Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-131). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2002. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-70). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ71577.

Hostile attribution of intent (HAI) is a social information processing pattern that reflects a distorted interpretation of ambiguous social situations as overly negative, personal, and aggressive, leading to further aggression. Previous research has documented the existence of HAI in connection with relational aggression among adolescent girls, but little is known about the role of HAI and physical aggression in this population. This qualitative study explored the experiences of adolescent girls involved in physical fights with another girl in order to determine the types of provocation that led to physical aggression. Participants were 11 girls, ages 15 to 17 years, and 7 parent participants of the girls. School disciplinary records were used to identify participants for the study. All girls who had a disciplinary record for engaging in a physical fight with another female student were invited to participate. A semi-structured interview was conducted, and the parents were given a single-question survey related to socioeconomic status. Data were analyzed using Consensual Qualitative Research as described by Hill, Thompson, and Williams (1997). The study participants reported that relational provocations, such as “talking mess” and “mean mugging,” led to physical aggression. They also noted that the type of help offered by adults to reduce conflict was not effective. Many participants reported receiving messages from adults implying it was acceptable to fight, provided that the participant won the fight. Finally, participants reported that disrespect is an acceptable and expected reason to get into a physical fight. / text

This study focused on fathers and their willingness to participate in family related research studies. Traditional expectations of parental roles have hindered the inclusion of fathers in research studies despite gradual changes in cultural norms and research studies that indicate fathers have a significant influence on the developmental outcomes of children. Recent work in this area indicates that fathers are just as likely as mothers to participate in family related research. This study sought to shed light on this issue. Employees at three large Southeastern Universities were asked to participate in one of three different types of research: Academics, Athletics, and Behavioral Functioning. The requests were manipulated to be framed as either positive, negative, or neutral requests for parental participation in the study. Requests were sent to employees either via interdepartmental mail for one institution or via email for two institutions. It was hypothesized that (1) requests framed in a negative manner would have higher rates of participation than requests framed in either a positive or a neutral manner, (2) there would be more mothers than fathers who agreed to participate in the study across research type (Academic, Athletic, and Behavioral), (3) fathers would have higher rates of participation in athletic related research vs. academic and behavioral research, (4) the Lum Emotional Availability of Parents Scale (LEAP) would be found construct valid, and (5) parental willingness to participate in future research would be related to parental emotional availability. Only hypothesis four received strong support as the LEAP was found to be correlated with measures of parental warmth and involvement in expected directions. Additional findings revealed that mothers had a higher response rate than fathers. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

This essey examines high school student’s religiosity and their views on religion. This view is later compared with the student’s description of their own faith. The essay uses a qualitative research method where the students are given open questions which they answer freely. The answers are then analyzed by attribution theory, knowledge sociology and the theory of late modern religiosity. This essey shows that students are very inconsistent in their presentation of what they believe compared to how they define their faith. Students also tend to have little confidence in the institutionalized religions and authorities; this gives them an individualized transcendent view on the world. This worldview that is generally influenced by external factors consists of religious influences from many cultures and religions that are mixed together into a personal faith.

Forming a medical diagnosis is a complicated reasoning process undertaken by physicians. Although there has been much research focusing on clinical reasoning approaches, there is limited empirical evidence in relation to causal attribution in medical diagnosis. The research on which this thesis is based explored and examined the social process of medical diagnosis and provides an explanation of the clinical reasoning and causal attribution used by physicians. The research was undertaken in an Emergency Department within an acute hospital, the data were collected using mixed method approach including one to one semi-structured interviews with individual physicians; observation of their medical assessments of patients and secondary data analysis of the subsequent recorded medical notes. The study involved 202 patients and 26 physicians. The analysis of the physicians’ semi-structured interviews, shows how physicians describe the diagnostic step process and how they blend their clinical reasoning skills and professional judgment with evidence-based medicine. Physicians apply prior learning of taught biomedical and pathophysiological knowledge to question patients using pattern recognition of common signs and symptoms of disease. These findings are portrayed through taped narratives of the physician/patient interaction during the medical diagnostic process, which shows how physicians control the medical encounter. The analysis/interpretation of documentary evidence (recorded medical notes) provides an insight into the way in which physicians used the information gathered during the diagnostic step process. By using SPSS it was possible to cluster the cases (individual patients) into groups. This stage-ordered classification procedure demonstrated commonality amongst individual cases whilst highlighting the uniqueness of any cases. A pattern emerged of two groups of cases: Group 1 - comprised of patients with the presenting complaints of chest pain, shortness of breath, collapse, abdominal pain, per rectal bleed, nausea, vascular and neurological problems and Group 2 - comprised of patients presenting with trauma, mechanical falls, miscarriage/gynaecological problems, allergies/rashes and dental problems. Findings show that the clinical reasoning approaches used varied according to the complexity of the patient’s presenting complaint. The recorded medical notes for the patients in Group 1, were comprehensive and demonstrated a combined approach of hypothetic-deductive and probabilistic reasoning which enabled the physicians to deal with the degree of uncertainty that is inherent in medicine. The recorded process in the medical notes was shortened for the majority of patients in Group 2, and here the clinical reasoning approach used was found to deterministic. It is acknowledged, that this is not always the case. By using crisp set QCA it was possible to explore causal conditions consistent with Group 1. Further analysis led to examination of the link of causal conditions presented in the medical notes with the individual impression/working diagnosis made by physicians.

