Senior Year Of College Research Articles

Does Subjective Well-Being Improve Self-Rated Health from Undergraduate Studies to Three Years after Graduation in China?

The health status of emerging adults is at risk. Although subjective well-being is one of the factors closely associated with health, their longitudinal relationship is not clear among emerging adults. The study aimed to investigate the prospective relationship between self-rated health and subjective well-being in emerging adults. The study collected longitudinal data from a total of 1021 Chinese college students (537 males and 484 females) for five years, including two years in college and three years after graduation. In the baseline survey, the average age of the sample was 21.57 years old. Descriptive statistics indicated that both self-rated health and subjective well-being significantly decreased from the senior year of college to the year after graduation. Correlation analysis revealed that self-rated health and subjective well-being had a significant positive relationship. In the five-wave random intercept cross-lagged panel model, subjective well-being unidirectionally predicted self-rated health. In other words, the subjective well-being in the previous year could positively predict self-rated health in the following year, but the previous self-rated health could not predict subsequent subjective well-being. Given the significance of emerging adulthood to individual development, more attention and care should be dedicated to improving subjective well-being so as to maintain good health and engagement in work.

Love as a Business Strategy: Resilience, Belonging and Success Book Review and Reflection

Teaching students about the value of organizational culture can be a daunting task for university professors. At faith-based universities, faculty face the additional challenge of connecting faith in Christ to organizational culture and answering the questions about how our faith should be reflected in our leadership. In Love as a Business Strategy: Resilience, Belonging and Success, authors Anwar et al. (2021) lay out the plan to flip any culture into a culture of love just as they have done at Softway, a software company Anwar created in 2003 during his senior year in college at the University of Houston. This book attempts to illustrate the methods they used along with sharing the stories of their journey and lessons learned. Though this is a secular market book, the biblical connections are evident on each page, and the lessons students can learn are transformational.

Diving Lessons

Diving Lessons

Similarity and Contact Frequency Promote Mentorship Quality among Hispanic Undergraduates in STEM.

Mentoring relationships can be important for promoting the success and persistence of undergraduates, particularly for students from historically underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. While mentoring is often cited as important for attracting and retaining students from underrepresented groups in STEM, little is known about the differential mentoring processes that can result from similar and dissimilar mentor–protégé pairs. The present study tests the process-oriented mentorship model (POMM) regarding how mentor–protégé similarities and the moderating role of contact frequency influence mentorship quality and STEM research career persistence intentions among faculty-mentored Hispanic STEM majors in their senior year of college. The results indicate that mentor–protégé similarity matters. Specifically, higher levels of mentor–protégé psychological similarity were related to higher levels of psychosocial support and relationship satisfaction. Hispanic students with a Hispanic faculty mentor reported engaging in more coauthoring opportunities than peers with non-Hispanic mentors. Among those with higher contact frequency, students with same-gender mentors had higher levels of relationship satisfaction than peers with different-gender mentors; however, there were no differences among those with low contact frequency. Additionally, protégés who reported coauthoring support were more likely to also report commitment to pursuing a STEM research career.

Crossing unlikely paths in science.

Crossing unlikely paths in science.

The Career-Related Parental Involvement Scale: Development and Validation Among College Senior Emerging Adults in India and the U.S.

The senior year in college is a pivotal time for emerging adults as they plan and make career decisions for their post-college lives. During this challenging transition, parents may be a safeguard; however, little research identifies how parents are involved in their emerging adult’s career development. The present study examined career-related parental involvement (CRPI; for mothers and fathers separately) from the perspective of graduating seniors in India and the US to develop and validate a new CRPI scale. Participants (India n = 1544; US n = 247) completed the CRPI scale and other related measures. Findings suggest that the 20-item CRPI scale represents three dimensions of career involvement across cultures and parents: Support, Interference, and Disengagement. Results supported the scale’s convergent and concurrent validity (e.g., negative association between disengagement and parent-emerging adult relationships). Notable role differences between parents were observed across cultures. Implications include the use of this scale across diverse cultures.

