Lyndsey Christoffersen

Ask Ari is the University of Southern California’s interactive well-being app that provides psycho-educational informational tools, evidence-based recommendations, resources, and referrals to help USC students manage stress, sleep, productivity, mood, relationships, and more.

In this project I:
• Created the vision, timelines, goals, and roadmap after meeting with the stakeholders and the development team.
• Held three in-person focus groups with users to determine needs and preferences.
• Analyzed user interaction transcripts via unmoderated remote usability testing.
• Wrote content and reviewed relevant literature and market trends.

Ask Ari is USC’s interactive well-being app that provides psycho-educational informational tools, evidence-based recommendations, resources, and referrals to help USC students manage stress, sleep, productivity, mood, relationships, and more.

As the product owner and UX researcher, I was responsible for defining the roadmap, vision, and goals, ongoing backlog grooming, problem-solving, user story development, trade-off negotiation, product testing, report writing, user feedback review, and making recommendations for feature priorities and updates. I used a mixed-method research approach through interviews, questionnaires, surveys, transcript analysis, literature review, focus groups, lab usability testing, unmoderated remote usability testing, heuristics testing, and A-B testing.

I managed the deployment of the app and the ongoing release of new tech features, including fillable worksheets, lead prompts, interactive quizzes, and content.

Additionally, I analyzed 200 user transcripts per month, six focus groups, 50 mixed-method questionnaires, survey data with approximately 350 responses collected, and ongoing in-depth interviews with subject matter experts.

The Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force (LBHTTF) is a multidisciplinary community-based collaboration of stakeholders who partner to combat human trafficking through prevention, protection, and prosecution.

I provided policy analysis, ensuring the task force and members were updated and compliant with local, state, and federal human trafficking policy.

As chair of the labor trafficking task force, I coordinated meetings with diverse stakeholders, including law enforcement, legislators, nonprofit organizations, social workers, government departments such as CPS and homeland security, and citizens resulting in collaborative efforts to address survivor needs.

I developed strategies, goals, and priorities with the core team and documented those goals, progress, and minutes for workgroups.

Additionally, I presented on labor trafficking and trained and coordinated speakers bureaus.

This thesis examined the relationship between instructor-supportive communication and student mental well-being. Supportive communication research has previously looked at the relationship between family and friend supportive communication and student mental well-being. Still, it has not examined the critical role that instructor support has.

The present study fills this gap by testing six hypotheses and one research question. Questionnaire data were collected from 350 college students who responded to an online survey. The data were analyzed through SPSS using bivariate correlation and multiple regression.

All hypotheses were supported. Findings indicated that instructors’ five types of supportive communication—emotional, esteem, informational, network, and tangible—are correlated with student flourishing. Specifically, instructor real support was the most significant predictor of student advancing. Additionally, instructor-supportive communication is associated with person-centeredness. These results highlighted the existing complexity of supportive communication and extended current understandings of the role instructors have in supporting student mental well-being outcomes.

This dissertation explores how local government transforms federal human trafficking policy into local practice. A case study of Los Angeles County, California, was accomplished via archival analysis, observations, and interviews.

Findings from this research include the following:
• Collaboration is essential to anti-trafficking efforts: government and nongovernmental actors play distinct yet complementary roles in the fight against human trafficking;
• TVPA’s Four Ps are interrelated in that they are not mutually exclusive categories of anti-trafficking work, and for efforts in one category to be successful, stakeholders must also address the other categories;
• Criminalization of victims hinders progress.

This project reveals an evolving relationship between federal and local governments in their efforts to address issues traditionally deemed as strictly the federal government’s responsibility. The findings and recommendations are analytically generalizable to other local communities addressing human trafficking.