Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 1998. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-263). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL:http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ27360.

As the population of the United States becomes more diverse, it is important that research be done to inform the implementation of psychological services that meet the needs of a wide variety of ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Research suggests that minority and low-SES clients with mental health disorders are underserved and receive inferior care when they do receive treatment. Although a large body of theory on multicultural counseling competence (MCC) has been developed over the last 30 years, little empirical research has been done in this area. This research proposal reviews the current research and theory and proposes the development and norming of a consumer measure of MCC. / text

This study examines how reliance on the client’s internal audit function (IAF) affects auditors’ ability to persuade management to accept material weakness assessments of detected internal control deficiencies. I further investigate whether auditors’ ability to persuade management to accept material weakness assessments depends on the subjectivity the control deficiency assessment to varied interpretations (ambiguity). I apply group affiliation and persuasion theories to hypothesize that management will have higher group identification with the IAF than with the auditors. I predict that management’s group affiliation will lead them to be more accepting of auditors’ internal control assessments when the auditors rely on the client’s IAF than when auditors do not. Further, I hypothesize that the greater the ambiguity in the internal control deficiency assessment, the more persuaded management will be to accept the auditors’ control assessment in situations where the auditors rely on the IAF than when the auditors do not. I conduct an experiment using a 2 X 2 between-subjects design in which I manipulate auditors’ reliance on the client’s IAF during tests of the client’s internal controls (rely or not rely) and the level of ambiguity in the internal control deficiency assessment (less ambiguous or more ambiguous) in a SOX 404 Internal Controls Over Financial Reporting (ICFR) audit setting. The study’s findings provide evidence that relying on the client’s IAF can improve auditors’ likelihood of persuading the client when control assessments are more open to varied interpretations. This study sheds light on a previously ignored benefit of using the client’s IAF – as a persuasion tactic. Thus, my research contributes to two literature streams: factors influencing auditor-client negotiations and the effects of using the IAF on audit engagements. These results provide both practical and theoretical insights to academics, practitioners and auditing standard setters.

Nowadays many scientific experiment results involve multi-dimensional arrays. It is desirable to store these results in a persistent way and make queries against not only well-structured data objects like arrays but also the metadata that describe the experiments. SPARQL is a Semantic Web standard query language for data and metadata stored in terms of RDF. SciSPARQL is an extended version of SPARQL designed for scientific applications. It includes numeric multi-dimensional array operations and user-defined functions. The SciSPARQL Database Manager (SSDM) is a query processing engine for SciSPARQL. MATLAB is a popular and powerful scientific computing application programming language. We implemented an interface between MATLAB and SciSPARQL called MATLAB SciSPARQL Link (MSL). MSL provides SciSPARQL queries in MATLAB through a client/server interface. It optionally also provides an interface to enable calls to MATLAB in SciSPARQL queries.  With MSL MATLAB users can populate, update, and query SSDM databases it in terms of SciSPARQL queries. For the implementation we use C interfaces of MATLAB and SSDM, and the networking capabilities of SSDM. The DLL we made extends MATLAB with MSL interface functions.

