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Abstract Title: ”A more humane and equal world” A consumers view on corporate social responsibility and the internet based apparel commerce. Author: Fanny Bergström & Isabelle Blanc Mentor: Emma Svensson Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to examine the attitudes and experiences of consumers in relation to Internet based commerce and corporate social responsibility. The study is based on the following questions; 1. How do costumers perceive Internet based companies and their work with CSR-questions? 2. Is external communications, particularly social and environmental responsibility and transparency something that costumer’s request? And 3. Are there any differences between the different consumer groups’ opinions and attitudes on corporate social responsibility and sustainable development depending on their earlier experiences and understandings? Method/ Material: The results are based on a qualitative study built on four different focus group interviews. Each focus group consisted of five students studying at Uppsala University with either a main focus in sustainable development or any other subject. The interviews were constructed with the help of Krueger’s 1998 interview guide model and later vertically and horizontally analyzed. Main Results: The main results demonstrate that the interviewed consumers do not perceive that Internet based companies work with corporate social responsibility towards their costumers. Furthermore the results show that work with CSR is something that the participants find should be available for costumers, although other factors are of more value, for example price and product quality. The main results moreover demonstrate that there are significant differences between the two groups studied, where students with more knowledge about corporate social responsibility valued companies external communication on CSR more than students that did not have any previous knowledge. Number of Pages: 59 Course: Media and Communication studies C University: Division of Media and Communications, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University Term: Fall 2013 Keywords: Corporate social responsibility, consumption patterns, sustainable development, transparency, corporate abilities. / Sammanfattning   Denna studie syftar till att undersöka hur kunders attityder kring internetbaserad handel kopplat till corporate social responsibility (CSR) ser ut vid konsumtion av textil- och konfektionsvaror. Uppsatsen bygger på följande tre frågeställningar: Hur upplever konsumenterna de internetbaserade företagens arbete med CSR-frågor? Efterfrågas extern kommunikation gällande CSR-arbete samt transparens från konsumenterna? Finns det någon skillnad mellan olika konsumentgruppers åsikter och attityder beroende på tidigare erfarenheter och kunskapsgrad gällande CSR och hållbar utveckling?   Teorierna som använts behandlar transparens, intressenters påverkan och konsumtion. Undersökningen baseras på en kvalitativ studie som genomfördes med hjälp av fokusgruppsintervjuer. De fyra fokusgrupperna delades in i två kategorier; studenter som studerar hållbar utveckling eller miljö, respektive studenter med övrig studieinriktning.    Resultaten av undersökningen tyder på att det finns en skillnad mellan olika konsumentgruppers åsikter och attityder gällande företagens arbete med ansvarsfullt företagande. Konsumenterna värdesätter i de flesta fall företagens corporate abilities högre än dess arbete med CSR. Enligt våra resultat efterfrågar konsumenterna dessutom en högre grad transparens och ett CSR-arbete som integreras i hela företagets verksamhet. Respondenterna ser CSR som ett sätt för företagen att vinna marknadsandelar snarare än arbete för hållbar utveckling. Resultaten visar också att ju högre kunskaps- och intressegrad konsumenten uppvisar gällande CSR-frågor, desto större chans att konsumtionsmönstret förändras i och med information om företagens arbete med dessa frågor.   Nyckelord: Corporate social responsibility, konsumtionsmönster, corporate abilities, hållbar utveckling, transparens

Many personality tests that have been developed outside of Asia (usually in Western countries such as the USA and UK) have been imported into the region, translated verbatim, and administered with little attention to the cultural differences in concepts and underlying properties. Whilst there has been a necessity to use these tests given few local alternatives, making decisions based on tests alien to the local culture may result in inconsistent decisions that possess no validity. This thesis then addresses crucial issues surrounding the importation of foreign-developed personality assessment instruments and their use in China. Research conducted with the NEO-FFI in Asia has demonstrated (although not without critics: Block, 1995) the cross-cultural applicability of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) (Costa & McCrae, 1985) of personality (McCrae, Costa, del Pilar, Rolland & Parker, 1988; McCrae & Allik, 2022; McCrae & Costa, 1997). However, and although this research may provide support for the model, there is a lack of research that assesses the link between personality and workplace performance in Asia. Recent developments in indigenous psychology have, despite the depth of support for the FFM, led