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Organizational support and management of volunteer coaching pathways for girls in community sport
(University of Waterloo, 2025-11-07) Baxter, Haley
Volunteer coaches play a crucial role in teaching skills, guiding athlete development, and leading community sport programs (Cassidy et al., 2023). However, there is a notable underrepresentation of women and girl volunteer coaches in community sport, necessitating further research into their recruitment and support. Currently, little is known about the experiences of girl youth athletes related to coaching pathways and the support available to enter volunteer coaching roles despite this population representing an important pipeline of future sport coaches (LaVoi & Boucher, 2021). This dissertation explores organizational support as it relates to the management of volunteer coaching pathways for girl ice hockey players in community sport. Guided by an interpretivist approach, this dissertation is presented in an integrated article format, comprised of three manuscripts that collectively contribute to the lack of research on women and girls in volunteer sport coaching roles at the community level (Baxter et al., 2021). This qualitative study draws on data collected through semi-structured interviews conducted with nineteen self-identified girl ice hockey players ages 12 to 17 years old and ten leaders of nonprofit community ice hockey organizations located in South-Western Ontario, Canada. Data were collected to maintain the overarching purpose of the dissertation while addressing the separate research objectives of each manuscript. Subsequently, data were analyzed following Braun et al.’s (2021) reflexive thematic analysis techniques and guided by the aims and theoretical assumptions identified in each of the respective manuscripts. Theoretically, this research draws on perceived organizational support (POS) theory (Eisenberger et al., 1986). POS refers to the general belief that organizational members (e.g., employees, volunteers) hold, regarding the extent to which an organization cares about their well-being and values their contributions (Eisenberger et al., 1986). Members with positive assessments of POS tend to have higher rates of retention and commitment to an organization. In addition, the third manuscript (Chapter 4), draws on Ryan and Deci’s (2000) self-determination theory (SDT) to provide an additional analytic lens related to volunteer well-being. SDT suggests that well-being consists of three psychological needs, including the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The purpose of the first manuscript (Chapter 2) was to examine perceived organizational supports for girl volunteer coaches in community sport and identify what support processes are needed to generate pathways and develop girls into sport coaching roles. The findings reveal girls' altruistic coaching intentions, the importance of relatability and communication in coaching pathways, preferences for resource equity, and the availability of coaching pathways. The research highlights girls’ aspiration to give back as future coaches despite limited awareness of coaching certification processes. The purpose of the second manuscript (Chapter 3) was to examine current challenges, strategies, and opportunities amongst club leader’s for the recruitment of girl youth ice hockey coaches in community sport clubs. The findings also reveal the lack of organizational support sport club volunteers felt from provincial and national sport organizations as acknowledged in the challenges they face in relation to the recruitment of girls and women as ice hockey coaches. Challenges include a lack of specific targets and informal strategies related to recruitment of women and girl coaches, club leaders perceived lack of interest in coaching amongst women and girls, and prioritization of elite-level sport by provincial and national sport organizations. Despite these challenges, leaders describe opportunities for engaging girl youth volunteer coaches including through the engagement of alumni networks, encouragement of volunteerism amongst current athletes, and support of the coach certification process for girl coaches. The purpose of the third manuscript (Chapter 4) was to examine how the tenets of well-being as proposed by self-determination theory - autonomy, competence, and relatedness - can enhance our understanding of the organizational supports needed to facilitate girls’ transition from players to volunteer coaches. Findings reveal that girls have positive experiences throughout their playing careers that contribute to their sense of well-being, yet there is limited knowledge of how these experiences can facilitate pathways into coaching despite an expressed interest in pursuing coaching opportunities amongst girls. Together, the three manuscripts that comprise this dissertation offer new insights to help sport governing bodies and clubs consider the importance of club level intervention to promote the recruitment of girl athletes as volunteer coaches who are, according to LaVoi and Boucher (2021), the start of a fruitful “pipeline” of future women and girl coaches. In addition, the use of POS and SDT provides a theoretical understanding of how clubs can create supportive environments to engage girls as volunteer coaches during their playing career and offers an important direction for nonprofit sport organizations seeking to improve capacity, increase the representation of women and girls in coaching and leadership positions, and deliver sustainable, high-quality sport programs in our communities for all participants (Hoye et al., 2019).
Designing for Trust: A Multi-Factor Investigation of Optometrists’ Perspectives on AI-Based Glaucoma Screening Systems
(University of Waterloo, 2025-11-07) Karim, Ali
Although glaucoma screening AI models show strong performance, their integration into clinical practice remains limited. Clinicians often face barriers rooted in technological acceptance, with trust emerging as a key determinant of adoption. Prior research has emphasized explainability, but a broader exploration of factors affecting trust is needed. This study investigates multiple factors shaping trust in AI and translates them into design requirements for next-generation glaucoma screening clinical decision support systems (CDSS). In a previous study, two real-world glaucoma patient cases, each comprising three visits at different times, were presented under both unimodal conditions (fundus images only) and multimodal conditions (fundus images, optical coherence tomography, visual fields, and medical history) through a mock interface simulating an AI-based glaucoma screening support system. During these simulated visits, nineteen licensed optometrists interacted with the system and participated in follow-up interviews, where they were asked whether they trusted the system and to explain their reasoning. The objective of this thesis is to identify the factors influencing optometrists’ trust in an AI-powered glaucoma screening tool and to propose design recommendations that can enhance trust in future iterations. The interview data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis approach. The emerging themes indicate that trust in the AI system is shaped by multiple factors: (1) alignment with clinicians’ expectations of AI’s role: flagging tool vs. consultant; (2) completeness of information; (3) communications of performance metrics: accuracy, sensitivity, confidence scores, perceived consistency and perceived quality of training data (4) clinical relevance of outputs (trends, actionable recommendations, differential diagnosis); (5) transparency in risk factor weighting, exclusions, and considered variables; (6) decision alignment between optometrists and the AI, assessed across decision inputs, identified risk factors, their relative importance, recommended actions, and the gradient of concordance in final decisions; (7) optimized the AI for cautious screening to captures all potential cases; (8) interface usability supporting timely decisions; (9) users’ self-perceived expertise, occasionally leading to overreliance; (10) onboarding and training that highlighted the system’s features and limitations; and (11) increasing familiarity over time, which helped calibrate trust. Based on these findings, 17 design principles were proposed to guide the development of the next iteration of a trust-supportive interface for glaucoma screening decision support systems.
