Browsing by Author "Wu, Felix Y"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemEmbargo
    Can organizational resources improve well-being for employed caregivers of children with disabilities?
    (2024-04-12) Wu, Felix Y; Oswald, Frederick L
    Across the United States, an estimated 32.6 million employees in 2020 have informal caregiving responsibilities for those with health conditions. For such employees, they manage not only the demands from their job, but also the demands that come with caregiving, often resulting in burnout, as well as other deleterious mental and physical health conditions. However, as suggested by the Job Demands-Resources model (JD-R model; Demerouti et al., 2001), caregiving employees may also have resources that buffer these negative health effects, such as social support at home, and flexible time arrangements in the workplace. To better understand the underlying processes, the current study examines 327 employees: 89 of whom are also caregivers for children with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD; a neuromuscular disease), and 238 are parents of children without disabilities, as a comparison group. Specifically, the study uses the JD-R model to integrate the demands and resources found in both the employment and caregiving roles and settings. My study generally did find support for demands leading to greater burnout. Yet, the impact of resources was relatively mixed, where many workplace policies did not reduce informal caregiving burnout and a rare few actually increased informal caregiving burnout. Furthermore, I did not find evidence of any resources (for the job or informal caregiving) acting as buffers for work-related and informal caregiving burnout. These results suggest that the resources received by the informal caregivers is largely inadequate, and that organizations and government should devote more effort in designing more effective and accessible work and informal caregiving resources to support working informal caregivers.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Zooming in on Communities of writing students: The impact of COVID-19 on writing self-efficacy
    (2022-04-15) Wu, Felix Y; Oswald, Frederick L
    Under the COVID-19 pandemic virtual learning environment, instructors have had to address various challenges such as integrating technologies with the curriculum, encouraging social interactions among students, and keeping students cognitively engaged and motivated. These challenges may be usefully organized into teaching, social, and cognitive presences within the Communities of Inquiry (CoI) framework as well as the learner characteristic of self-efficacy, which is necessary to keep students motivated. Specifically, the current study sought to investigate how these challenges are interrelated in the domain of writing and impact academic outcomes among 142 Rice University students enrolled in a First Year Writing Seminar. Because there was no variance in slopes among students and academic performance was range restricted, the main findings associated with the slope could not reject the null hypothesis. However, exploratory analyses reveal that cognitive presence and writing self-efficacy intercepts were more impactful on beliefs and affect about writing.