The researcher-clinician gap has been acknowledged in the literature and has been attributed to a variety of factors. According to Olswang and Prelock (2015), this term refers to a gap between "what we know, and what we do" in the profession, and is essentially the gap between knowledge and evidence. There is often, but not always, a disconnect between what researchers are publishing and what is actually being implemented in a clinical setting (Olswang & Goldstein, 2017). Olswang and Goldstein (2017) provided a suggestion for bridging this researcher-clinician gap, namely through an active partnership during the research and development process. Researchers need to work together with practicing clinicians in order to help better understand delivery needs, which results in an active partnership between research and delivery (Olswang & Goldstein, 2017). An active partnership supports researchers to discern service delivery needs and the realities of the clinical world, which allows for a more balanced way to address internal and external validity while developing treatment protocols which can be implemented into practice (Olswang & Goldstein, 2017). Research is a costly and complex process that requires the collaboration of many individuals. Speech-language pathologists have numerous obligations that may hold them back from playing an active role in research collaboration. According to Craig (2014), the three major barriers that prevent clinicians from research collaboration include lack of time, lack of education and training, and lack of funding. Despite these barriers, collaboration in the field of SLP is crucial for the development of evidence-based (EB) resources for clinicians and to ensure the best outcomes for clients. Furthermore, collaboration between researchers and practicing clinicians can create relationships that evolve and grow stronger over time, which will, in turn narrow the researcher-clinician gap and improve evidence-based practice being pulled into clinical use. Involving practicing clinicians in research by formulating and answering questions relating directly to clinical practice has been suggested to address the researcher-clinician gap (Olswang & Goldstein, 2017). A first step to bridge this gap is to determine the research interests and needs of practicing clinicians. This should lead to the identification of research areas of shared interest and can form the basis of new research collaborations. Such clinical research projects will have the potential to inform clinical practice and benefit the clients and families we serve. The purpose of this survey research is to determine and describe the research interests and needs of practicing clinicians in the Tri-Cities area in Tennessee (TN).Method: An exploratory, descriptive design with quantitative and qualitative analysis was used to explore research interests of practicing clinicians within the Tri-Cities, TN. An exploratory design was deemed appropriate due to the paucity of research on the topic. This study addressed the following questions: What role does research play in the local practicing clinicians' activities?; What are the barriers to consuming and conducting research by local practicing clinicians?; What are the primary research resources of local practicing clinicians?; What are the research needs of local practicing clinicians?; Are local practicing clinicians interested in collaborating on research?; How do local practicing clinicians view themselves contributing to collaborative research?; and What are the differences between work settings, research resources, and interest in research? An electronic survey was developed based on an in-depth literature on the topic and a review of survey research (e.g. Blessing & Forister, 2012; Irwin, Pannbacker & Lass, 2014). The survey consisted of four sections: Research Background, Research Interest, Research Collaboration, and Demographics. It contained 23 questions. The question and response format consisted of the following: 1 question was open-ended and 22 used a semantic differential scale (i.e., Likert-Scale and verbal frequency scale). IRB approval was obtained. Purposive sampling was used as local SLPs certified by ASHA were targeted. A cover letter served to recruit respondents via email. An online survey system, SurveyMonkey ™ was utilized to administer the survey to local practicing clinicians. Descriptive and inferential statistics will be used to analyze the data. Thematic analysis will be performed on the results obtained from the open question. Results: The results will be described both quantitatively and qualitatively. Results will be presented in terms of the practicing clinicians’ overall research needs and with differences between work settings, research resources, and interest in research. Correlations will be determined between variables such as work setting, time to collaborate on research, and research needs. The implications of the findings will be discussed in terms of suggestions for research resources, interests, and potential future collaboration between practicing clinicians and researchers. Recommendations for further research will be discussed. This preliminary research project will serve as a stepping stone to establishing practicing researcher-clinician collaboration in the Tri-Cities, TN area.Conclusion: The researcher-clinician gap remains a concern in the field of speech-language pathology. However, researchers and practicing clinicians can collaboratively create relationships that evolve and grow stronger over time. This in turn will narrow the researcher-clinician gap and improve evidence-based practice to the benefit of the clients served.