Stream periphyton response to phosphorus loading events is constrained by antecedent conditions
(University of Waterloo, 2025-11-06) Schneider, Natalie
Phosphorus (P) loadings to streams often occur in short duration events associated with runoff from human activities. Although it has been shown that stream periphyton can uptake and assimilate event-based P, the role of antecedent P concentrations in modulating P uptake from event-based loadings and resulting effects on periphyton structure and function is not known. To assess effects of antecedent P concentration on stream periphyton response to short-term P loading events, we completed two 26-day artificial stream experiments at the Thames River Experimental Stream Sciences (TRESS) Centre in London, Canada. Experiments consisted of exposing periphyton communities in nine artificial streams to a range of 48-hour P loading event concentrations (15 to 690 μg P/L) under low (10 μg P/L) or high (50 μg P/L) antecedent P concentrations. Periphyton was sampled one day before, one day after and 10 days after P loading events to quantify periphyton structure (ash free dry mass (AFDM), chlorophyll a (chl a), P content) and function (P uptake, benthic metabolism, cellulose decomposition, biomass growth, chl a accumulation). Under low antecedent P conditions one day after the P event, P content and P uptake had a positive linear relationship with event concentration and this was similarly seen in biomass and chl a ten days after the P event. One day after the P event in high antecedent streams, P content and P uptake showed a positive linear response with P event concentration, but this additional P in periphyton did not lead to increases in biomass and chl a. Whereas, a negative linear relationship with event concentration and P uptake was seen ten days after the P event. Measures of periphyton function (benthic metabolism and cellulose decomposition) were unaffected by P event size and regardless of the antecedent condition. These findings suggest that high antecedent P concentrations caused cellular saturation of periphyton limiting the assimilation of P from event-based P loads. Therefore, streams with high antecedent P may deliver reduced water purification benefits with regards to attenuating P transport to downstream ecosystems at risk of eutrophication. Management actions to reduce antecedent P concentrations will be needed to rehabilitate ecosystem service provision in streams chronically enriched in P.
Cross-sectional Analysis of Current Care Assessment Practices in the Retirement Home Sector in Ontario
(University of Waterloo, 2025-11-06) Nasim, Anooshah
As the population of Canada ages, some older adults often have increased multimorbidity, disabilities, and frailty. As a result, they are at an increased risk of hospitalization, accelerated functional decline, and earlier institutionalization. As they face more disability and health challenges, the lack of sufficient primary, community, and home care services to support them leads many to move into retirement homes. Once there, residents continue to experience health challenges, likely as a consequence of ongoing inadequate primary care and insufficient services geared toward their needs. Yet, addressing the unmet needs of retirement home residents at the individual and population levels is made challenging by the lack of standardized information collection. While regulatory agencies stipulate that residents undergo a health assessment, there are no specific requirements as to their nature. A better understanding of their unmet needs can potentially guide better primary care planning and help identify the level of services required to deliver better resident and system outcomes. To begin, current care assessment practices and processes surrounding these assessments must first be characterized and understood before the introduction of a new standardized instrument can be contemplated.
Manifold-Aware Regularization for Self-Supervised Representation Learning
(University of Waterloo, 2025-11-04) Sepanj, Mohammad Hadi
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for representation learning, yet much of its recent progress has been guided by empirical heuristics rather than unifying theoretical principles. This thesis advances the understanding of SSL by framing representation learning as a problem of geometry preservation on the data manifold, where the objective is to shape embedding spaces that respect intrinsic structure while remaining discriminative for downstream tasks. We develop a suite of methods—ranging from optimal transport–regularized contrastive learning (SinSim) to kernelized variance–invariance–covariance regularization (Kernel VICReg)—that systematically move beyond the Euclidean metric paradigm toward geometry-adaptive distances and statistical dependency measures, such as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and Hilbert–Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC). Our contributions span both theory and practice. Theoretically, we unify contrastive and non-contrastive SSL objectives under a manifold-aware regularization framework, revealing deep connections between dependency reduction, spectral geometry, and invariance principles. We also challenge the pervasive assumption that Euclidean distance is the canonical measure for alignment, showing that embedding metrics are themselves learnable design choices whose compatibility with the manifold geometry critically affects representation quality. Practically, we validate our framework across diverse domains—including natural images and structured scientific data—demonstrating improvements in downstream generalization, robustness to distribution shift, and stability under limited augmentations. By integrating geometric priors, kernel methods, and distributional alignment into SSL, this work reframes representation learning as a principled interaction between statistical dependence control and manifold geometry. The thesis concludes by identifying open theoretical questions at the intersection of Riemannian geometry, kernel theory, and self-supervised objectives, outlining a research agenda for the next generation of geometry-aware foundation models.