UVicSpace | Institutional Repository
UVicSpace is the University of Victoria’s open access scholarship and learning repository. It preserves and provides access to the digital scholarly works of UVic faculty, students, staff, and partners. Items in UVicSpace are organized into collections, each belonging to a community.
For more information about depositing items, see the Submission Guidelines.
Recent Submissions
Child and youth care fieldwork during COVID-19
(2025) McGrath, Jenny; Magnuson, Douglas
There are over 40 post-secondary Child and Youth Care (CYC) programs in Canada, but there is insufficient empirical data and little literature in CYC about the effectiveness of fieldwork practices, even though most educators believe fieldwork is an essential component of human service programs. Current literature from allied fields utilizes the variables supervision, context, use of self, and challenges to depict fieldwork from the perspective of both students and supervisors. Satisfaction, learning, and competency are commonly used to evaluate the outcomes. These seven variables guided the development of the survey.
This research question was: How have child and youth care students experienced fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic? Students across Canada completed a questionnaire describing their field education experiences, and three themes were present. The first theme is pandemic perceptions, which are contextual and time specific but illustrates field education strengths and challenges that would be relevant beyond the pandemic. The second theme of relational support has sub-themes about supervision and feedback. The third theme of self-reflection has sub-themes about student learning and processing emotions. A framework to help CYC faculty supervisors better understand and successfully facilitate fieldwork courses is provided.
MindMover: A proactive mHealth psychoeducation intervention for late life cognitive decline
(2025) Gilson, Zoë; Paterson, Theone
As the global prevalence of dementia continues to rise, early intervention strategies targeting modifiable risk factors are critical for reducing the progression of cognitive decline. Subjective cognitive decline (SCD), characterized by self-reported cognitive difficulties without measurable impairment on neuropsychological tests, has emerged as a key indicator of future dementia risk. The present study evaluated the feasibility and preliminary effectiveness of MindMover, a six-week mobile health (mHealth) psychoeducation intervention targeting modifiable lifestyle factors associated with risk for cognitive decline, in older adults with SCD. This intervention, delivered via the Pathverse and MyCogHealth smartphone apps, included modules on nutrition, physical activity, social connection, intellectual activity, stress
management, and sleep hygiene. Participants (N = 60, Mage = 67.5 years) completed weekly surveys and pre/post-intervention neuropsychological testing.
While recruitment was successful, adherence was variable. Multilevel models revealed no significant improvements in lifestyle behaviours over time, although a significant reduction in SCD symptoms was observed. App engagement was not a significant predictor of range of change in SCD symptoms. Minimal but statistically significant gains were noted on select objective cognitive measures related to memory, attention, and processing speed. Findings suggest that MindMover is a feasible and scalable approach for supporting cognitive health in older adults with SCD, though stronger engagement strategies are needed to produce meaningful behavioural change and risk reduction. Future research should explore personalized, gamified content and use randomized controlled designs to evaluate long-term efficacy.
Scroll or stroll?: Screen time’s displacement of physical activity in Canadian adolescents
(2025) Sihoe, Christopher Emmett; Ames, Megan
Few Canadian adolescents adhere to the recommended 2 hours of daily screen time, increasing their risk for poor health outcomes. However, the literature remains conflicted about how screen time affects mental health. I investigated two hypotheses that examine this issue. Namely, the Displacement Hypothesis proposes that screen time has a negative effect on mental health by displacing movement behaviours, such as physical activity and sleep. Alternatively, the Goldilocks Hypothesis suggests this association is non-linear, and that only high levels of screen time negatively impact mental health while low-to-moderate levels are not harmful. Using intensive longitudinal data (self-report surveys and FitBit measurements), I tested these hypotheses by examining: 1. the linear association between screen time and physical activity or sleep, 2. if the displacement of physical activity or sleep explains the association between screen time and mental health, and 3. if there is evidence for a non-linear association between screen time and mental health. The final sample included 89 adolescents (mean age = 14.96; 63% Girls, 31% boys, 6% transgender/non-binary). Results partially supported the Displacement Hypothesis, showing that daily fluctuations in screen time negatively predicted daily physical activity, but not sleep. Results did not support the Goldilocks Hypothesis, as there was no evidence to support a non-linear association between screen time and mental health. These results call into question the practical validity of screen time guidelines and highlight the need to promote physical activity and mindful digital media use on days when adolescents engage in more screen time than usual.
Factors affecting Canadians' attitudes toward immigration and immigrants: A quantitative study of differences in attitude definitions
(2025) Hu, Jingtong; Gray, Garry; Zhou, Min
This study examines the factors shaping Canadians' attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the context of shifting global immigration patterns. This research used data from the Canadian sample of the seventh wave of the World Values Survey. By employing quantitative methods, this study investigates how social demographic characteristics, geographical considerations, religion, social capital, social integration and boundary perception, political ideology, economic competition, and personality traits influence two distinct yet interrelated attitudes. A key finding is that participation in social organizations exerts opposite effects on the acceptance of immigrants and support for immigration policies, highlighting that social capital could have different cognitive pathways for interpersonal openness versus institutional preferences. This study reveals clear cognitive differences between the two attitudes through systematic and empirical analyses, offering more precise insights for immigration studies.
Electroweak radiative corrections in super-allowed beta decays from Ab initio theory
(2025) Gennari, Michael; Navratil, Petr; Kowalewski, Robert
A systematically improvable, ab initio model is developed to compute nuclear-structure-dependent elec troweak radiative corrections in superallowed Fermi β decays. With inter-nucleon interactions derived from the low-energy symmetries of quantum chromo-dynamics via a prescription of effective field theory, the nuclear many-body configurations are obtained in the quasi-exact, no-core shell model. This approach rigorously treats all nucleons as active degrees of freedom in solution of the non-relativistic, many-body Schrödinger equation with Hamiltonian constructed from chiral effective field theory. One of the two key nuclear-structure corrections to superallowed β decays, known as δNS, arises from modifications to the one-nucleon γW box diagram when immersed in the nuclear medium. It is computed for the two lightest superallowed transitions: the 10C → 10B and 14O → 14N transitions. The nuclear γW box amplitude is itself explicitly evaluated as the time-ordered product of the electromagnetic and charge-changing weak current operators, providing a transparent multipole decomposition of the currents. The resulting complicated amplitude structure involves many-body resolvent operators which are treated with the Lanczos strengths method, the key tool of this dissertation. As much as is permitted by the Lanczos algorithm, this method incorporates quasi-exact information about the complete intermediate nuclear spectrum. For 10C → 10B, we find the nuclear-structure-dependent radiative correction δNS to be
δNS [10C → 10B] = −0.422 (14) PME (4)Ω(9)χ(24)sh(12)n,el % ,
which represents a 1.6x reduction in the quoted uncertainty compared to prior literature estimates despite the accounting for additional uncertainties. Preliminary results for the 14O → 14N transition indicate a markedly different distribution of the amplitude strengths, reflecting a strong Gamow-Teller suppression and highlighting the need for higher-multipole analysis before a final value is quoted. These precision gains directly impact the determination of Vud and thus the top-row, Cabibbo Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix unitarity test, motivating renewed experimental efforts– particularly a more precise measurement of the 10C branching ratio– and opening the way to analogous, precision ab initio studies for other electroweak processes in light nuclei.