<p>The role of the principal in Sweden has undergone significant changes over the past two decades.  Task and responsibility has been decentralized from the national level to o the local school board affecting principals´ everyday life. At the same time a new inspection system for all schools has been introduced.  These changes puts focus on how principals implement and report political decisions within established guidelines. For many principals it is a balancing act to achieve the national goals within a local context. All the above include for the principal important work with evaluations of quality in different processes in the school, especially those related to teacher performance and children’s grades and results.</p><p>In the mid 1990’s a debate about the lack of evaluations and school improvement in Swedish schools started, and as a result the Government decided in 1997 that every school should write a quality assessments and that the school board should write a summery for the whole school district. Many schools had problems in the beginning with the working processes around quality assessments, and many schools view this national law only as a top-down control decision from the Government and were not able to see the school improvement part of the law.</p><p>The aim of this study is to describe how principals take responsibility for the quality assessment regulation and to analyze how they act and lead their schools in relation to quality assessments. In this study, results are presented from survey data, done with 131 principals who attended the National Principal Training Program at Umeå University. A theoretical model which discusses four leadership styles is used as a theoretical background. This model has an organizational frame. After making an argument for the importance of each of these styles for understanding principals work with quality assessments, two strands are examined. First, leadership styles are described from a principal perspective and factor analysis is used to investigate if these styles can illustrate principals´ work with quality assessments. Second, important factors explaining different ways in which principals tackle the work with quality assessments is highlighted. These factors are affected by different laws and regulations and even some time local political decisions and policies which here is understood as structure and culture, and personal background, for example the principals´ age, sex, education and experience. </p><p>Based on the empirical results, my theoretical conclusion is that the four leadership styles used are relevant for understanding how principals work with quality assessments.  The study also shows that structure and culture are important factors when it comes to explaining how principals´ work with quality assessments.  Personal background, however, are not shown as important in this study.</p>

<p>The overall aim of the present thesis was three-fold. The overall aim of the present thesis was three-fold. The first was to study occupational performance in individuals with severe mental disorders and their experiences of occupational therapy, the second to study experienced burden of family caregivers and the third to test the validity and the homogeneity of assessment tools in this area. The samples consisted of individuals with severe mental disorders participating in organised occupations (n= 112), occupational therapy records (n=64), occupational therapists working in mental health care (n=7) and family caregivers of individuals with severe mental disorders (n=256). Data were collected by questionnaires, structured and narrative interviews, observations and occupational therapy records. Individuals with severe mental disorders reported problems related to leisure and work activities and the occupational therapists recorded problems concerning how to organise and structure occupational performance. Individuals functioning on a high cognitive level experienced problems related to work and productive activities. Participation in occupational therapy strengthened their confidence in their own ability. The "Experience of Occupational Performance Questionnaire" (EOPQ) was developed from data on the experiences of women participating in occupational therapy. A principal component analysis gave seven factors with acceptable homogeneity. There is a need for assessment tools to evaluate occupational therapy. The EOPQ represents an attempt to fulfil this need. Family caregivers experienced limitations of daily activities as a burden. The ability to perform daily activities was studied from three perspectives, the individuals’, the occupational therapists’, and the experienced burden of the family caregivers. These perspectives are complementary and thus necessary for planning and implementation of individually adapted occupational therapy as well as for the evaluation of outcomes.</p>

This dissertation discusses a method that will aid in diagnosing the root causes of product and process variability in complex manufacturing processes when large quantities of multivariate in-process measurement data are available. As in any data mining application, this dissertation has as its objective the extraction of useful information from the data. A linear structured model, similar to the standard factor analysis model, is used to generically represent the variation patterns that result from the root causes. Blind source separation methods are investigated to identify spatial variation patterns in manufacturing data. Further, the existing blind source separation methods are extended, enhanced and improved to be a more effective, accurate and widely applicable method for manufacturing variation diagnosis. An overall strategy is offered to guide the use of the presented methods in conjunction with alternative methods.

