This manuscript includes an investigation of decision making in alternative modes of transportation in order to understand consumers' decision in different contexts. In essay 1 of this study, the motives for participation in situated ridesharing is investigated. The study proposes a theoretical model that includes economic benefits, time benefits, transportation anxiety, trust, and reciprocity either as direct antecedents of ridesharing participation intention, or mediated through attitude towards ridesharing. Essay 2 of this study, focuses on self-driving vehicles as one of the recent innovations in transportation industry. Using a survey approach, the study develops a conceptual model of consumers' anticipated motives. Both essays use partial least square- structural equation modeling for assessing the proposed theoretical models.

Little is known about the mechanisms by which extracurricular participation in high school influences educational attainment in young adulthood. Also limited is an understanding of the different types of extracurricular participation and how various activities may manifest within the relationship. The purpose of this study was to examine the link between high school extracurricular participation and educational attainment, with social capital, parental expectations, and academic achievement presented as mediators. Additionally, the present study will explore socioeconomic differences in the proposed relationships. The sample consisted of 5,239 ninth through twelfth graders from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple-group SEM were used to test pathways. Extracurricular participation was categorized into sports participation, non-sport participation, mixed participation (including both sport and non-sport), and no participation. Social capital, a latent factor, was measured by the latent variables of family and school capital. Various indicators of family closeness and inclusion of school culture from survey items operationalize social capital. Parental expectations, another latent factor, was measured by one survey indicator using the question of how disappointed would your resident father and mother be if you did not graduate from college. Academic achievement was measured by grade point average and calculated by the average of self-reported grades in four subjects: English, math, social studies, and science. Educational level attained used seven levels ranging from less than 8th grade to beyond a Bachelor degree. Gender, race, and parent education were also included as covariates. Social capital, parental expectations, and high school academic achievement were all shown to be mediators between high school extracurricular participation and educational attainment. However, social capital's impact on educational attainment was indirect through GPA rather than direct. Sport showed better capacity to strengthen social capital than non-sport. However, non-sport participants achieved higher high school GPA than sport participants. On average, students involved in both sport and non-sport activities had more positive effects on all model variables than students involved in sports only. Results for socioeconomic comparison showed some evidence for the benefit of sport participation directly on educational level for low-income students. Practically speaking, the conclusion of the study is that students need to participate in a combination of activities that include both sport and non-sport to improve their chances of educational attainment.

Violence and aggression continue to be both public health and economic concerns. The field of violence prediction has undergone a series of changes in an attempt to best assess risk including using unstructured clinical judgment, actuarial measures, and structured professional judgment. Although prediction has become more accurate with improved measures, a new generation has recently emerged with an emphasis on understanding violence, as opposed to merely predicting it, to shift the focus towards violence prevention. In addition to the creation of measures, researchers have sought to identify specific risk factors for aggression and violence including static and dynamic risk factors. Despite research demonstrating associations between neuropsychological and social-cognitive factors, violence risk measures continue to omit these variables. The current study developed a multi-faceted, theoretical model of aggression including social-cognitive, neuropsychological, personality, and psychiatric factors. A community, male sample (N = 1,192) collected through Amazon's MTurk responded to a series of self-report measures and neuropsychological tasks. Utilizing structural equation modeling (SEM), I created a model predicting aggression. Several important paths were significant including from entity theory to aggression, mediated by hostile attribution bias, schizotypy to aggression, mediated by both hostile attribution bias and disinhibition, substance use to aggression mediated by disinhibition, and psychopathy to aggression directly. This model provides a framework for future research that focuses on process factors of violence and aggression.

Imagination and creative self-efficacy are important components of the creative process and outcomes but are rarely investigated together. To explore the relationship between personality factors, imaginative thinking, and creative self-efficacy, survey responses were gathered from university students in a southwestern region in the United States (n = 1,731). Personality was measured using the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), imagination was measured using the Imaginative Capability Scale (ICS), and creative self-efficacy was measured using items based on reliability in previous studies. Participants were asked to complete the three surveys along with demographic information through an online format. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted first to confirm measurements used. After fit indices confirmed measurement models used, subsequent analyses were conducted using structural equation modeling (SEM). The model of best fit supported creative self-efficacy as a strong predictor of all three factors of imagination. Additionally, the model indicated a strong relationship between conscientiousness and conceiving imagination as well as other notable relationships with personality factors.

