The subject of enquiry is the variation seen in the results of a specific set of studies about methods for training people’s judgment. This review attempts to synthesise the studies’ findings, and tests hypotheses about the causes of the variation. Research questions ask if variation is attributable to differences in participant characteristics, different aspects of judgment having been targeted, different tasks having been performed or different training strategies having been used. Relevant literature was reviewed, and studies that reported a method for training an aspect of judgment were selected for further quantitative analysis if at least two groups had been randomly selected from a larger set of human adults, one of which received training that another did not, and where, during the test phase, members of no group had access to tools or resources, performed tasks, or received feedback which members of another group did not. A meta-analysis of statistical data from 39 published studies was conducted. The findings are interpreted as indicating variation in the effect of training is attributable to differences in task type and differences in training strategy. The effect of training is greatest in the studies that have diagnostic tasks (p<0.05). The studies that trained participants with examples have, on average, greater effect sizes than studies that did not (p<0.05). Implications, limitations, and avenues for further research are discussed. It is concluded that the findings indicate that different tasks and different training strategies account for a significant proportion of the variation in training effect seen between the selected studies.

A study of women's views of maternity services in the Northern Sydney Area Health Service was conducted as a result of the changing patterns of use of the Area's 7 obstetric hospitals. 340 primiparous women living in the Northern Sydney Area who had given birth in the previous six months were approached in Early Childhood Health Centres and asked to complete a survey exploring the factors influencing their choice of obstetric hospital, postnatal length of stay in hospital, and overall satisfaction with their choice of hospital. Of the 315 eligible women, 312 (99%) consented to participate and 297 (94%) completed the survey. Overall, reputation of the hospital and quality of nursing care were the most frequent reasons given for choice of hospital and there was some evidence that women selected different hospitals for distinct reasons. Women's postnatal length of stay ranged from less than 1 day to 11 days with an average of 5.3 days. Private patients stayed an average of 1 day longer than public patients, after adjusting for delivery type and pregnancy induced hypertension. There was little evidence that women in the Northern Sydney Area Health Service desire a shorter postnatal stay with the majority of women reporting they were satisfied with their length of stay. Overall, women displayed high levels of satisfaction with their choice of hospital; at least 90% of women attending all hospitals except one reported that they would choose the same hospital for the birth of another baby. This study provides valuable information, based on the experiences of the service users, to help guide the Northern Sydney Area Health Service in the provision of its maternity services to ensure they meet the changing needs of women and their families.

The literature and research investigating why people choose social work as a career has tended to focus on motivational traits rather than on the choice experience itself. Whereas the vocational sector has moved to include a focus on the narrative processes involved with selecting a career, much of the social work research fails to capture the meaning-making processes individuals engage in to make sense of their career choices within their personal and social contexts. This research project describes the meaning-making processes two students participating in the social work program at Central Queensland University and I employ to understand our career choice experiences. Over a period of four years, using a research approach that combines Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) narrative inquiry with Riessman’s (2003) emphasis on social positioning within narratives, Geraldine, John and I explore the interplay between individual, community and professional agendas in our past, present and imagined career choice experiences – particularly focusing on the impact of gender. Identifying the importance of caring as a hallmark of the profession and what draws us to social work, this co-constructed research text highlights the agendas that predominantly support women’s entrance into the profession and challenge men’s participation. Drawing on the metaphor of a quilt to describe our career choice experience, this project draws attention to the importance for aspiring social workers to carefully choose, cut and join together bits of gendered narrative material to create a professional story that both legitimises their entrance into the profession and to position them within the larger career sector.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Wyoming, 2006. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Dec. 21, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-112).

<p>This essay presents empirical tests of one of the conclusions from Bryan Caplan's 2007 book <em>The Myth of the Rational Voter. </em>Caplan claims that voters suffer from systematic biases about economic policy that through elections affects economic policy negatively. I derive three hypotheses from Caplan's theory and test them on a cross-country panel of 19 countries covering the time 1973 to 2009. The hypotheses stipulate that increased turnout lead to lower economic freedom, lower levels of foreign aid and higher inflation. After controlling for country specific effects turnout does not seem to have the effect stipulated in the three hypotheses.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006. / Title from title screen (site viewed on Mar. 9, 2007). PDF text: vii, 151 p. UMI publication number: AAT 3225795. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche format.

