her loyal friends act out a role-playing game, in which Jamie assumes a fearless character who can deal with any situation. Mason, a skater boy with perfectly crooked teeth and smiling eyes, keeps the horrid cockroaches at bay and her troubles in perspective. Her two brothers give insight to her past while relating to her present plight. Even the animals that live inside the Suicide House instinctively stop her from harming herself. Most of the novel is set in a suburb of Tampa, Florida. It takes place in modern times over the course of two months, beginning a few weeks prior to Halloween and ending a few days after Thanksgiving. In the first part of the story, Jamie struggles with her feelings about her mother and how the situation affects her family. She and her friends begin exploring the Suicide House and Jamie meets Mason and his friend Gene, who both have issues with their mothers. In the second section, the family takes a trip to Washington DC to visit her mother where she gains information about her past and about her mother’s motivations for moving. Upon their return to Tampa, the family struggles through Thanksgiving without Jamie’s mother. Friend troubles abound as Jamie has a one-sided conflict with her best friend, Sarah, and Mason’s friend, Gene, attempts to commit suicide. Moving into the final portion of the book, Jamie’s father flies back to Washington DC and Jamie heads to Ybor City with Mason, leaving younger brother Pete alone. As the book comes to a climax, Pete goes missing, Mason treats Jamie badly, and a secret about Jamie’s best friend is revealed. A frightening event takes place at the Suicide House, and as Jamie attempts to find Pete, her memories finally work their way free. In the end, she confronts her mother and comes to terms with the fact that her mother is not perfect and never will be.Item Middle Class American Proverb(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Davis Jr., JohnItem [Untitled](MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Smith, DerryThis story examines the life of a man who, because of events that occurred in his life, not only questions the validity of hell, but decides to make a career of advocating a belief against it. The theme is revealed when he is pushed to substantiate his belief and realizes there is no authority, there is no one proven truth, and that belief is individual and can’t be considered wrong, only different. This theme is replicated is each chapter as conflicts arise that have no one correct solution, yet the protagonist fails to recognize this pattern. The techniques that I worked to hone in my story include distance, remaining in scene, and character development that doesn’t interrupt the story’s progression. I kept very close to my protagonist, always narrated from his point of view and perspective, which changed as he matured and experienced incidents and circumstances that tried his basic beliefs. The story moved from scene to scene rather than leaning on summary and exposition to bring the reader up to speed. Even explanations are stingy, only written within the scene as a scant reason for a character’s behavior or attitude. The protagonist’s character was also built as the story moved—in fact, the characters’ motivations produced movement and therein the story existed. Momentum was not stopped for description. Instead, reactions to situations and choices in conflict exhibited character.Item [Untitled](MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Murray, AWhen Liz, a successful freelance journalist, catches her fiancé in bed with Mwewa, a woman she considers inferior, she writes off Zambian men, a decision that riles her mom, a traditional marriage counselor, who sees Liz’s nonconformist outlook on marriage—that it should be monogamous—as the reason she fails to land a husband. Liz moves on and falls in love with Marvin, an American, in a whirlwind online romance. With Marvin, she glimpses her idea of an ideal relationship, and a trip to the altar seems inevitable; at last, Liz can silence the bitter debates with her mom. But Marvin vanishes. His e-mails bounce back, his profile disappears from the website Liz met him and apart from a photograph he e-mailed her, she has no way of tracing him. Liz refuses to accept losing Marvin. She walks out on her thriving career, defies her culture and sets off to find him. En route, she learns that Marvin had cheated on her— with Mwewa. Reeling from this devastation, Liz witnesses Ivor, a blast from her past, show Mwewa the affection Liz thought Zambian men incapable. When she gets to America and discovers that Marvin’s identity is a sham, Liz parallels his behavior to that of Zambian men. She reevaluates her convictions about deception as well as her mom’s teachings. Told in third person close point of view with events laid out in chronological order, the principle theme is that sometimes it takes leaving to appreciate one’s home and culture.Item BONECLOCKS: A Hybrid-Genre Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Tomassi, Adriana F.Boneclocks is