This dissertation consists of three studies that collectively investigate the factors influencing the consumer adoption intention towards emerging healthcare technologies. Essay 1 systematically reviews the extent literature on healthcare technology adoption and serves as the theoretical foundation of the dissertation. It investigates different models that have been previously applied to study healthcare technology acceptance. Meta-analysis method is used to quantitatively synthesize the findings from prior empirical studies. Essay 2 posits, develops, and tests a comprehensive biotechnology acceptance model from the end-user's perspective. Two new constructs, namely, perceived risk and trust in technology, are integrated into the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. Research hypotheses are tested using survey data and partial least square – structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Essay 3 extends the findings from the Essay 2 and further investigates the consumer's trust initiation and its effect on behavioral adoption intention. To achieve this purpose, Essay 3 posits and develops a trust model. Survey data allows testing the model using PLS-SEM. The models developed in this dissertation reflect significant modifications specific to the healthcare context. The findings provide value for academia, practitioners, and policymakers.

Recent estimates suggest that a large percentage of the population experiences some type of traumatic event over the course of the lifetime, but a relatively small proportion of individuals develop severe, long-lasting problems (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder; PTSD). One major goal for trauma researchers is to understand what factors contribute to these differential outcomes, and much of this research has examined correlates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity. An important next step in this line of research is the development of conceptual frameworks to foster a deeper understanding of the relationships among these diverse predictors of PTSD and their predictive power in relation to each other. A framework proposed by Rubin, Boals, and Hoyle centers on the influence of narrative centrality (construal of a traumatic experience as central to one's identity and to the life story) and negative affectivity (the tendency to experience negative emotion and to interpret situations and experiences in a negative light), suggesting many variables may correlate with PTSD symptoms via shared variance with these two factors. With a sample of 477 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, this dissertation project extended the work of Rubin and colleagues by a) utilizing structural equation modeling techniques to simultaneously examine relationships among variables, b) investigating the utility of the model with a carefully-selected list of PTSD correlates, c) extending the model by including PTSD symptom severity, and d) exploring both direct and indirect effects to assess the roles of narrative centrality and negative affectivity as they relate to known PTSD correlates and PTSD symptom severity. PTSD correlates included social support quality and quantity, peritraumatic dissociation, negative posttraumatic cognitions, perceived injustice, and negative religious coping. Hypotheses were partially supported, and there was some evidence that the model may be effective in distinguishing between variables more and less germane to the individual's construal of a traumatic experience.

This dissertation presents an empirical investigation of learning from online courses. The current dissertation examined student participation, using Arbaugh et al.'s Community of Inquiry (CoI) survey instrument and Biggs et al.'s revised version of the Study Process Questionnaire (R-SPQ-2F) to determine CoI influences on learning from the students' perspective. This study is in response to Rourke and Kanuka's call to provide further empirical evidence about CoI conceptual framework connections to deep and meaningful learning. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the elements of CoI, cognitive, social, and teaching presences and students' learning approaches to students' perceived learning. Students enrolled in traditional, online, and, blended courses during the 2016 spring semester at a southwestern university participated in a web-based survey. Structural equation modeling was used to test the indirect effects between the elements of CoI, learning approaches, and perceived learning. Student's deep approach to learning was found to have an indirect effect between cognitive presence and perceived learning. However, this study's findings, when the CoI framework was viewed in its entirety, failed to provide evidence to simulate deep and meaningful learning.

Educational loan defaulting is a problem increasing on a worldwide scale. In Malaysia, the default rate is almost 50% in the case of loans advanced to students in higher education. With this in mind, for the first time, this study analyses this chronic problem in-depth with consideration to primary data collected from a cross-section of students currently studying in public universities in Malaysia. With help from the Theory of Planned Behaviour, the empirical analysis establishes that loan defaults are influenced by a complex interaction of personal-, social- and psychology-related variables: students’ attitude, intention to repay loan, parental influence, perceptions that loan repayment will affect quality of life after graduation, perceptions towards loan agreement, and an awareness of loan repayment issues created by the media. This study succeeds in disentangling the precise impact of such variables in regard to loan defaults. The findings are of great relevance to government-funding agencies, which can better plan the loan advancement and recovery process once they understand the true reasons behind defaults. The novel method utilised for the first time with the objective to study the default issue should also be useful to academic researchers seeking to conduct similar studies in the context of other countries. This study should also assist policy makers in planning long-term strategies in terms of assessing, designing and evaluating new loan schemes. Developing countries, such as Malaysia, face competing demands on their limited financial resources. An increase in the recovery rate will bring in funds that can be lent to additional students or used for strengthening educational infrastructure. These measures add useful value to the social and economic set-up of the country.