The role of the principal in Sweden has undergone significant changes over the past two decades.  Task and responsibility has been decentralized from the national level to o the local school board affecting principals´ everyday life. At the same time a new inspection system for all schools has been introduced.  These changes puts focus on how principals implement and report political decisions within established guidelines. For many principals it is a balancing act to achieve the national goals within a local context. All the above include for the principal important work with evaluations of quality in different processes in the school, especially those related to teacher performance and children’s grades and results. In the mid 1990’s a debate about the lack of evaluations and school improvement in Swedish schools started, and as a result the Government decided in 1997 that every school should write a quality assessments and that the school board should write a summery for the whole school district. Many schools had problems in the beginning with the working processes around quality assessments, and many schools view this national law only as a top-down control decision from the Government and were not able to see the school improvement part of the law. The aim of this study is to describe how principals take responsibility for the quality assessment regulation and to analyze how they act and lead their schools in relation to quality assessments. In this study, results are presented from survey data, done with 131 principals who attended the National Principal Training Program at Umeå University. A theoretical model which discusses four leadership styles is used as a theoretical background. This model has an organizational frame. After making an argument for the importance of each of these styles for understanding principals work with quality assessments, two strands are examined. First, leadership styles are described from a principal perspective and factor analysis is used to investigate if these styles can illustrate principals´ work with quality assessments. Second, important factors explaining different ways in which principals tackle the work with quality assessments is highlighted. These factors are affected by different laws and regulations and even some time local political decisions and policies which here is understood as structure and culture, and personal background, for example the principals´ age, sex, education and experience.  Based on the empirical results, my theoretical conclusion is that the four leadership styles used are relevant for understanding how principals work with quality assessments.  The study also shows that structure and culture are important factors when it comes to explaining how principals´ work with quality assessments.  Personal background, however, are not shown as important in this study.

The overall aim of the present thesis was three-fold. The overall aim of the present thesis was three-fold. The first was to study occupational performance in individuals with severe mental disorders and their experiences of occupational therapy, the second to study experienced burden of family caregivers and the third to test the validity and the homogeneity of assessment tools in this area. The samples consisted of individuals with severe mental disorders participating in organised occupations (n= 112), occupational therapy records (n=64), occupational therapists working in mental health care (n=7) and family caregivers of individuals with severe mental disorders (n=256). Data were collected by questionnaires, structured and narrative interviews, observations and occupational therapy records. Individuals with severe mental disorders reported problems related to leisure and work activities and the occupational therapists recorded problems concerning how to organise and structure occupational performance. Individuals functioning on a high cognitive level experienced problems related to work and productive activities. Participation in occupational therapy strengthened their confidence in their own ability. The "Experience of Occupational Performance Questionnaire" (EOPQ) was developed from data on the experiences of women participating in occupational therapy. A principal component analysis gave seven factors with acceptable homogeneity. There is a need for assessment tools to evaluate occupational therapy. The EOPQ represents an attempt to fulfil this need. Family caregivers experienced limitations of daily activities as a burden. The ability to perform daily activities was studied from three perspectives, the individuals’, the occupational therapists’, and the experienced burden of the family caregivers. These perspectives are complementary and thus necessary for planning and implementation of individually adapted occupational therapy as well as for the evaluation of outcomes.

In the James Bay Lowlands of northern Ontario, kimberlite pipes are concealed by peat, thick layers of till, and Tyrell sea sediments. Studies have shown that buried ore bodies produce geochemical signatures in surface media. This thesis explores the geochemistry of near-surface groundwater above concealed kimberlite pipes using factor analysis to determine whether (1) a factor analysis can reveal an underlying structure (factors) in a multivariate groundwater geochemical dataset, and whether (2) those factors are related to the presence of concealed kimberlite. Factor analysis was performed on two datasets of nearsurface groundwater, collected at 0.2 m and 1.1 m below ground surface in peat. Results revealed that (1) there is a significant difference in the behaviour of elements in groundwater near the surface compared to those in deeper groundwater, which is sheltered from the effects of the atmosphere; (2) for both datasets, the first factor is dominated by elements known to be enriched in kimberlite, notably rare earth elements (REE), U, Th, Ti – the composition of factor one is consistent with their derivation from kimberlite in a limestone background where such elements are in very low concentration; (3) high-valence and lowvalence kimberlite indicator elements (KIE) are found separated into distinct factors suggesting that once released from the kimberlite after weathering, KIE are subjected to various geochemical processes to be differentiated as they migrate upward to the surface; and (4) Fe and Mn load on a factor distinct from other metals, suggesting that in this environment Fe-Mn-O-OH is not a significant controller of metal mobility in groundwater. Overall, this research has further highlighted the multivariate nature of geochemical processes in groundwater. Compared with previous work in geochemical exploration where often only univariate or bivariate statistics or single element profiles over concealed ore bodies were used, this thesis has shown that factor analysis, as a multivariate data analysis technique, is a robust exploration tool, able to shed light on relevant geochemical processes hidden within geochemical datasets. This thesis shows that high-valence KIE, notably U,V, Th, Ti and the REE, as a group, are better indicators of the presence of kimberlites than other well-known KIE. Single element concentration profiles such as Ni or Cr (known KIE) show similar anomalies over a concealed kimberlite as a factor score profile for factor one (U, V, Th, Ti, REE, Ni) would; however, it is the peculiar assemblage of elements in factor one that makes it unique to kimberlites, a feature that can be used in future exploration work for concealed kimberlites in similar surficial environments, such as the Siberian wetlands. The results suggest that future geochemical exploration work involving groundwater should focus on the more stable groundwater located below the zone of oxidation, sheltered from the effects of the atmosphere.