My Bedeviled Country

My Bedeviled Country Susan Neville (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo courtesy of Division of Medicine and Science, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution [End Page 110] I have in my mind a special room with iron doors. The things I don't like I throw in there and slam the doors. —Edith Head Events as I remember them, when placed over the historical record of an era, do not add up. They harmonize, but barely, creating a fuzzy line of historical and personal memory that makes me question whether I existed in that time at all. For instance, it's as though there was a decade known as the '70s with a certain narrative that, like a black hole, pulls all memories of those years, both personal and public, toward it but leaves them in a jumbled mess. I don't know whether to attribute this most to the failure of memory, the power of myth, or something else entirely. [End Page 111] So. It was a weeknight my junior or senior year of college, in the spring as I remember, the first years of the 1970s, when the campus doctor gave a presentation in the freshman dorm. I was in my early twenties. I was a woman, I thought, a sexual being, no longer a girl. And so everything seemed newly born. Even the names of things as simple as flowers were new to me, as though spring hadn't really existed until I woke up and noticed it. Tulip, lilac, daffodil, forsythia. Suddenly I could name them. Where had I been all my life? I walked through that Midwestern college town as though it were a movie set or water, walked through it as though I'd never experienced the pressure of air on my skin, the sweet scent and texture of it. The light in the lobby of that dorm was greenish gold as I remember it, that particular spring light that surrounds the doctor in my memory now, holding up a plastic implement so we all could see. He stood, I think, in front of a black grand piano. But how old was I exactly, and which spring, and why am I remembering the event in the lobby of a freshman dorm I never lived in? I'm not sure. I don't remember what the doctor looked like, but I remember that he was earnest. I remember the light, the device (the thing itself or an image from the packaging?) and the grand piano. What could possibly have gotten into the doctor's head that made him feel the need to gather all the female students together one spring afternoon to—as I'm sure he thought—make our lives better? A kickback? Impossible. I only think of that now that I'm old and cynical, but it's hard for me to believe my older, more cynical self. He wasn't a person who gave speeches or the type of adult who would put young women's lives at risk for money. While I can't picture him as he really was, it's incredible how easily my memory rushes in to fill the blank space of him: I believe I remember thinking that the poor, round, bespectacled, middle-aged balding man must spend all his time worrying about us, the young women having sex day and night, with only one doctor to keep us safe. The campus was the rye, and he was our catcher. I was sure at the time that he saw himself that way. Or maybe he was jealous of the professors holding forth, and he wanted his moment. Who knows? We assumed, if we thought of him at all, that he was some kind of failure or he would have been a real doctor still—because of course he must have left some lucrative practice due to a scandal. Now he was a campus doctor, down on his luck, who lived in a small town and gave us our prescriptions for the pill. He did the tests for [End Page 112] venereal and other infectious diseases. Aside from your basic colds and cases of...

