The purpose of this study is to assess the perceptions of social workers employed in Florida hospitals in relation to the core values of their profession and the alignment of those values within the culture of their current work setting. The conceptual framework for the study was from organizational behavior theory specific to culture, values, and trust. The Competing Values Framework (Cameron & Quinn, 1999) provided a method to distinguish co-existing competing values within an organization. The research findings indicated that 65% of the professional social workers who participated in the study perceived that the core values of their profession are very much in alignment with the written mission statement of their hospital. However, less than half of the respondents (42%) stated the daily business of the hospital strongly reflected the mission statement. The social workers perceived the current culture of hospitals in Florida as being closely clustered among four cultures: clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy. However, they would prefer a stronger clan culture and less of a market culture in the future. A large majority (85%) of all respondents communicated that their work assignments allowed them to demonstrate their professional values on a regular basis. However, only 63% stated that they trusted that their hospital valued the knowledge and skills of their profession.

Management scholars have become increasingly interested in the role of organizational context. As part of this trend, research on work climates has thrived. This contemporary climate research differs from traditional approaches by concentrating on facet-specific climate types like service or innovation, rather than general, global conceptualizations of climate. Consequently, the climate literature has become fragmented and disorderly. I seek to remedy this in my dissertation. Specifically, I propose and test an integrated model of work climate that examines both molar and facet-specific climates. Chapter 1 is a review of the organizational work climate literature. This review seeks to review, reorganize, and reintegrate the climate literature. In addition, this review brought to light an issue that hinders the integration of the climate literatures: the literature does not contain a quality instrument for assessing the general characteristics of the molar work climate of an organization. In Chapter 2, I develop a theoretically-driven measure of work climate by drawing on the competing values framework (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983). Preliminary results from three studies suggest that the proposed four-component model of molar work climate appears to be viable. The results indicate the instrument has internal reliability. Further, the results demonstrate discriminant, convergent, and criterion-related validity. In Chapter 3, I propose and test an integrated model of work climate by drawing on bandwidth-fidelity theory (Cronbach & Gleser, 1957). I predict that facet-specific climates will be more strongly related to specific outcomes and molar climates will be more strongly related to global outcomes. Further, I suggest weaker, indirect relationships between molar climate and specific outcomes and between facet-specific climates and global outcomes. The results indicate support for my predictions.

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yes / Thomas S. Kuhn is famous both for his work on the Copernican Revolution and his ‘paradigm’ view of scientific revolutions. But Kuhn later abandoned the notion of paradigm (and related notions) in favour of a more ‘evolutionary’ view of the history of science. Kuhn’s position therefore moved closer to ‘continuity’ models of scientific progress, for instance ‘chain-of-reasoning’ models, originally championed by D. Shapere. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate around Kuhn’s new ‘developmental’ view and to evaluate these competing models with reference to some major innovations in the history of cosmology, from Copernicanism to modern cosmology. This evaluation is made possible through some unexpected overlap between Kuhn’s earlier discontinuity model and various versions of the later continuity models. It is the thesis of this paper that the ‘chain-of-reasoning’ model accounts better for the cosmological evidence than both Kuhn’s early paradigm model and his later developmental view of the history of science.

Understanding the lifetime behavior of their products is crucial to the success of any company in the manufacturing and engineering industries. Statistical methods for lifetime data are a key component to achieving this level of understanding. Sometimes a statistical procedure must be updated to be adequate for modeling specific data as is discussed in Chapter 2. However, there are cases in which the methods used in industrial standards are themselves inadequate. This is distressing as more appropriate statistical methods are available but remain unused. The research in Chapter 4 deals with such a situation. The research in Chapter 3 serves as a combination of both scenarios and represents how both statisticians and engineers from the industry can join together to yield beautiful results. After introducing basic concepts and notation in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 focuses on lifetime prediction for a product consisting of multiple components. During the production period, some components may be upgraded or replaced, resulting in a new ``generation" of component. Incorporating this information into a competing risks model can greatly improve the accuracy of lifetime prediction. A generalized competing risks model is proposed and simulation is used to assess its performance. In Chapter 3, optimal and compromise test plans are proposed for constant amplitude fatigue testing. These test plans are based on a nonlinear physical model from the fatigue literature that is able to better capture the nonlinear behavior of fatigue life and account for effects from the testing environment. Sensitivity to the design parameters and modeling assumptions are investigated and suggestions for planning strategies are proposed. Chapter 4 considers the analysis of ADDT data for the purposes of estimating a thermal index. The current industry standards use a two-step procedure involving least squares regression in each step. The methodology preferred in the statistical literature is the maximum likelihood procedure. A comparison of the procedures is performed and two published datasets are used as motivating examples. The maximum likelihood procedure is presented as a more viable alternative to the two-step procedure due to its ability to quantify uncertainty in data inference and modeling flexibility. / Ph. D.

The typical research of Alzheimer's disease includes a series of cognitive states. Multi-state models are often used to describe the history of disease evolvement. Competing risks models are a sub-category of multi-state models with one starting state and several absorbing states. Analyses for competing risks data in medical papers frequently assume independent risks and evaluate covariate effects on these events by modeling distinct proportional hazards regression models for each event. Jeong and Fine (2007) proposed a parametric proportional sub-distribution hazard (SH) model for cumulative incidence functions (CIF) without assumptions about the dependence among the risks. We modified their model to assure that the sum of the underlying CIFs never exceeds one, by assuming a proportional SH model for dementia only in the Nun study. To accommodate left censored data, we computed non-parametric MLE of CIF based on Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Our proposed parametric model was applied to the Nun Study to investigate the effect of genetics and education on the occurrence of dementia. After including left censored dementia subjects, the incidence rate of dementia becomes larger than that of death for age < 90, education becomes significant factor for incidence of dementia and standard errors for estimates are smaller. Multi-state Markov model is often used to analyze the evolution of cognitive states by assuming time independent transition intensities. We consider both constant and duration time dependent transition intensities in BRAiNS data, leading to a mixture of Markov and semi-Markov processes. The joint probability of observing a sequence of same state until transition in a semi-Markov process was expressed as a product of the overall transition probability and survival probability, which were simultaneously modeled. Such modeling leads to different interpretations in BRAiNS study, i.e., family history, APOE4, and sex by head injury interaction are significant factors for transition intensities in traditional Markov model. While in our semi-Markov model, these factors are significant in predicting the overall transition probabilities, but none of these factors are significant for duration time distribution.