a hybrid genre work consisting of a nonfiction foreword and a novel in multiple voices that utilizes typography, artwork, poetry and prose. The published version will be much more intricate and laden with imagery and all handwritten text will actually be handwritten. My genre is poetry, but I have been allowed to float between genres in making this novel. These are only excerpts or vignettes as the novel is over 35,000 words and would be too long for this thesis.Item Better Times Than These: A Novel or Selections from a Novel or A Collection of Essays/Poems/Stories or Nonfiction(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Cox, DanielBetter Time Than These is a compilation of eight short stories whose central themes revolve around the characters’ constant striving for goodness up against the simple human truths of hunger, weakness, honor, lust, and courage, to name a few. Some manufacture their own misery and slide into darkness, while others, by simple fate, find themselves faced with impossible situations with impossible odds. Through the gearing of the physical to the felt, these characters push the bounds of human nature by subverting the myths upon which our preconceived notions rest, calling all certainty into question. They allow us, as readers, to stack cruelty against compassion, evil against good, and give us a glimpse of the possibility of redemption and grace for even the worst of us.Item Memento Mori: Selections from a Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Halley, Nicholas A.The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the viability of writing to an audience both literary and involved in the genre fiction market, and to showcase this in selections of a novel in sequence. The novel in question is a fictive narrative. The thesis aims to integrate the elements of speculative genre fiction with those of literary fiction and to create a hybrid of the two styles as a result. The manuscript serves as a genre piece, specifically science fiction, with an emphasis on portrayal of characters in a literary manner. Action and internalization of external conflict are both utilized to create a duality of heightened tension, both from a literal and figurative standpoint. Character interaction and narration serve as the primary means of plot progression in lieu of authorial narration. The thesis is divided into two halves, each alternating with character viewpoints: one half involves the business and romantic dealings of the primary protagonist, while the second half concerns itself with corporate and military espionage on the part of multiple antagonists. The two halves periodically intertwine with emphasis on revealing successive character interaction, with an emphasis on integrating the various cast members into a cohesive related whole.Item FRIDAY WAS THE BOMB: A Collection of Essays(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-01) Deuel, NathanIn 2008, Deuel, a former editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, and his wife, a National Public Radio foreign correspondent, moved to the deeply Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to see for themselves what was happening in the Middle East. There they had a daughter, and later, while his wife filed reports from Baghdad and Syria, firefights erupted and car bombs went off right outside the family's apartment in Beirut. Their marriage strained, and they struggled with the decision to stay or go home. At once a meditation on fatherhood, an unusual memoir of a war correspondent’s spouse, and a first-hand account from the front lines of the most historic events of recent days— the Arab Spring, the end of the Iraq war, and the unrest in Syria—Friday Was The Bomb is a searing collection of timely and absorbing essays.Item The Russian Dead: A Collection of Stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-02) Alboher, Resa MarieThe Russian Dead, by Resa Alboher is a collection of thematically interwoven fiction and nonfiction using fictional techniques set mainly in Russia during the Yeltsin years, but moving back and forth in time, place and memory. This work, through its numerous characters and narrators (including the author herself) and by its style –fragmentary and meandering—is a philosophical exploration of the nature and quality, substance and tone of death, change, stagnation, transition, unity, and fragmentation, and raises the question of whether it is possible to create a work of art about the collapse of the Soviet Union (or indeed of any collapse) that doesn’t reflect that fragmentary nature in its very style. Thus this work is a story told in fragments, and the question of the artistic merit of the fragmentary itself is raised, and the characters who wander through this collection, both real and fictional, living and dead, wonder if anything in their lives can ever feel whole again, and this worried question reverberates in the book’s style and tone. We see characters who have died and yet their lives go on after death pretty much as before, and death bringing no