Shostakovich After Midnight

Shostakovich After Midnight Jerome Blanco (bio) Every so often, I happen across a person who reminds me of someone I once knew. I'd see a woman in a checkout line at my local grocery store and think, she looks an awful lot like my English teacher from the 8th grade. Nearly every time, the person turns out to be a complete stranger, who, upon closer inspection, looks nothing like who I thought them to be. When I saw Henry Wong board the BART at the 24th Street Mission Station, I thought this to be one of those occasions. But as I stared—what else was I to do on a long underground train ride?—I had no doubt that he was the same guy from ten years ago. He was older, of course, a couple more lines on his face and much shorter hair. He was dressed better, too, in a nice coat with gray slacks. But he was surely the same Henry Wong who'd changed my life. I wanted to run up to him right then but thought better of it, because I didn't want to be mistaken for one of those lunatics on the train. People were very on edge these days about strange men causing a ruckus on public transit. Instead, I said his name, quietly first, and then a bit louder. He didn't hear me. I didn't even hear myself. The train screeched too deafeningly along the tracks. After five stops, Henry positioned himself by the door, to get off at the Montgomery stop. I was meant to go all the way across the Bay, to Berkeley where I lived. Instead, I got out of my seat and readied myself to exit the train with him—and then to tap him on the shoulder when we wouldn't be bothered by all the noise. I would be late for dinner, but I knew that my wife would understand. ________ I'd encountered Henry Wong only once before that moment on the train. It happened in the second semester of my senior year of college, a time when I was a very different person than the one I am now. We both studied at a small liberal arts school in the Midwest, where they had real winters, unlike the ones we have here. I was walking across campus after midnight, towards the south end of the school where the train tracks ran east to Chicago and west to somewhere else. Minutes before, I'd been sitting in my apartment, tearing my hair out over a research paper on St. Augustine and his Confessions, thinking that I couldn't stand to type one more word. My mother was very sick then, and an ex-girlfriend had just broken up with me. My friends were set for fancy careers in Manhattan and D.C., while I languished and scratched my head about what to do with a degree in English. That existential dread that struck many seniors plagued me in feverish degrees, and on top of everything else, I admit that [End Page 63] I often walked towards the train tracks at night and watched the trains go by, imagining what it might be like to lay down on the cool steel rails, with nobody around to see. That night, I'd shut the Confessions, and thought, enough is enough. Why were we reading this man's prayers to God hundreds of years later anyway? If anyone were to read my prayers a hundred years from now, they'd probably be very disappointed. I went outside, under the falling snow, and found myself walking to the tracks. I never did intend to hurt myself, although hearing that churning on the rails did set my mind going. The snow was light, the sort that melted the second it touched my fingers. I wasn't wearing gloves, and the dry air made my skin rough and raw. The ground was still visible, only sprinkled with white, the way dandruff settles on my grandfather's jackets. Halfway across campus, I heard the music. Behind the soft rumble of the approaching freight train, piano keys glittered in the...

Outcomes after Elbow Ulnar Collateral Ligament Reconstruction with the Docking Plus Technique in 162 Athletes (129)

Objectives:This retrospective case series examined 162 athletes who underwent ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction (UCLR) from 2015-2018. All cases were by a single surgeon at a high volume center using the Docking Plus Technique. We previously reported outcomes in 324 athletes from 2005-2014 with 88% of patients reporting a Conway score of good or excellent. The purpose of this study was to determine if patients undergoing UCLR with the docking plus technique are able to return to sport and to better characterize the athletes needing this procedure. Our hypothesis was that our cohort would largely be able to return to their previous level of play and be mostly college level pitchers.Methods:Patients who underwent UCLR at our institution from 2015-2018 were identified and surveyed. We were able to reach a total of 162 patients by telephone for a survey. They were surveyed for subjective and objective outcomes and for background demographic information including information about their athletic careers before and after UCLR.Results:Of our 162 respondents, 150 (93%) returned to the same level of play or higher (excellent on Conway classification). 9 did not return to competitive play (6%) while 3 returned to a lower level of play. 5 of those who did not return to competitive play had their surgery senior year of college. Most athletes were in college at the time of surgery (61%), followed by high school (32%). 2 athletes were in middle school, the rest were playing professionally. Baseball pitchers compromised the majority of our respondents (75%). Catchers were 9% of respondents and infielders/outfielders were 3% each. Other athletes participated in cheerleading, lacrosse, track, volleyball, gymnastics, wrestling, and football, though these were far less common. The mean and median ages of survey respondents was 19 (12-31). 61% described an acute “pop” leading to their elbow pain while 39% endorses no acute event but chronic elbow pain leading to presentation. Of the 61% presenting with an acute rupture, 40% endorsed an “acute on chronic,” presentation. 58% of baseball players played more than just baseball in high school while 41% had specialized in just baseball. The average return to competitive play was 12 months, with a range of 4-24. The range for pitchers was 9-24 with an average of around.Conclusions:Overall, our results mirror those of previous studies. 93% of our patients returned to the same level of competition or higher after undergoing UCLR with the docking plus technique. Most of those who did not return were college seniors who graduated. Our typical patient was a college baseball pitcher around 19 years old. Return to play with our set rehab protocol was around 1 year, though faster for non-pitchers. The docking plus technique provides reliable treatment for chronic or acute UCL tears in athletes.

