Dissertations

This mixed methods action research intervention study analyzed the influence of social music improvisation (SMI) on students' behaviors and perceptions of their connectedness to others in a virtual middle school classroom setting. Nine 10-minute SMI sessions allowed for the accumulation of data, with two additional pre-sessions being informative and exploratory to describe the SMI intervention and practice its aspects with participants in the intervention group. This study acquired pretest and posttest data from the Hemingway Measure of Adolescent Connectedness (Karcher, 2005) and observational information through process coding and field notes. Results showed how the presence or absence of SMI influenced 37 virtual middle school music students' perceived connectedness to others. Social music improvisation activities included playing instruments and singing using improvisation cards created by Dr. James Oshinsky (2021, see Appendix F). Qualitative field note data and process coding provided a more personalized snapshot of the results using the teacher-researcher's observations of actions and the nature of communication during sessions (Plano Clark & Ivankova, 2016; Privitera & Ahlgrim-Delzell, 2019). Actions recorded included playing an instrument, singing/speaking, smiling/laughing, and making eye contact. A statistically significant result (p=.035) in the connectedness to school subscale suggests that SMI activities positively influence students’ perceived feelings of connectedness to school, an integral part of this research. Qualitative data through observations and process coding showed that levels of participation during SMI paralleled with increased levels of connectedness to school for participants.

The problem that the researcher will investigate is the conflicting social media messages between the Office of the President and the two preeminent national health organizations (the CDC and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health) regarding the COVID-19 crisis. The purpose of this study is to explore alignment and disconnect in the social media messaging between the Office of the President and the top two health organizations and subsequent state government decisions around the COVID-19 pandemic in the southeast region of the United States. Given the research purpose of exploring the alignment between expert information, social media coverage, and leadership decisions around the COVID-19 pandemic in the southeast region of the United States, the research approach was that of a qualitative analysis employing the method of thematic analysis of social media messaging from the Office of the President and the top two health organizations during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the southeastern region of the United States chose to disregard the advice of the CDC and the NIAID offered through their respective Twitter accounts during the first six months of 2020, in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, regarding wearing face coverings, testing, staying at home, and vaccines. According to Chen et al. (2022) and Funk et al. (2022), the political affiliation of the state governors was an overarching contributing factor. Though the Tweets of President Trump initially also supported these initiatives to mitigate the spread of the vaccine, his Tweets and actions in the later part of the study period were not in support of these initiatives, leading Republican followers, specifically, to follow suit. The nation’s two top health agencies and the President were often not in alignment due to a lack of a concerted effort to work together to provide the best possible information to the general public. Because this study primarily focused on the decisions made in the southeastern region of the United States, it would be beneficial to extend this study to other populations to determine experiential differences and similarities.