Full weighted least squares (full WLS) and robust weighted least squares (robust WLS) are currently the two primary estimation methods designed for structural equation modeling with ordinal observed variables. These methods assume that continuous latent variables were coarsely categorized by the measurement process to yield the observed ordinal variables, and that the model proposed by the researcher pertains to these latent variables rather than to their ordinal manifestations. Previous research has strongly suggested that robust WLS is superior to full WLS when models are correctly specified. Given the realities of applied research, it was critical to examine these methods with misspecified models. This Monte Carlo simulation study examined the performance of full and robust WLS for two-factor, eight-indicator confirmatory factor analytic models that were either correctly specified, overspecified, or misspecified in one of two ways. Seven conditions of five-category indicator distribution shape at four sample sizes were simulated. These design factors were completely crossed for a total of 224 cells. Previously findings of the relative superiority of robust WLS with correctly specified models were replicated, and robust WLS was also found to perform better than full WLS given overspecification or misspecification. Robust WLS parameter estimates were usually more accurate for correct and overspecified models, especially at the smaller sample sizes. In the face of misspecification, full WLS better approximated the correct loading values whereas robust estimates better approximated the correct factor correlation. Robust WLS chi-square values discriminated between correct and misspecified models much better than full WLS values at the two smaller sample sizes. For all four model specifications, robust parameter estimates usually showed lower variability and robust standard errors usually showed lower bias. These findings suggest that robust WLS should likely remain the estimator of choice for applied researchers. Additionally, highly leptokurtic distributions should be avoided when possible. It should also be noted that robust WLS performance was arguably adequate at the sample size of 100 when the indicators were not highly leptokurtic. / text

Sport development is an emerging discipline in sport management due in part to the popular, normative associations between sport and its beneficial outcomes. However, concerns on how sport is used and designed as well as the miscomprehension of the word development cloud sport's utilitarian prospectus. Although research has started to address these concerns in youth and adolescent forums, research on adults using sport for developmental purposes is widely ignored. With life expectancy growing, the pressure to sustain living quality in late adulthood has become almost unmanageable. Maintaining quality of life in late adulthood is difficult. Drawing from human development and aging literature, quality of life is still possible in light of the challenges presented by multiple developmental forces. Developmental trajectories are the products of net gains and losses over the life course and are influenced by transitional events and the ability in people to adapt to them. In addition, development is both cumulative and innovative, which affirms that people in later stages of life can still develop. In order to do this, gerontological and psychological research argue that resources are key in the achievement of positive outcomes. However, research understanding mechanisms that affect resources that produce positive gains is still in its infancy. Hence, I constructed a dissertation with two studies using a multi-method approach to ascertain the role and efficacy of sport participation on the transitional process that undergirds the developmental trajectory. The impetus for this approach was to examine the utility of sport as a developmental force adults could consider in improving their overall quality of life. Study 1 used a life-history, qualitative method that reveals sports' role as an influential resource provider during life event transitions across a person's life. Data show that sport was believed to aid in the adaptation process that provided distinct benefits that other activities or support structures could not match or replicate easily. Study 2 used structural equation modeling to specify the magnitude of sport's role on resources during a specific transitional event that most adults will experience: retirement from the workforce. Quantitative evidence from this study yields support that sport participation can positively impact resources and retirement well-being directly. Both studies supply substantiation for the argument that sport participation can act as a positive developmental force for adults by assisting with the recruitment of resources and acting as a resource provider which affords adaptation assistance in transitions. The combined results demonstrate how sport may be viewed as a developmental tool which has practical implications for sport development and managers wishing to design sport for this purpose. In addition, the common assumption that sport development programming should be geared exclusively toward youth and adolescents is dismissed. This dissertation provides theoretical and empirical justification for creating positive adult developmental programming in sport. / text