researchers to challenge its completeness. With Cheung et al. (1996) (a) suggesting the existence of a ‘blind-spot’ in Western personality assessment, (b) finding six major personality factors instead of five in Chinese samples and (c) reporting that similar patterns can be found outside of China, in both Singapore and the USA, there is sufficient evidence pointing to a need to investigate the structure and psychometric properties of both Western and Chinese tests in Asia. Moreover, and despite the favourable cross-cultural acceptance of the FFM, there has been a dearth of research providing links between personality and performance at work across cultures. The major questions covered in this thesis are: (a) to what extent is a translated, work-specific measure of personality, based on the FFM structurally similar, reliable, and useful in performance prediction in China? (b) does a locally-developed measure of indigenous personality traits possess acceptable psychometric properties in China? (c) does the indigenous measure have incremental utility over the Western test in its ability to predict performance outcomes in China? (d) does the indigenous Chinese test have acceptable psychometric properties in a Western nation? (e) does the indigenous Chinese test have incremental utility over the Western test in its ability to predict performance in a Western nation? In order to answer these questions, a research program involving 7 organisations, 2 universities and 1040 participants was instigated. A pilot study was carried out with 28 students from an Australian University and 12 counsellors from a vocational training institutions in Hong Kong to assess the psychometric properties of the 15FQ+ outside of its country of origin. Subsequently, the 15FQ+ was administered to 116 staff from an Australian private hospital in order to introduce a real-world organisational setting to the research. The UK-developed 15FQ+ (Fifteen Factor Questionnaire Plus: Psychometrics Limited, 2002) then underwent a program of translation (into Traditional and Simplified Chinese), piloting, revision and trialling. The trialling involved the administration of this questionnaire alongside the Chinese version of the NEO-FFI and the collection of grades from 178 students at a Hong Kong university. Following thorough analyses of the items comprising the questionnaire, it was further refined before being administered with the CPAI-2 (Cross-Cultural Personality Assessment Inventory: Cheung, 2002) to 437 professionals from 4 Hong Kong organisations and 100 ship employees from mainland China. These two questionnaires were then administered in their English forms to 121 Australian University students and 48 hospital staff. Finally, bureau-scored data was collected from the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia to enable cross-cultural structural comparisons of 15FQ+ to be carried out. The analyses revealed that the 15FQ+ had adequate psychometric properties in all Western countries noted above. The Chinese version also had strong psychometric properties and “essential identity” with the UK data in Hong Kong. However, the mainland China data revealed poor reliability and a number of scales lacked identity with the UK data. Scores on 15FQ+ scales were shown to be related to outcome measures such as grade performance in students in both Australia and Hong Kong and to perceived work performance in Australian hospital workers. Likewise, the 15FQ+ demonstrated utility in the prediction of performance appraisal competencies for Airline staff in Hong Kong and scale scores were found to correlate with some performance appraisal competencies for Chinese ship crew. The indigenous CPAI-2 revealed poor reliability for most of its scales in all datasets. Joint factor analyses of the 15FQ+ and CPAI-2 indigenous scales revealed that only in Australia did the CPAI-2 measure a unique factor not accounted for by the Western test. In China, the CPAI-2 scales loaded on global scales of the Western test. Furthermore, whilst a small number of scales were found to correlate with performance dimensions, these scales also correlated highly with 15FQ+scales, suggesting a degree of overlap in measurement. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that the CPAI-2 added no incremental predictive ability over and above the 15HQ+ in relation to workplace performance. This research has provided a significant contribution to our understanding of personality in Asia. The program of studies investigating the criterion-related validity of both Western and local tests in Asia added to the body of knowledge that exists regarding the construct validity of FFM tests. Additionally, the use of narrow-band, primary traits as predictors has further enhanced knowledge of the relationship between personality and performance in Asia. In light of the results surrounding the CPAI-2 the research has cast some doubt upon the position that there may be a ‘blind-spot’ in Western personality psychology, but this doubt paradoxically related to the Chinese data, rather than the Australian data. Finally, with a strong practical component, the research program has provided strong evidence to human resource professionals of the utility of Western-developed personality assessments that are based on a long-debated model, translated and applied with local sensitivity.