Könsfördelningen är ojämn i ledarpositioner då endast fyra av tio chefer är en kvinna. Det beror på bland annat att könsstereotyper bidrar till att män och kvinnor anses olika lämpade för en chefsroll. Studiens syfte var att undersöka universitetsstudenters upplevelse av olika ledarstilar och vilka karaktärsdrag som föredras i chefsrollen. 151 studenter läste en vinjett där en manlig, kvinnlig eller könsneutral chef hade communal eller agentic ledarstil. En trevägs-ANOVA visade att communal ledarstil upplevdes bättre än agentic ledarstil oavsett chefskön. Ett chi-två test för oberoende visade att oavsett ledarstil uppfattades könsneutrala chefen oftare som man än kvinna. Resultaten tyder på att det skett förändring i synen på en typisk ledarskapsstil, samtidigt som den stereotypa bilden av ett manligt chefskön fortfarande kan antas existera. Resultaten gick delvis i linje med tidigare forskning som visade på könsklyftan men att det har skett förändringar i moderna organisationer där kvinnligt ledarskap är oftare förekommande.

Are ethnic income gaps a result of attitudes? This paper studies how natives’ negative attitudes towards immigrants affect the income gap on the Swedish labor market. The significance of this question is based on policies in the European union that work towards labor markets that are free from discrimination that are based on characteristics such as ethnicity, gender etc. This paper will investigate the situation on the Swedish labor market in hopes that both foreign and domestic policy makers will work together, towards creating a labor market that does not discriminate by race. To answer this question, we use a behavioral measure of the general public as an attitude measure, which also should be fairly representative for the employers’ attitudes in the same region. This measure is obtained from a field experiment conducted on the Swedish housing market. This data addressed the general public’s attitudes towards immigrants in terms of positive callbacks to a housing contract. This data combined with data on earnings, age, sex, race, and education, from Statistics Sweden (SCB), could be used to run four different OLS-regressions in Stata. We found weak to no evidence that attitudes contribute to the income gap due to lack of data on employment, unemployment, hourly wages, and firm information. A further investigation containing data on work hours and hourly wages are essential to conclude that attitudes affect the income gap. Our hopes are that future studies regarding differences in earnings between natives and immigrants keep getting studied with additional data on hourly wages and employment.

This dissertation is a collection of three empirical essays on Albania and Iran. In December of 1990, the communist system in Albania came to an abrupt end. The collapse of communism led to a number of macroeconomic reforms that, among other things, brought dramatic changes in the Albanian labor market. This study uses data from the first nationally representative household survey to examine one outcome of a decade-long transition in Albania, the earnings gap between men and women. The average gender earnings gap is calculated at 31 percent, but it is found to be as high as 50 percent in the upper parts of the distribution. The traditional Oaxaca-Blinder method and a recent method that combines quantile regression with the bootstrap are applied to decompose the gender gap into a portion attributable to differences in characteristics and a portion explained by returns to characteristics. Results show that differences in human capital characteristics do not explain any of the existing gap. Furthermore, a large proportion of the gap can be attributed to segregation in occupations and industries. Simulations of female counterfactual wages show that the gender gap is significantly reduced for the entire distribution, and disappears in the higher quantiles of the distribution when occupation and industry are controlled for. The next two essays analyze welfare and female labor force participation in post-Revolution Iran. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 and a number of subsequent macro shocks dealt a huge blow to Iran's economy. In this paper we ask the question of how families and individuals have fared through these tumultuous times. Conventional measures of change in welfare, such as average consumption or GDP per capita, do not accurately reflect the experience of individual cohorts. We utilize annual surveys of expenditures and income conducted between 1984 and 2004 and decompose changes in average earnings and expenditures into cohort, age, and period effects. The estimated period effects accurately reflect the fluctuations in the economy noticeable in the macro data, and the life cycle earnings and expenditures profiles show a typical inverted U-shape. The cohort effects, which compare the position of life cycle profiles of different cohorts, and are of most interest to us, show a rising trend for cohorts born before the 1950s (about 30 years or older at the time of the Revolution). They also indicate that younger cohorts, those born after 1965 and therefore entered adult life after the Revolution, seem to have lost out. We discuss possible reasons for the asymmetrical lifetime experience of the two sets of cohorts. We believe that the disruptions caused by the Revolution itself and the subsequent eight year war with Iraq (1980-88) may have caused lifetime losses for the cohorts who came of age in the early 1980s. The purpose of the third essay is to understand changes in the labor force participation rate of women in Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Studies consistently show that like other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, Iran has experienced only a modest improvement in female labor force participation rates, despite having gone through the fertility transition and significant improvements in education of women. Utilizing 21 consecutive household surveys from 1984-2004, we decompose changes in the participation rate into age, cohort, and period effects. We find some evidence that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 did indeed have a negative impact on the cohorts that were in their teens or early 20s at that time. However, viewed from a cohort perspective, the evidence shows that women born after 1965 have continuously increased their participation. This is in contrast to the evidence that has been observed by others who have compared cross-section averages over time. / Ph. D.