Testing models of reciprocal relations between social influence and integration in STEM across the college years.

The present study tests predictions from the Tripartite Integration Model of Social Influences (TIMSI) concerning processes linking social interactions to social integration into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) communities and careers. Students from historically overrepresented groups in STEM were followed from their senior year of high school through their senior year in college. Based on TIMSI, we hypothesized that interactions with social influence agents (operationalized as mentor network diversity, faculty mentor support, and research experiences) would promote both short- and long-term integration into STEM via social influence processes (operationalized as science self-efficacy, identity, and internalized community values). Moreover, we examined the previously untested hypothesis of reciprocal influences from early levels of social integration in STEM to future engagement with social influence agents. Results of a series of longitudinal structural equation model-based mediation analyses indicate that, in the short term, higher levels of faculty mentorship support and research engagement, and to a lesser degree more diverse mentor networks in college promote deeper integration into the STEM community through the development of science identity and science community values. Moreover, results indicate that, in the long term, earlier high levels of integration in STEM indirectly influences research engagement through the development of higher science identity. These results extend our understanding of the TIMSI framework and advance our understanding of the reciprocal nature of social influences that draw students into STEM careers.

College Students with Disabilities: Factors Influencing Growth in Academic Ability and Confidence

Using large-scale longitudinal data, this study sought to examine factors influencing two important student development outcomes in students with disabilities attending 4-year colleges and universities. Informed by Astin’s Input-Environment-Outcome model and the interactional model of disability, this study investigated the effect of student characteristics (i.e., disability type, gender, mother’s education level) and environmental factors (i.e., faculty encouragement and engagement in political discussion) on the development of academic ability and intellectual confidence in students’ senior year of college. The comparison between two outcome models for students with learning disabilities and those with physical or sensory disabilities provided important educational implications. Results from the multiple regression analyses revealed that both student characteristics and environmental factors significantly affect student development, accounting for students’ academic ability and intellectual confidence upon entering college. Institutional policy implications and educational interventions for college students with disabilities were also discussed.