In New Zealand, approximately 10% of births are considered premature, that is less than 37 weeks gestation. With advances in medical technology, young infants are surviving gestation periods as few as 23 weeks. It is expected that many of these severely premature infants will demonstrate some problem in their academic, or cognitive function including language functioning. It is agreed that children who are born severely premature often present with language problems, the nature of the difficulties are not clear. Research examining language abilities that involve cognitive functions such as inference generation have demonstrated that children born prematurely exhibit difficulties with phonologic short-term memory and executive function. Language tasks such as inference understanding require children to integrate real-world knowledge with the linguistic information to generate and produce language that is more complex. The aim of this study was to discover if the language of children born severely premature differs from that of language-age matched peers. This study examined high-level language abilities of school-age children born severely prematurely, specifically, language tasks that involved executive functions including working memory, story inferencing, and recognising absurdities. Six children who were born less than 28 weeks gestation participated in this study. Their results on the above measures were compared to a language-aged matched comparison group, determined by performance on a standardised test. It was hypothesised that the children born severely premature would not differ from their language-age matched peers on measures of general language ability but differences would exist on measures of language processing and inferencing. The findings overall showed little difference between the preterm group and their language-age matched peers on measures except for the measure of chronological age. Although no group difference was found for the measure of working memory, a larger variance on this measure was observed in the preterm group.

Doctor of Philosophy / The main aim of this research is the exploration of relationships and correlations between thinking styles of student designers, their personal aptitudes, and design education. It involves discovering the role/s several groups of learning styles and cognitive abilities may play in problem solving during administered design tasks; and the influence they may have on academic performance and quality of produced design solutions. The main hypothesis is that differences in designers’ individual problem solving strategies and, ultimately, products of their expertise – designed artefacts – can be correlated with the differences in their learning styles and cognitive abilities. We suggest the following. (a) Designers with different styles adopt different approaches to design situations and use different strategies during problem solving. It is possible to find the supporting evidence by investigating their performance on design tasks. (b) Individual differences in design reasoning and problem solving could be correlated with the differences in individual cognitive abilities. (c) It may be possible to find correlations between cognitive styles and cognitive abilities. (d) It is likely that a number of visible or measurable qualities of students’ design drawings, would in some way reflect different characteristics of the above individual styles and abilities. The methodological approach draws on theoretical and empirical knowledge from several domains, including: design studies, psychology, cognitive science and study of creativity. This study is concerned with selecting and substantiating the input – a number of cognitive styles and abilities chosen for evaluation; and their subsequent assessment. It involves administering design sessions and exploring them as a process to see whether and how the above abilities and styles are reflected in problem solving. It also deals with the assessment of the product i.e. produced design solutions, and their relation to the academic performance reports. And, finally, it explores correlations between the input, the process and the product to help finding explanations for the students’ preferences in adopting particular problem solving strategies in designing. This study is based upon the analysis of six major datasets from (1) an electronic test assessing individual positions on four dimensions (two dichotomies) of learning styles; (2) tests of cognitive abilities chosen on the basis of their relevance to designing; (3) design sessions, administered individually under retrospective protocol guidelines; (4) questionnaires, containing summaries of design sessions, and introspective reports of imagery use and problem-solving styles and strategies; (5) judgements of academic performance from course supervisors based on marks and grades; and (6) assessments of design drawings by professional architects. The analysis revealed fundamentally different ways by which students approach design situations; they are positively correlated with their learning styles. Students’ approaches to problem situations change with the task and within the task. However, eighty percent of the first year and half of the final year subjects showed various degrees of inflexibility in dealing with design problems; this may have decreased the quality of performance. Learning styles proved important in predicting the process and the outcome of problem solving. They may account for moderate to low quality of design solutions in cases with either style (from both dichotomies explored) being of low development. Styles were also observed to may have a moderate to strong influence on the students’ academic performance. Correlations between the measured cognitive abilities and academic performance were moderate to significant for the first year and similar but marginally lower for the final year students. At the same time, final year students scored higher on the ability tests and showed better results on the learning styles assessments. One of the likely reasons for this is the enhancement of abilities and styles during the course of study. No significant linear correlations between preferred learning styles and most of the measured cognitive abilities have been observed. The probable inference is that abilities are among many other factors affecting the development of learning styles. It has been, however, possible to establish a number of important correlations between the measurements of learning styles, cognitive abilities, observed problem solving behaviour, and students’ design solutions. Overall, it has been demonstrated that the applied methodology, although requiring further refinement, does enable examining and elucidating the influence of learning styles and cognitive abilities on design problem solving and academic performance.

Research paper (M.A.) -- Cardinal Stritch College -- Milwaukee, 1969. / A research paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Education (Special Education). Includes bibliographical references (p. 28-30).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-90). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-90). Also available on the Internet.