本研究旨在探討國民中學校長課程領導與教師賦權增能之關係，希望藉由理論探討與實徵研究的結果，提出建議作為校長推動課程領導與提升教師賦權增能的參考。 本研究採用問卷調查法，以台北市、台北縣及宜蘭縣共計抽取57所公立國民中學的880位正式教師為研究對象，有效問卷595份，問卷回收後以描述統計分析、t考驗、單因子變異數分析、典型相關分析，多元逐步迴歸分析等統計方法進行資料分析。 本研究之主要研究發現歸納如下： 一、國民中學校長課程領導運用「人群關係」頻率最高。 二、國民中學校長課程領導於競值架構下呈現均衡發展。 三、國民中學教師賦權增能整體表現良好，「自我效能」表現最佳，「參與決策」最顯不足。 四、教師對校長課程領導的知覺會因為教師的性別、職務、年齡及年資的不同而有所差異。 五、規模十二班以下的國民中學教師對校長課程領導感受最高，台北市國民中學校長最重視課程領導。 六、教師對賦權增能的知覺會因為教師的性別、職務、年齡及年資的不同而有所差異。 七、國民中學校長課程領導風格以「人群關係」對教師賦權增能的預測力最高。 八、國民中學校長課程領導確實有助於提升教師賦權增能。 最後，本研究根據上述發現針對教育實務層面與未來研究提出具體建議以供參考。 / Analyzing the differences of educators’ perception toward principals’ curriculum leadership and teachers' empowerment in different background variables, the purpose of this study is to inquire the relationship between principals' curriculum leadership and teachers' empowerment in junior high school. With the results of theoretical studies and empirical findings, this study provides some suggestions for promoting “principals’ curriculum leadership” and “teachers' empowerment”. Using a questionnaire, this study conducts a survey on 880 teachers from 57 public junior high schools in YI-Lan county and Taipei County. Among them 595 valid questionnaires from teachers were compiled. The returned data were analyzed by statistical methods including mean, standard deviation, t-test, one-way ANOVA, Pearson’s product-moment correlation, canonical correlation, and multiple stepwise regression analysis. Our main findings are concluded as follows: 1. The highest frequency of teachers’ perception on principals’ curriculum leadership in junior high school is “relation of people”. 2. There is a balance development of the four styles in competing values framework of junior high school. 3. Junior high school teachers perform well in “teacher empowerment” as a whole, while “self-efficiency” performs the best; however, “making decision” performs obviously insufficient. 4. Those teachers who are male, senior, directors, and from small size schools, are aware of better principals’ curriculum leadership of the principal. 5. The teachers in junior high schools with less than twelve classes feel the principals’ curriculum leadership the most. The principals from schools in Taipei emphasize curriculum leadership the most. 6. The teachers’ perception toward empowerment is different because of their gender, position, age, and career. 7. Among all dimensions of principals’curriculum leadership, the best prediction to teachers’ empowerment is promoting “relation of people”. 8. Principals' curriculum leadership into practice is indeed helpful to improve teachers' empowerment. Finally, some suggestions are proposed based on the aforementioned conclusions for further studies and for the practice of education.

Child and family nonprofit organizations are essential for the implementation of United States public policy in their role as service providers. Human service nonprofit organizations held approximately 20,000 government contracts, totaling more than $100 billion in 2009 (Boris, deLeon, Roeger, & Nikolva, 2010). Almost 33,000 human service nonprofit organizations contract with the government to deliver services (Boris, et al., 2010). The services provided by these organizations are critical to the lives of vulnerable American citizens. These organizations depend on committed employees to serve this group, carry out the mission, and reach organizational goals. Employees are nonprofit organizations’ greatest resource, investment, and also expense (Rutowski, Guiler, & Schimmel, 2009), thus turnover is considered a critical problem facing the nonprofit sector (Salamon, 2012). Retaining highly committed employees in this important work has been of interest to those studying the nonprofit sector because it is a significant problem particularly in the area of human services (Mor Barak, Levin, Nissly, & Lane, 2006). This study asks if leadership and organizational culture have an impact on nonprofit employees’ commitment to their workplace. This quantitative research uses a quota sample of 103 nonprofit employees to understand the relationships between their perceptions of their managers’ transformational leadership, their perceptions of their organizations’ culture types (clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, market) and two important and distinct employee outcomes, affective commitment and turnover intention. The findings indicate that perceived transformational leadership matters to nonprofit employees as it positively predicts their affective commitment and negatively predicts their turnover intentions. The majority of respondents reported that they perceived their organizations as clan cultures, which are known to be friendly, personal places where belonging and connectedness is high. The findings also reveal that hierarchical cultures play a role in this predictive relationship, having a moderating effect on the relationship between transformational leadership and affective commitment. In contrast, the findings reveal that compared to clan cultures, hierarchical and market cultures may be problematic in that they positively predict employees’ turnover intentions. Further, perceived hierarchical cultures negatively predict the employees’ affective commitment.