resolution becomes a metaphor for all changes political and otherwise. The work is divided into three sections: “Gogol Was a Realist,” “The Fragmentary,” and “The Russian Dead,” and is as much a meditation on the themes in the works of Gogol as it is on anything else.Item A Fine Line: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-02) McConkey, Ryan K.A Fine Line is a novel set during the Great Tribulation. Nothing has turned out like it was supposed to. The Great Tribulation has been going on for eight years, but Jesus has yet to return. The anti-Christ rules over a united world, and those who defy him are forced underground. The last remnant of Christ takes to the sewers, where they are hunted night and day for profit. Imprisonment awaits all who are captured, a fate that is said to be worse than death. With little to place their hope in, the last remnant is forced to make a series of difficult decisions. Should they wait it out hoping for the rapture to finally take place, or should they stand on faith and fight against the anti-Christ? Is it possible to stop that which has been foreordained by God? For every decision there are consequences, and for every act of free will there is a destiny that cannot be altered. Though much is made concerning the indisputable difference between good and evil, you will find that the two are only separated by a fine line in the middle that makes all the difference in the world.Item BACKBEAT THE WAVES: Selections from a Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-03) Wilhelm, GreggSet in a time between glam rock and filthy punk, “Backbeat the Waves” washes over the summer that changed Mercury Widdershins’s life. His divorced mother struggles to keep the family bar from sinking. His gay uncle gets promoted to tollmaster of the city’s new bridge that completes the beltway circuit. His strung-out sister bursts about like a seagull popping Alka-Seltzer. His extended family of barflies includes a wooden-legged charlatan, a former stripper with dementia, a reporter with literary aspirations, an AWOL sailor of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, arabbers, beat cops, and ballplayers. Merck’s life completely spazzes when his cousin arrives from Appalachia—as alien as a Wookie—bringing with her a weird look, strange words, a radical attitude, and ultimate questions. Together, they discover their own liberating music, their unique sexual identities, and their separate solutions to what the future holds. Told from the perspective of popular late-night disc jockey Mercy Withers, over the course of her last shift before a station format change, “Backbeat the Waves” explores moments when people exist between things: city and country, adolescence and adulthood, male and female, perseverance and mortality. For a summer that witnessed the death of a universal “king” and the launch of human culture toward interstellar space, the most dramatic events happened at home.Item MISTAKES BY THE LAKE: A Collection of Stories and a Novella(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-03) Petkash, BrianThe work is a collection of stories and a novella set in and around the urban landscape of Cleveland, Ohio. Each story follows characters in different decades who are lost, misplaced, displaced or transforming in the shadow of a city that, itself, is lost. The work depicts characters working to sort out lives of sorrow and suffering, to discover true hope in an impersonal and deteriorating city that, for all that it could offer, does little to provide solace. The stories in the work move from pastoral, fairly nostalgic and small-town-seeming atmospheres to gritty, urban landscapes, landscapes broken by the harsh realities of a changing city. Stylistically, the writing is meant to be both economic and vivid, and ultimately reflects the working class, domestic realist school of American fiction with tendencies toward the absurd, the tragic, the comic.Item THE WOUNDED: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-03) Perlman, CullyTHE WOUNDED is a novel set pre- and post-WWII in the fictional town of Blacksoot, Colorado. Barstow Little, the protagonist, is psychologically damaged after witnessing the assault of his uncle, Nathan, and later Nathan’s death at the hands of Barstow’s uncle Joseph as well as Barstow’s father, Jonas. Before the war Barstow must navigate not only the physical world of Blacksoot and life on his family’s farm but the confusion in his reality created by the trauma he experiences growing up a Little. As Barstow matures, he is unable to cope with all that he has witnessed in a constructive manner, and while he does attempt to follow the understood laws, norms, and mores of civilized society, circumstances dictate he stray from those norms as a way of ensuring his survival. Establishing himself as a man in the shadow of his father and uncles, Barstow’s only true ally is his mother, and in his development Barstow discovers that he is rarely better than the men he has come to loathe, and in some ways more wounded than them all.