Doležalová Kamila. Gender pay gap in education within Ostrava district. Diploma thesis. Brno : Mendel University, 2019. This diploma thesis looks into wage differences between men and women employed in sector of education within the district of the city of Ostrava. Its main objective is to determine the level of the gender pay gap in sector of education in the Ostrava district and to compare this result with the national average. The thesis also examines the factors that cause gender pay gap in this area, gender stereotypes, interpersonal relationships in the workplace and gender discrimination. In the literature research, the reader is acquainted with the basic concepts related to gender pay gap, its causes and possibilities of reduction. The field of education and the Ostrava district are characterized in the own part of the thesis, the results of questionnaire research and semi-structured interviews are presented. Based on these findings, concrete measures are proposed to remedy the situation.

With the advent of No Child Left Behind legislation in 2002 and its mandates for annual yearly progress for all students, many districts and schools in Texas have had difficulty elevating African American and Hispanic students’ scores. The current study examined these students’ achievement on the annual Texas high-stakes measure as a function of a numerical construct that aligns the race/ethnicity of students when the teacher race is White. Earlier studies have shown that racial/ethnic compatibility between students and teachers improves student achievement in the primary grades. The study, which was set in 10 north Texas school districts and 30 high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools, examined African American and Hispanic students’ achievement on the Texas state assessments in reading and mathematics over a 10-year period. District performance data came from 4,664,192 African American, Hispanic, and White students and 222, 834 White teachers. Campus level data encompassed 188,839 10th graders, 93,573 eighth graders, and 40,083 fourth graders, and 20,471 White teachers. Analysis revealed that, as the ratios of African American and Hispanic students to White teachers increased, the percentages of these two student groups passing the Texas assessments decreased. These patterns differed for White students whose passing percentages increased as these students’ numbers increased relative to White teachers in all settings except in elementary schools. These preliminary findings suggested that racial alignment at the high school and middle school levels might elevate African American and Hispanic achievement. Implications may lead to shifting focus on teacher quality and class size as the primary determinants of student achievement. Findings need validation with further study using larger data sets and sequential grade levels. If validated through further studies involving larger samples, contiguous grade levels, and more sophisticated statistical analysis, this study’s findings may have implications for teacher education curriculum, recruitment of minority teacher candidates, workforce retention, and state policy on class size limits.

Methadone is a mu-opioid agonist used in the treatment of patients with an opioid use disorder in an outpatient addiction treatment clinic. A recognized knowledge gap exists among nurses managing overweight and obese patients in an outpatient methadone treatment center in the northeastern United States. The goal of this project was to develop a weight management toolkit to assist nurses in the identification, evaluation, and management of overweight and obese patients receiving methadone treatment at the center. The evidence-based weight management toolkit incorporated practice guidelines from the American Heart Association, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, America College of Cardiology, and the Obesity Medical Association. The project was evaluated by 8 content experts in primary care and addiction medicine. A 5-point Likert-scale survey was used to measure experts' responses. The survey evaluated the relevance of the weight management educational toolkit in relation to nurses' preparedness to assess, identify, and manage patients on methadone treatment with negative weight gain. Results indicated that toolkit content was beneficial in guiding nurses on the use of evidence-based guidelines to promote weight management treatment for patients on methadone. The toolkit supports social change by providing nurses with the tools necessary to increase their knowledge and skills to manage patients' weight gain on methadone, thus promoting improved patient outcomes.