<p>Multivariate or high-dimensional data with mixed types are ubiquitous in many fields of studies, including science, engineering, social science, finance, health and medicine, and joint analysis of such data entails both statistical models flexible enough to accommodate them and novel methodologies for computationally efficient inference. Such joint analysis is potentially advantageous in many statistical and practical aspects, including shared information, dimensional reduction, efficiency gains, increased power and better control of error rates.</p><p>This thesis mainly focuses on two types of mixed data: (i) mixed discrete and continuous outcomes, especially in a dynamic setting; and (ii) multivariate or high dimensional continuous data with potential non-normality, where each dimension may have different degrees of skewness and tail-behaviors. Flexible Bayesian models are developed to jointly model these types of data, with a particular interest in exploring and utilizing the factor models framework. Much emphasis has also been placed on the ability to scale the statistical approaches and computation efficiently up to problems with long mixed time series or increasingly high-dimensional heavy-tailed and skewed data.</p><p>To this end, in Chapter 1, we start with reviewing the mixed data challenges. We start developing generalized dynamic factor models for mixed-measurement time series in Chapter 2. The framework allows mixed scale measurements in different time series, with the different measurements having distributions in the exponential family conditional on time-specific dynamic latent factors. Efficient computational algorithms for Bayesian inference are developed that can be easily extended to long time series. Chapter 3 focuses on the problem of jointly modeling of high-dimensional data with potential non-normality, where the mixed skewness and/or tail-behaviors in different dimensions are accurately captured via the proposed heavy-tailed and skewed factor models. Chapter 4 further explores the properties and efficient Bayesian inference for the generalized semiparametric Gaussian variance-mean mixtures family, and introduce it as a potentially useful family for modeling multivariate heavy-tailed and skewed data.</p> / Dissertation

In this study, a chlorinated-solvent contaminated groundwater site was used as the study site. Multivariate statistical analysis explains the huge and complicated current situation of the original data efficiently, concisely, and explicitly; it simplifies the original data into representative factors, or bases on the similarity between data to cluster and identify clustering outcome. The statistical software SPSS 12.0 was used to perform the multivariate statistical analysis to evaluate groundwater quality characteristics of this site. Results show that 20 analytical items of groundwater quality of the study site are simplified into seven major representative factors through factor analysis, including ¡§background¡¨, ¡§salt residual¡¨, ¡§hardness¡¨, ¡§ethylene chloride¡¨, ¡§alkalinity¡¨, ¡§organic pollutant¡¨, and ¡§chloroform¡¨. The factor score diagram was drawn according to the score of monitoring well on each factor and 89.6% of the variance could be obtained. This study used cluster analysis to cluster in two phrases, the groundwater quality monitoring wells were classified into seven clusters according to the similarity of monitored data nature and the differences between clusters. The groundwater quality characteristics and pollutant distributions of each cluster out this site were evaluated. The clustering result indicates that for the sixth cluster (where monitoring well SW-6 was the representative well), the average concentrations of chlorides such as 1,1-dichloroethylene, 1,1-dichloroethane, and cis-1,2-dichloroethylene were the highest among the clusters, indicating those the groundwater of nearby area might be polluted by chlorinated organic compounds. In addition, to evaluate whether the clustering of cluster analysis were appropriate or not, discriminant analysis is used to evaluate clustering accuracy, in which seven Fisher discriminant coefficient formulas that were exclusively suitable for this location were established. Then, the observed values were substituted to Fisher discriminant coefficient formula. Result shows that the monitoring well¡¦s clusters obtained from discriminant analysis were totally identical with the result of actual cluster analysis; the accuracy were 100%. After performing cross-validation analysis, the result shows that the accuracy were 80%, indicating the use of discriminant analysis (with forecasting function) to verify the clustering result of the cluster analysis was highly accurate. After analyzing the pollution condition of this site using time trend and space distribution, it were determined to conclude that trichloroethylene and 1,1-dichloroethylene were the major concerning pollutants; the pollutants appeared to be spreading on a large scale, so it was difficult to use the existing data to evaluate the pollution source. After assessing environmental medium characteristics and pollutant distribution of the site, this study suggests that the use of insitu bioremediation, which is cost-effective, can be applied as a remedial mothod.