The purpose of this study is to understand why some children of teachers, who, having been brought up in an environment where education is highly valued, nevertheless, choose not to pursue a college education right out of high school. The study focuses on young adults who have at least one parent who is a teacher and who, when they graduated from high school, either chose not to attend college right away or enrolled in college then left within the first few semesters. Through open-ended interview questions, constant comparative qualitative analysis, and narrative analysis, the study examines what impact having a teacher as a parent has had on young adults’ construction of formal education and their decision to forego higher education immediately after high school. The interviewer also asks the teacher-parents what response they had to that decision. The research questions of this study are as follows: (1) What experiences of education do these young adults, who are teachers’ kids, have? (2) How has their family shaped their understanding of education and their attitudes toward it? (3) How did they choose not to pursue a college degree right out of high school and what meaning do they give to this decision? and (4) What is/was the teacher-parent’s response to this decision? This study illuminates the college decision-making process that young adults go through when they are in an environment in which education is a prominent feature. Two major findings emerge. For the young adults, all valued education but they had no sense of urgency about pursuing formal education immediately. Their decisions were shaped by particular life circumstances and, for many, a belief that a college education was irrelevant at that point in their lives. The second finding concerns the teacher-parents. These educators assumed that their children would go on to college, but they did not pressure them to do so; their primary concern was that their children be happy.

Multichannel marketing is the practice of simultaneously offering information, goods, services, and support to customers through two or more synchronized channels. In this dissertation, I develop an integrated framework of multichannel marketing and develop models to assist managers in their marketing resource allocation decisions. In the first essay of the dissertation, I investigate the factors that drive customers multichannel shopping behavior and identify its consequences for retailers. In the second essay, I build on this work and develop a model that enables firms to optimize their allocation of marketing resources across different customer-channel segments. In the first essay, I develop a framework comprising the factors that drive consumers’ channel choice, the consequences of channel choice, and their implications for managing channel equity. The results show that customer-channel choice is driven in a nonlinear fashion by a customer demographic variable such as age and is also influenced by consumer shopping traits such as number of categories bought and the duration of relationship with a retailer. I show that by controlling for the moderating effects of channel-category associations, the influence of customers’ demographics and shopping traits on their channel choices can vary significantly across product categories. Importantly, the results show that multichannel shoppers buy more often, buy more items, and spend considerably more than single channel shoppers. The channel equity of multichannel customers is nearly twice that of the closest single channel customers (online or offline). In the second essay, I propose a model for optimal allocation of marketing efforts across multiple customer-channel segments. I first develop a set of models for consumer response to marketing efforts for each channel-customer segment. This set comprises four models, the first for purchase frequency, the second for purchase quantity, the third for product return behavior, and the fourth for contribution margin of purchase. The results show that customers’ responses to firm marketing efforts vary significantly across the customer-channel segments. They also suggest that marketing efforts influence purchase frequency, purchase quantity and monetary value in different ways. The resource allocation results show that profits can be substantially improved by reallocating marketing efforts across the different customer-channel segments.

The aim of this study is to investigate the occupational orientations and choices of young people in rural Crete, a society, which is in constant change as it finds itself caught between tradition and modernity. To achieve this, the study looks into two cases: the case of Anogia, a small mountainous cattle-raising village, and the case of Archanes, which is a farming village on a plain. Both communities are undergoing a process of change due to the influence exerted upon them through the frequent contacts with the ‘outside world’ and the diffusion of modernity in all areas of life. The study expects to shed light on how the young people of these villages experience the transition from tradition to modernity and how this transition influences their choice of occupation. More specifically, the aims of this study are to investigate: A. The occupational orientations and choice of occupation of the young people within the communities of Anogia and Archanes. B. The main contextual factors that contribute to the young people’s occupational orientations and choice of occupation in Anogia and Archanes. The overall approach is a qualitative inquiry consisting of two case studies. The empirical research took place in the field of the communities of Anogia and Archanes, and addresses 29 young people of the villages, so as to gather primary data through semistructured interviews. The age has been defined to be 16 to 25 years old. In order to arrive at the findings, data analysis derived from the Grounded Theory methodological approach was employed (Strauss, 1987). The main findings of the study show that the transitional process from school to work seems to be the most crucial issue for the young people under study, in the process of shaping their occupational orientations and choices. The attitude, either positive or negative, that each one has adopted towards school and education generally and the level of education constitutes the main tool that determines the limitations and the opportunities for job placement. In these small societies, the traditional roles have been overturned as regards the youth and their professional orientations. The majority of young people follow new practices in seeking employment. These characterise the following three types of youth: the stayers, the ambivalent and the leavers.