Le Web Mining (WM) reste une technologie relativement méconnue. Toutefois, si elle est utilisée adéquatement, elle s'avère être d'une grande utilité pour l'identification des profils et des comportements des clients prospects et existants, dans un contexte internet. Les avancées techniques du WM améliorent grandement le volet analytique de la Gestion de la Relation Client (GRC). Cette étude suit une approche exploratoire afin de déterminer si le WM atteint, à lui seul, tous les objectifs fondamentaux de la GRC, ou le cas échéant, devrait être utilisé de manière conjointe avec la recherche marketing traditionnelle et les méthodes classiques de la GRC analytique (GRCa) pour optimiser la GRC, et de fait le marketing, dans un contexte internet. La connaissance obtenue par le WM peut ensuite être administrée au sein de l'organisation dans un cadre de Gestion de la Connaissance (GC), afin d'optimiser les relations avec les clients nouveaux et/ou existants, améliorer leur expérience client et ultimement, leur fournir de la meilleure valeur. Dans un cadre de recherche exploratoire, des entrevues semi-structurés et en profondeur furent menées afin d'obtenir le point de vue de plusieurs experts en (web) data rnining. L'étude révéla que le WM est bien approprié pour segmenter les clients prospects et existants, pour comprendre les comportements transactionnels en ligne des clients existants et prospects, ainsi que pour déterminer le statut de loyauté (ou de défection) des clients existants. Il constitue, à ce titre, un outil d'une redoutable efficacité prédictive par le biais de la classification et de l'estimation, mais aussi descriptive par le biais de la segmentation et de l'association. En revanche, le WM est moins performant dans la compréhension des dimensions sous-jacentes, moins évidentes du comportement client. L'utilisation du WM est moins appropriée pour remplir des objectifs liés à la description de la manière dont les clients existants ou prospects développent loyauté, satisfaction, défection ou attachement envers une enseigne sur internet. Cet exercice est d'autant plus difficile que la communication multicanale dans laquelle évoluent les consommateurs a une forte influence sur les relations qu'ils développent avec une marque. Ainsi le comportement en ligne ne serait qu'une transposition ou tout du moins une extension du comportement du consommateur lorsqu'il n'est pas en ligne. Le WM est également un outil relativement incomplet pour identifier le développement de la défection vers et depuis les concurrents ainsi que le développement de la loyauté envers ces derniers. Le WM nécessite toujours d'être complété par la recherche marketing traditionnelle afin d'atteindre ces objectives plus difficiles mais essentiels de la GRCa. Finalement, les conclusions de cette recherche sont principalement dirigées à l'encontre des firmes et des gestionnaires plus que du côté des clients-internautes, car ces premiers plus que ces derniers possèdent les ressources et les processus pour mettre en œuvre les projets de recherche en WM décrits. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Web mining, Gestion de la connaissance, Gestion de la relation client, Données internet, Comportement du consommateur, Forage de données, Connaissance du consommateur

No description available.

The effect of the perception of fitness on the acquisition of several basic interviewing skills was explored. Furthermore, the relationship between perceived and actual fitness was investigated, as well as the relationship between actual fitness and basic interviewing skills. The interviewing skills were eye contact, talk time, verbal following (topic change) and focus of subject verbalization. / The study consists of two parts. The first part explored the viability of altering an individual's perception of personal physical fitness. Fifty-four subjects were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control condition. Experimental subjects received positive feedback related to their physical fitness during a bicycle ergometer test of actual fitness. Control subjects received only neutral feedback. Results indicated that positive feedback worked to successfully alter perception of fitness among experimental subjects. / The second part of the study explored the effect of fitness perception on interviewing skill acquisition. Results indicated that increasing an individual's perception of personal fitness did not enhance skill acquisition. There was also no significant difference in skill acquisition among subjects with higher and lower levels of perceived fitness. It was further determined that no significant relationship existed between actual fitness and the acquisition of basic interviewing skills used in the study. Additionally, it was determined that although a significant relationship between perceived and actual fitness was evident for female subjects in the study, this relationship did not hold true for male subjects.

No description available.

Certification and licensure have been sources of debate and controversy for many years in the counseling profession. Counseling psychology, in contrast, has developed uniform standards for licensure across most of North America. Virtually no literature, though, has examined whether these phenomena have any impact on a client's perceptions of a counselor. This dissertation reports on a study designed to examine this issue. University student and university counseling center client perceptions of helper credential status and educational achievement were studied. Subjects reviewed written vignettes of a helper that included the person's credential status and level of educational achievement. Credential status was presented in one of three ways: not certified or licensed; certified but not licensed; certified and licensed. Educational achievement was presented in one of two ways: a master's degree in counseling or a doctoral degree in counseling psychology. Subjects then completed the Counselor Rating Form - Short (CRF-S) (Corrigan & Schmidt, 1983) and the 15 Personal Problems Inventory (15 PPI) (Cash, Begley, McCown, & Weise, 1975). Data from the CRF-S and the 15 PPI were analyzed using multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs). The data were analyzed in terms of three samples: a combined student-client sample (N = 127), a student sample (N = 96), and a client sample (N = 31). The results of the analysis of the CRF-S data showed a significant main effect for credential status in the combined and student samples (p < .01), but not in the client sample. A significant main effect was also found for educational achievement in the combined sample (p < .01) and student sample (p < .05), but not the client sample. Follow-up analyses showed that helpers with more credentials were generally rated better than helpers with fewer credentials, and that helpers with a master's degree were generally rated better than helpers with a doctoral degree. The results of the 15 PPI analyses also found a significant main effect for credential status in the combined student-client sample (p < .01) but no other significant main effects. The study's results are discussed in terms of their implications for the field of counseling psychology. / Department of Secondary, Higher, and Foundations of Education