Samford University is a private Christian university in Homewood, Alabama. In 1841, the university was founded as Howard College by Baptists. Samford University describes itself as the 87th oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. The university enrolls 5,758 students from 48 states and 22 countries.
Wearable health technologies (WHTs) increasingly enable continuous, consumer-driven health monitoring, yet healthcare systems remain organized around episodic, reactive care. This research examines how this misalignment shapes consumer well-being by integrating consumer and physician perspectives on wearable-generated data. Study 1 draws on interviews with wearable users and Study 2 involves practicing physicians. Across the two studies, the authors identify four consumer tensions and four parallel physician tensions that emerge in response to continuous health data within episodic care systems. Together, these findings reveal a guidance infrastructure gap, a term coined to describe the absence of interpretive, relational, and system-level support needed to make continuous data meaningful. The findings show that WHTs influence consumer well-being not through data access alone, but through the presence or absence of guidance infrastructure that shapes how consumers and providers interpret, navigate, and act on continuous health data.
This study explores the barriers child welfare professionals encounter when attempting to engage in spiritual practices recommended by their organizations. Using thematic analysis of qualitative responses from a larger mixed-methods project of 304 child welfare professionals, seven primary barriers emerged: busyness and competing responsibilities, internal obstacles, organizational culture and structure challenges, contextual constraints, resource limitations, and caregiving demands. These findings highlight the complex personal and organizational dynamics that shape spiritual engagement in child welfare settings. Results underscore the need for organizational policies, leadership support, and feasible structures that enable spiritual practices, with implications for enhancing resilience, well-being, and professional quality of life among child welfare workers.
This study explores journalists' negotiation of role conceptions through a comparative analysis of two groups of journalists who have experienced institutional marginalization and repression in their societies and professions: journalists in Zimbabwe and Black journalists in the U.S. We seek a richer understanding of role conceptions in repressive, marginalizing environments. We adopt institutional logics theory, expecting that while the common experience of marginalization will lead to some commonality in role conceptions, journalists' differing institutional environments will shape role conceptions in distinct and sometimes conflicting ways. Findings from qualitative interviews with 43 journalists reveal different sets of roles, some new and some consistent with past literature. Journalists in both groups straddle different logics that are often incompatible, for example, the professional logic of Western liberal journalism, the logic of the state, and the logic of the community. Roles are negotiated as journalists seek to maintain accord with multiple, often conflicting logics. Roles are sometimes oppositional to power, but in indirect ways. Additionally, evidence suggests institutional repression and marginalization may encourage professional fragmentation for these journalists.
In this research, we examine a modified Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model with a square root functional response. We have identified a key result regarding the finite-time extinction of the prey species and provided a comprehensive proof to support this finding. An illustrative example is also included to substantiate our theoretical result. Furthermore, our numerical simulations suggest that the phase portrait exhibits two distinct modes of behavior, where certain positive initial conditions result in convergence toward the predator axis in finite time. (c) 2026 L&H Scientific Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.
This study examines various job demands (emotional labor, secondary trauma exposure, student-related stressors) and job resources (organizational support, self-care) using the Jobs Demands-Resource Theory to analyze professional quality of life (compassion fatigue/satisfaction) for university faculty members. Research questions are related to the predictive relationship among these variables and outcome of quality of life. While studies have examined various aspects of these relationships, the research is scant regarding higher education faculty. Our findings indicated the job demands, in general, did predict higher compassion fatigue and lower compassion satisfaction. One salient result indicated student related stressors mediated the positive relationship between exposure to student trauma and burnout. When stressors were controlled, trauma no longer predicted burnout. Similarly, when stressors were controlled for compassion satisfaction, there was a positive relationship between exposure to student trauma and compassion satisfaction. Discussions of student-centered and trauma-informed practices within the classroom require information for how these concepts may affect faculty.