Ouro Preto

Ouro Preto Joanna Pearson (bio) the summer before my senior year of college, I spent far too many of my waking hours in the basement of the state natural-science museum, rarely leaving, even for meals. During my lunch break, I sat eating red licorice under the yellow orb of a desk lamp, turning pale and flaccid as a mushroom. “You need something with some damn nutrition to it,” my boss, Bill, would say, jabbing a thick finger at me as I chewed plasticky chunks. But he had a MoonPie with Sun Drop for lunch himself, so my eating habits felt like an act of solidarity. Bill was a geologist whose Twitter handle was @DrRocks and who played in a prog rock band on the weekends. I was his summer research assistant, having taken the job with little idea as to what it would actually entail but knowing it was the least popular option each year on the university’s summer work board. Mostly, I’d taken it as a sort of punishment. I wasn’t a geology major; I’d taken one class as a freshman to fulfill a science requirement: “Rocks for Jocks,” people called it. As summer drew near, though, I’d [End Page 87] allowed myself to imagine some possibility of adventure: the geologist and myself, hiking over hillsides together, delving into hidden seams of mineral deposits, plundering the earth, the jumble of ruby and kyanite and hiddenite in my hands like cool, disinterested eyes. By the end of such a summer, I’d find myself strong-legged and sun-browned from the fieldwork, restored. Of course, it turned out to be nothing like that. Bill, or DrRocks, had gotten a new mass spectrometer. He patted it lovingly from time to time, as if it were a trusty basset hound, cajoling it sweetly before each use. We were going through the current specimen collection, reorganizing it. “Respect the drudgery, Annie,” Bill would say, and then, with both thumbs pointing at himself, “Respect the drudge.” He was working on a project involving carbon dating; I’d stopped paying attention the moment I’d understood we weren’t going to be swashbuckling our way to gemstones together. Really, I had very little understanding of Bill’s methods or aim. It didn’t matter. He mostly seemed to want company, a captive audience, and I could provide that. I’d broken up with my boyfriend, Nick, and my best friend, Beau, right around the same time. It felt appropriately punitive to be stuck in a grungy basement all summer, listening to Bill. Most of the specimens were not even beautiful. I felt a little cheated, having imagined that we’d at least be rummaging through boxes of sparkling, candy-colored stones. Instead I sorted hunks of humdrum gray or black or olive green. Plain old gravel. Penance. “If they’d give a little more funding to us instead of those damn dino duds,” Bill would say, three or eleven or fifty-eight times a day. His perennial plaint was the inequity in funding and attention between the geology department and paleontology. By his contention, paleontology, the damn dino duds, got everything—the money, the glory, the cartoon T-rex T-shirts in the gift shop. All of Bill’s rocks, lovingly labeled and identified—fewer than half of them had ever even made it out for display. “Damn dino duds,” I echoed. Even as hollowed out as I felt, I could be loyal. What I didn’t point out to Bill was that dinosaurs were pretty darn interesting, and that’s why little kids loved them, and so maybe this was just the natural order of things, an unequal dispensation of gifts—like how some people seem to possess an intrinsic luminosity while others bumble around, dull and uncertain. Like the difference between Nick and me. My boyfriend, Nick, had broken up with me. I’d met him in one of my English classes, where he’d stood out with his blonde dreadlocks, weaponized smile, and effortless, unearned confidence. He’d responded to the professor the very first day of class, September sunlight dappling his shoulders like a mantle...

Learning in Context with Horizontally & Vertically Integrated Curriculum in a Smart Learning Factory

Abstract In this work we present the development of a Smart Learning Factory (SLF) at Purdue University for preparing students with the skills, capabilities, and technological experiences necessary to excel in an Industry 4.0 environment. Functionally, the SLF is a replica of an actual cyber-physical production factory designed to intentionally foster collaboration between courses from multiple disciplinary areas, particularly mechanical, electrical, mechatronics, and robotics. Our objective is to reduce course silos by deliberately fusing the interconnection between courses by using SLF as the common unifying platform. Activities in design, manufacturing processes, production, production management, automation, energy, information, and communications, teamwork and collaboration are integrated using a vertical and horizontal integration framework. Unifying project activities were designed and introduced into these courses using this framework. As a result, 22 courses were integrated and a total of 26 vertical and horizontal integrated projects developed. This integration also facilitated the development of an energy credential using the SLF. Students progressing from freshman through senior year in college will better understand the interconnection of content between different courses, apply their learning to a manufacturing environment, gain a holistic perspective of the interdependent structures of the cyber-physical system, the connected enterprise, and the manufacturing ecosystem.

The Future Work-Life Balance Attitudes Scale: Assessing Attitudes on Work-Life Balance in Millennial College Women

The goal of this study was to construct a reliable and valid scale that assesses the work-life balance attitudes of millennial college women. The items that created the Future Work-Life Balance Attitudes Scale (FWLBAS) were based on the Kaleidoscope Career Model and proved similar to findings from a previous qualitative pilot study. The scale was administered to an online sample of 508 millennial college women in their senior year of college. The data were then analyzed via exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and internal consistency reliability estimates were generated. The scale showed high reliability. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses led to the development of three subscales, namely “defining working motherhood,” “work-life balance strategies,” and “influence of college personnel,” and revisions of the item content of the FWLBAS. This scale is the first work-life balance instrument of its kind focusing on the population of millennial college women.