At an urban school district, administrators were concerned about the English language arts (ELA) achievement gap between economically disadvantaged (ED) students and non-economically disadvantaged (NED). To address this gap in performance, district administrators instituted an extended day program (EDP) for ED students that included additional learning time and individualized strategies in ELA. The purpose of the study was to determine the extent of the impact that the EDP had on ED students in ELA achievement. The quasi-experimental quantitative design was guided by Carroll's model of school learning and explored the difference in ELA Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) scale scores between ED students who participated in the EDP and ED students who did not during the 2016/2017 school year. The study examined 28 matched-pairs of students, based on grade level and reading ability who were classified as ED during school year 2016/2017, following an intervention. Ex post facto analysis included a paired-samples t test to determine whether a statistically significant difference existed in ELA PARCC scores for ED students who received the intervention and those who did not, controlling for grade level and reading level. Data analysis indicated no statistical difference between groups. The project deliverable recommended implementation of a Response to Intervention program to replace the EDP because such a program would affect more students. Local school administrators may use the findings of the study to effectuate positive social change by making program decisions that could support the improvement of ELA achievement of ED students. In the larger context, this study could become part of the body of literature on the relationship between extended learning time and academic achievement among ED students.

Magister Artium (Development Studies) - MA(DVS) / In all parts of the Global South, female farmers face challenges to access productive resources and output markets in an equal manner as male farmers, which is referred to as the gender gap in agriculture. In Ghana, where cocoa is one of the major cash crops, these systematic disadvantages mean that female small-scale cocoa farmers face challenges to equally benefit from cultivating the cash crop. Even though there is agreement among researchers that quantitative differences in access to assets result from underlying social gender norms and intra-household inequalities in bargaining power, there is a research gap as to how these underlying causes affect female small-scale cocoa farmer’s agency and empowerment in private and public spheres.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Glioblastoma is a lethal cancer that arises from support cells in the nervous system and kills around 20,000 people in the United States each year. While much is known about the highly malignant primary glioblastoma, the natural history of lower grade glioma (LGG) is less understood. While the majority of LGGs are initiated by a mutation in isocitrate dehydrogenase, the events leading to their malignant progression into a grade IV tumor are not known. Analysis of primary tumor sample data has revealed that low transcript levels of Angiomotin-like-1 (AmotL1) strongly associate with poor outcomes of patients with these cancers. Follow-up RNA-sequencing of human embryonic astrocytes with AmotL1 silencing revealed the downregulation of many transcripts that encode proteins mediating gap junctions (GJ) between astrocytes, especially connexin-43 (Cx43). Cx43 protein oligomerizes to form functional channels comprising the astrocytic GJ. AmotL1 knockdown through RNA interference decreases Cx43 transcript and protein levels while increasing its distribution to GJs. This suggests increased GJ formation and intercellular communication, as similar localization patterns are observed in differentiated astrocytes. Astrocytes with AmotL1 knockdown also display a pronounced pancake-like morphology, suggesting that the actin cytoskeleton is affected. Imaging reveals that cells with reduced AmotL1 have characteristic losses in both stress fibers and focal actin under the cell body but notable increases in cortical F-actin. Consistent with previous studies, AmotL1 may promote increases in the number and thickness of F-actin fibers. Because actin binding to related angiomotins is inhibited by phosphorylation from the LATs kinases, I define the effects of expressing wildtype AmotL1 versus mutants that mimic or prevent phosphorylation by LATs1/2. Interestingly, expression of AmotL1 S262D in combination with NEDD4-1, a ubiquitin ligase, results in a profound loss of actin stress fibers. Dependence on NEDD4-1 suggests that this phenotype is due to the induced degradation of proteins that promote F-actin, e.g. RhoA. These results directly support a model in which phosphorylated AmotL1 specifically inhibits F-actin formation as opposed to unphosphorylated AmotL1 which is known to promote stress fiber formation. Thus, in addition to regulating polarity and YAP/TAZ transcriptional co-activators, AmotL1 plays major functions in dictating cellular F-actin dynamics. / 2021-01-01