Graduation date: 1994

This work deals with verb inflections in a Finnish dialect spoken by descedants of Finnish-speaking settlers in northern Sweden. The dialect has been given the name Jukkasjärvi Finnish, as the main area where it is spoken lies within the parish of Jukkasjärvi. Jukkasjärvi Finnish belongs to the Vittangi Finnish dialect group within the principal Torne-Finnish dialect, the use of which extends along both sides of the Swedish-Finnish border. The documentation of the dialect is based on the language spoken by older people, as younger people are with increasing frequency using Swedish for their spoken language. The linguistic material has been collected by means of direct questioning, tape recordings and questionnaires. In the documentation, the principles for Keruuopas by Terho Itkonen and others have been used. In this study the dialect is compared with standard Finnish. The result of the investigation shows that Jukkasjärvi Finnish has the following characteristics: short vowels in endings, low frequency of gemination, syllable contraction, roots as the infinitive forms of contracted verbs, and to a certain extent analogical formations. An earlier influence from Saamish (Lappish) can also be discerned. Recently the dialect has also been influenced by those Finland-Finnish dialects that scarcely deviate from standard Finnish. / digitalisering@umu

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Mathematics, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 65).

published_or_final_version / Statistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Introduction: Past studies have indicated that nursing support reduces parental stress and anxiety during a child’s NICU hospitalisation and therefore fosters the parents’ abilities to cope with the difficulties they are facing. The importance of parental support has been emphasised in numerous studies in Western countries, however the nursing support which is responsive to the parents may vary between different cultures. The cultural norms of medical and nursing care environments can affect parental stress-related experiences as well as nursing roles in the NICUs across different countries. The aims of this study are, first, to compare the medical and nursing care environments of the two NICUs. Second, the study establishes any similarities and differences in sources of parental stress in the two NICUs. Third, the study illustrates the underlying philosophy of Doane and Varcoe’s (2005) relational approach to family nursing and highlights the importance of relational inquiry in the process of determining the parental support which best responds to individual families’ needs in the NICU. Methods: This study analyses the nursing roles that support parents of children hospitalised in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It is a cross-cultural comparison between two NICUs, one in Christchurch, New Zealand and the other in Tokyo, Japan, with both quantitative and qualitative components. Thirty-one families participated voluntarily in the study from each NICU (n=121). The three main sources of data were a NICU staff interview, parental interview, and parental questionnaire using the Parental Stress Scale: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (PSS: NICU) (Miles, 2002). A thematic analysis was used in order to examine parental comments. Results: The differences between the two NICUs in terms of the NICU care environment, including NICU regulations and routine nursing care, were identified by the staff interviews, highlighting the contrasting dominant ideologies of individualism and collectivism reflected in each culture. The three sources of parental stress, measured by PSS: NICU: Sights and Sounds; Baby’s Appearance and Behaviour; the Parental Role Alteration, were examined. The sources most responsible for parental stress differed between the four groups of parents. Overall, The Tokyo parents seemed to be most concerned about the infant’s condition. The Christchurch parents, however, perceived the change in parental role to be most stressful. Additionally, only the Tokyo fathers experienced stress in association with Sights and Sounds more often than other areas of stress. The infant’s medical/nursing care requirements, oxygen therapy and/or tube feeding, were associated with a high degree of stress for each of the parents’ groups except that of the Christchurch fathers. There was a positive relationship between parental NICU visiting and stress level among the Tokyo parents while this was not the case for the Christchurch parents. The infants’ and parental characteristics were found to be associated with stress level for the Tokyo mothers and Christchurch fathers only. The thematic analysis of interview data revealed three key themes of NICU parental experiences: Uncertainty, NICU contexts and Communication with staff. These themes were identical between the two NICUs. Discussion: This study highlighted the influence of the norms of each NICU, particularly the NICU regulations and nursing care on parental stress-related experiences, and the importance of reflecting upon these norms to critique those professional beliefs which may hamper parental coping abilities. The areas of parental support needing attention were different between the two NICUs. These areas were: the establishment of oral feeding, and infants’ nursing care-related decision-making for the Christchurch NICU whilst parental information/involvement in the early stage of hospitalisation, the influence of visiting regulations, and importing Western-based NICU intervention for the Tokyo NICU. In providing these areas of parental support, the importance of effective, meaningful communication between parents and staff was equally evident in the two NICU settings. In the light of the relational approach to family nursing, this study demonstrated that how nurses communicate with families is not universal: one way to reach across the differences is to listen to parents, and this, it is clear, is crucial to the role of nurses in NICU settings.