Standards and You [Catching Rays

There are literally dozens of standards associations worldwide (almost every nation has some type of regulating unit for standards). Some relate only to national equipment requirements, while several are recognized on a global basis, where their standards must be adhered to for product acceptance. Unfortunately, most engineering students will get, at best, limited exposure to standards during their academic experience. If discussed at all, the topic will most often be covered as part of the capstone project during their senior year of college. One of the requirements for ABET accreditation of engineering programs is that engineering standards be covered in some manner, but the depth of the coverage is not prescribed. Regardless of the particular field of engineering the student pursues, there will be standards that apply. Whether a person is designing a new television or planning an installation of an air-conditioning system, he or she must adhere to standards.

Inductive Hermeneutics and Cross-Cultural Interpretation

Inductive Hermeneutics and Cross-Cultural Interpretation John G. Peters (bio) Reading Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's fine book, Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), which considers the nature of literature and its relationship to cultural and geographical boundaries, has caused me to consider how I approach literature, particularly literature from outside my own cultural experience. As an undergraduate student, I studied both English and philosophy. Many of the philosophy professors at my university were strongly drawn to the works of Hans Gadamer and Edmund Husserl. And I remember a fellow student telling me of one professor in particular who began his class by asserting that Husserl's was a presuppositionless philosophy. My friend then read me the first paragraph of I think it was Cartesian Meditations and remarked on point after point, "Isn't this a presupposition? And isn't this a presupposition?" and so on. I was reminded of this incident when in thinking about this essay I recalled yet another undergraduate experience. My English professors were a bit behind the times in their approach to literature. While many or perhaps most English professors elsewhere were then enthralled with the new developments in literary theory ushered in by poststructuralism, my professors were all New Critics. New Criticism came about as a response to the belles lettres tradition of literary commentary and the biographical/historical criticism of [End Page 826] the early twentieth century, arguing that the former emphasized mere praise with no analysis and that the latter emphasized mere biography/history with no literature. In large part, New Criticism looked to focus on the literature by approaching a literary work in isolation, the poem found in a bottle washed up on a beach as it were, with no indication of the author, culture, or historical epoch in which it was produced—in effect a presuppositionless criticism. Trained in this approach to literature, by my senior year of college, I felt adept at analyzing literature without considering context and in what I considered, I suppose, to be a presuppositionless environment, and I felt that through this methodology I could interpret any piece of literature. That idea quickly exploded in the space of a single class. Along with my studies in English and philosophy, I also minored in Japanese. In my senior year I took my first class on Japanese literature and suddenly realized that rather than being presuppositionless New Criticism in fact concealed many important presuppositions with its high value on ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, and, particularly with fiction, the additional expectations of conflict, complication, rising action, falling action, and denouement. I abruptly discovered these presuppositions upon reading, for example, Kawabata Yasunari's Yukiguni (Snow Country) or the sadly inelegantly English-titled The Makioka Sisters (for the elegant original title of Sasameyuki or Thin-Falling Snow) by Tanizaki Junichirō. I found myself finishing so many literary works in this class puzzled and saying to myself, "What just happened here?" My expectations, that is my presuppositions, of rising action, falling action, denouement, irony, and so on seemed absent from these works, and it was as if I had suddenly been thrust back to my freshman year and was reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Ernest Hemingway's The Sun also Rises for the first time and coming away with the same confused response. I then understood that rather than approaching literary works with no presuppositions, I in fact had been approaching them with many presuppositions, and while I may have come to literature without the presupposition of knowledge of biographical or historical context, I had come to it with other presuppositions concerning elements that I had thought were necessary for a literary work to be literary. This experience came to mind as I was reading Thinking Literature Across Continents. If there were a single global culture and a single global language, then there would be no need to inquire into thinking about literature across continents, but of course that is [End Page 827] far from reality. And if we wish to appreciate literature not of our own culture (as I do), then we must look to ways to best appreciate what it has to offer. It seems to...

Career Adaptability and Social Support Among Graduating College Seniors

Previous research has highlighted the employment needs of recent college graduates, focusing on the specific challenges members of this group encounter as they transition into the workforce. This study examined graduating seniors (N = 164) during their senior year of college as they transitioned to the workforce, investigating career adaptability and social support. Results from multiple regression analyses found that the concern resource of career adaptability was significantly predicted by social support. Implications and future directions are highlighted.

