Theses and Dissertations
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on-cisgender identity, age of awareness, age of social transition, primary caregiver acceptance, secondary caregiver acceptance, and mental health. Hypotheses were partially supported for age of social transition with mental health, parental acceptance with mental health, and awareness-transition gap with parental acceptance. This study investigated under studied concepts of social transition and parental acceptance that appear to have an effect on the mental health of transgender adults.
Graduating from college is an important time of life transitions and career development for undergraduates and their future. Future self-identification, the connection between an individual’s current and future self, can negatively predict depression and utilize self-control as a mechanism to achieve later academic goals. Investigating an individual’s future self- identification, depression scores, and behavioral outcomes in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic can help optimize college graduate success in an uncertain world. The present study aimed to (1) determine if earlier future self-identification moderated the changes between later outcomes (e.g., depression, perceived alcohol consumption, and academic and career goals) from pre-COVID-19 to during COVID-19, (2) investigate if psychological resources (e.g., self-control and emotion regulation) had any intermediary effects between earlier future self-identification and later depression and behavioral outcomes during the pandemic, and (3) test for any moderation effects of future self-identification on the relationship between available psychological resources before COVID-19 and during COVID-19. The present research demonstrated that students with greater earlier future self-identification were less likely to change their academic and career goals and were less likely to experience symptoms of depression during the pandemic. Additionally, self-control was demonstrated as an intermediary factor between earlier future self-identification and later academic and career goal changes. These findings may help college graduates develop resilience in other stressful situations.
To the public, law is portrayed as a career where people experience an intense workload that eventually leads them to burnout. As a person interested in becoming a lawyer, I took it upon myself to research how burned out lawyers are in the empirical literature and study if that burnout can be linked with job dissatisfaction and, further, life dissatisfaction. As predicted, lawyers have been and continue to be burnt out and that burnout has implications on their job and life satisfaction. In turn, a lawyer’s job satisfaction and life satisfaction can also have an effect on whether or not they experience more or less symptoms of burnout. After establishing that there is a problem, I researched potential solutions to increasing life satisfaction for lawyers within the existing flawed system. I discussed five solutions proposed in the book The Happy Lawyer by Nancy Levit and Douglas Linder, which included (1) gaining more control, (2) establishing more connections, (3) increasing flow experiences, (4) identifying pleasures and strengths, and (5) making downward comparisons. Finally, as a cumulation of all my research, I offer a final suggestion to increase life satisfaction, which is to create and stick to a schedule that works for the individual lawyer.