Fear of negative evaluation by others has been a central construct in psychological research in social anxiety and social phobia. Fear of negative evaluation by others in individuals with social anxiety/phobia suggests that these individuals hold different beliefs about themselves and others, and about how others see them, than do people who do not experience fear of negative evaluation. This thesis will examine the role of beliefs about self and others in social anxiety/phobia; specifically, how people high and low on social anxiety/phobia evaluate themselves (private self-referent representations), how they believe they are evaluated by others (public self-referent representations) and how they evaluate other people (other-referent representations). Recent models of social anxiety/phobia have differed in the emphasis they place on these various representations of self and others. Five studies addressed this issue by assessing these representations in people high and low on social anxiety/phobia. Previous investigations of the above representations have mostly employed self-report measures, which suffer from serious limitations. The current research employs both self-report measures and performance-based measures to provide a picture of explicit and implicit beliefs or representations about self, about other people and about how people think they are viewed by others. It also assesses how these representations differ in relation to positive, as well as negative, cognitions

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1990.

In this article we suggest a beta regression model that accounts for the degree of preference in paired comparisons measured on a bounded metric paired comparison scale. The beta distribution for bounded continuous random variables assumes values in the open unit interval (0,1). However, in practice we will observe paired comparison responses that lie within a fixed or arbitrary fixed interval [-a,a] with known value of a. We therefore transform the observed responses into the interval (0,1) and assume that these transformed responses are each a realization of a random variable which follows a beta distribution. We propose a simple paired comparison regression model for beta distributed variables which allows us to model the mean of the transformed response using a linear predictor and a logit link function -- where the linear predictor is defined by the parameters of the logit-linear Bradley-Terry model. For illustration we applied the presented model to a data set obtained from a student survey of learning related emotions in mathematics. (authors' abstract)

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF CANDACE A. DAVIS, for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in ANTHROPOLOGY, presented on March 31, 2011, at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. TITLE: BILATERAL ASYMMETRY IN INCISORS: IMPLICATIONS FOR MIOCENE HOMINOID SPECIES DIAGNOSIS MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Robert S. Corruccini The primary purpose of this dissertation is to show how knowledge of variation and asymmetry in incisor antimeric pairs of living great ape genera can be utilized as a "yardstick" for pairwise comparisons of isolated Miocene ape incisors from the two genera Kenyapithecus and Equatorius . The research was designed to help determine whether these fossil teeth could be reliably sorted into one or more than one genera. Both metric and morphological data for each class of incisor were recorded for Kenyapithecus and Equatorius , and resampling was performed to determine the significance of variation (p<.05) for each of 12 traits. Intraindividual antimeric differences in three genera of extant great apes were compared with interspecimen differences between Equatorius and Kenyapithecus. Pairwise comparisons using resampling sorted out which traits showed intraindividual significant variation and which could be used to discriminate between the two fossil genera under consideration. Based on these results, one can cautiously conclude the two fossil species within these genera are not different enough to justify placing them in two different genera.

The diploma thesis focuses on enterprise performance assessment. Based on financial analysis methods the company's financial health is evaluated. Results are compared with three competing companies. Comprehensive company performance also contains strategic analysis, credit management analysis and analysis of stakeholders' satisfaction. Recommendations and suggestions to sustain company performance are defined at the end of this thesis.