This Is Why.

On Being a Doctor16 May 2017This Is WhyCassandraCassandraSearch for more papers by this authorAuthor, Article, and Disclosure Informationhttps://doi.org/10.7326/M16-1745 Audio Reading - “This Is Why” Audio. Michael A. LaCombe, MD, Annals Associate Editor, reads "This Is Why," by Anonymous. Your browser does not support the audio element. Audio player progress bar Step backward in current audio track Play current audio trackPause current audio track Step forward in current audio track Mute current audio trackUnmute current audio track 00:00/ SectionsAboutFull TextPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail I write this because I am afraid to write this.I write this because I am a fourth-year medical student typing on a small laptop in my closet in the dark. Because I am sitting on the floor with my back against the wall. Because to my left lies a pile of unsorted clothes and underneath a silver knife. Because in my senior year of college, I sat on the corner of my bed—on my bed, because back then my closet was overfull of skeletons and nightmares seeped in under door cracks and through the walls and there was nowhere ...

Reported Alcohol and Tobacco Use and Screening Among College Women

ObjectiveTo describe the reports of young women in their senior college years related to alcohol and tobacco use and to describe their health screening experiences in college health centers. DesignA secondary analysis of data collected as part of a cross-sectional study of college women. SettingFor the original study, women were recruited from two accredited 4-year universities in the Northeastern United States. The first was a private university, and the second was a public university; both had on-campus health centers. ParticipantsThe participants were 615 female undergraduate students enrolled in their senior year of college. MethodsA Web-based survey was sent to approximately 1,200 women at each university. Women were asked about their alcohol and tobacco use and about screening experiences in college health centers. The mean response rate was 25.8%. ResultsNearly 90% (n = 550) of the women reported drinking alcohol in the last 3 months, and of those, more than two thirds (n = 370) met the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definition of hazardous drinking. However, only 21.5% (n = 56) reported being screened for alcohol use. Similarly, only 19.7% (n = 52) reported being screened for tobacco use. ConclusionCollege health centers are ideally positioned to screen and provide interventions for young women who are at high risk for alcohol misuse and tobacco use. Despite prevalence of use and importance of screening, reported screening is low. Future research is needed to understand barriers to screening and implement recommendations for college health centers.

Using Self-Determination of Senior College Students with Disabilities to Predict Their Quality of Life One Year after Graduation

<p style="text-align:justify">The purpose of this study was to assess the correlation and predictive relationship between self-determination and quality of life of college students with disabilities. Subjects were 145 senior college students recruited from northern Taiwan. Subjects' age ranged from 22 to 25 years and their disabilities varied, including visual impairments (n = 16), hearing impairments (n = 17), speech/language impairment (n = 6), physical disabilities (n = 40), specific learning disability (n = 26), emotional and behavior disorders (n = 5), multiple disabilities (n = 4), autism (n = 23), and health impairments (n = 8). Two measures, the Self-Determination Scale for College Students (SDSCS) and WHOQOL-BREF were used to collect data. The subjects completed the SDSCS in their senior year of college, whereas the WHOQOL-BREF data were collected one year after their graduation. The Pearson correlation and stepwise multiple regression analyses were used to assess the correlation between the SDSCS and the WHOQOL-BREF. Results showed that positive correlations were found between self-determination and quality of life. Subjects’ scores on the SDSCS subscales (Self-Realization, Psychological Empowerment, Autonomy) were able to explain between 30.3%-53.2% of the total variance of their scores on the WHOQOL-BREF domains (Psychological, Social Relationships, Environment). The results of this study re-confirmed the positive correlation between self-determination and quality of life of individuals with disabilities. Furthermore, the study highlighted that self-determination not only has an immediate impact on quality of life for people with disabilities, but it seems to have a long-lasting effect. Suggestions and implications are provided.</p>