Background: The skill to attribute mental states to the self and others, or Theory of Mind (ToM), is a problem seen universally amongst children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and may also affect the ability to make inferences about characters while reading narrative text. Aim: The aim of this study was to teach four male participants with ASD an explicit cognitive strategy to answer inferential questions and provide feedback regarding their answers to improve their reading comprehension and ToM. Method: A single case study ABC design was used to assess the effect of the intervention. The participants read five short narrative passages each session for 20 sessions, and answered one factual and one inferential question following each passage. Specific feedback was used to respond to the answers of each question in the intervention phase. Pre- and post-intervention levels of reading comprehension and ToM were measured. Results: All four participants improved their reading comprehension in a pre and post-intervention test and three of the four participants improved their ToM understanding, although their ability to answer inferential questions involving ToM did not improve greatly. Limitations: Limitations of the study include not asking enough inferential questions involving ToM each session. During post-hoc analysis of the results it became clear that the participants could have benefited from more practice of using the strategy. Individual reading ability should have been assessed before the intervention began to determine the appropriate reading level at the beginning of the intervention. Conclusions: The explicit cognitive strategy had limited effect on participant’s ability to answer inferential questions involving ToM; however the participants improved their scores on pre and post-intervention tests of reading comprehension and ToM. These results suggest that making inferences in text may involve ToM and that the problems seen in the reading comprehension profiles of children with ASD may be attributed to their limited ToM skills.

While the role of attributional feedback on student learning and achievement has been previously studied in laboratory settings, the importance of these types of feedback in real-time classroom settings is yet to be examined. This study attempted at exploring whether attributional feedback is present in interactions between teachers and students in natural classroom settings and how much they contribute to students' achievement in mathematics. Using an observational coding system, 55 one hour mathematics classrooms were coded for three different types of attributional feedback: direct attributional feedback, indirect attributional feedback, and strategy feedback. Direct attributional feedback consisted of explicit statements that were effort-oriented, ability- oriented, or knowing-oriented. Indirect attributional feedback consisted of teacher behavior that implicitly conveyed attributional messages to students. Behaviors such as unsolicited offers of help, giving credit to students, abandoning students, and calling out student name publicly were coded as indirect attributional behavior in this study. In addition, "why", "how", "what" strategy questions and strategy statements were coded as strategy feedback in this study. The results of this study indicated that while both direct and indirect attributional feedback are present in natural classroom settings, there is a significant difference between the number of times each type occurs. Teachers are more likely to convey attributional messages to students through indirect behavior compared to explicit attributional statements. When these types of feedback were examined in a model predicting students' mathematics achievement scores, the results showed that attributional feedback on their own significantly predicted student achievement but when it was combined with strategy feedback a stronger association with achievement scores occurred. Amazingly, it should be noted that in this model, direct attributional feedback indicated a negative association with mathematics achievement whereas indirect attributional feedback and strategy feedback indicated a positive association. These findings reveal that attributional feedback play an important role in student achievement in mathematics and the most effective way to present students with these types of feedback is to convey them indirectly and in combination with strategy feedback.

Salmonella causes gastrointestinal illness in humans. The purpose of the study was to determine the relative contribution of different food commodities to sporadic cases of salmonellosis (attribution analysis) caused by Salmonella Newport (SN) using Pulsed-Field Gel Electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns and antimicrobial sensitivity (AST) data submitted by public health laboratories and regulatory agencies from 2003 to 2006. The genetic relationship between isolates from non-human (348) and human (10,848) sources was studied by two unique clustering methods: UPGMA and Ward. Results show poultry was the highest contributor of human SN infections, followed by tomatoes and beef. Beef was the largest contributing food commodity of multi-drug resistant (MDR)-AmpC infection patterns. Results from this pilot study show that PFGE and AST can be useful tools in performing attribution analysis at the national level and that SN MDR-AmpC patterns are decreasing and seem to be restricted to isolates from animal sources.

No description available.