According to the change of Taiwan economic structure, Taiwan is gradually moving into an aging society and more and more population in Taiwan will suffer from chronic disease in the near future. Hypertension is not only the first cause of death among the top ten COD in Taiwan, but is also the major source of other four types of disease in the top ten COD list. Market size for hypertension treatment has enormous potential thus all multi-national pharmaceutical companies seize for opportunities in it. Hypertension treatment research and development are always a priority for pharmaceutical companies and medical research centers, however, new compound takes a long time to develop and patent protection period is getting shorter, therefore, how to increase physician acceptance of a new compound becomes the critical success factor of the new launch product for pharmaceutical companies. This research is an attempt to study the relationship between ¡§Current Prescription¡¨, ¡§New Drug Usage¡¨ and ¡§Environmental Factors-Medical Provider¡¨ and ultimately to find the vital factors which would influence the ¡§Willingness¡¨ of the physicians to prescribe product X. One aim of this research is also to understand the potential factors which would affect the physician acceptance of a new mechanism drug. Based on the Multiple Regression Analysis, Analysis of Variance and Factor Analysis, the research results are as follows: 1. The effect of ¡§Current Prescription¡¨ on ¡§Willingness to Prescribe New Product X¡¨ is limited, and factors such as ¡§Satisfaction on Current Prescription¡¨ and ¡§Current Prescription¡¨ do not influence the ¡§Willingness to Prescribe New Product X¡¨. Only the satisfaction of BLOPRESS and PLENDIL and current prescription percentage on ADALOT OROS and CO-DIOVAN show a significant affect. So the research hypothesis H-1 and H1-3 are partially supported. AS far as ¡§Level of Fame¡¨ of the product shows a significant influence on the ¡§Willingness to Prescribe New Product X¡¨, so the research hypothesis H1-2 is fully supported. 2. Relationship between ¡§New Drug Usage¡¨ and ¡§Willingness to Prescribe New Product X¡¨ is not all significant. ¡§External Information¡¨, ¡§Physician Specialty¡¨ and factors a physician will consider when prescribing did not have a large impact on whether the physician will prescribe the new drug or not. Only the familiarity on ¡§Renin system is an import treatment indicator on blood pressure control and organ protection¡¨, ¡§External Information Orientated¡¨, and ¡§Market Follower¡¨ type of physicians and ¡§Will still use broadly to treat, even despite the high cost of new drugs¡¨ and ¡§New product X will always be part of the prescription in combination therapy¡¨ show significant impact. Thus hypothesis H2-1, H2-3 & H2-4 are partial supported. ¡¨Type of Patient¡¨ shows no difference in effect physician¡¦s willingness to prescribe new product X, so the hypothesis H2-2 are not supported. 3. ¡§Level of Fame¡¨ just has partial significance effect to physician¡¦s ¡§Current Prescription¡¨. ¡§Level of fame¡¨ for CCB, ARB and ACEI have significant effect to the physician¡¦s ¡§Current Prescription¡¨, but other drugs like ALPHA BLOCKER, BETA BLOCKER & OTHERS have no effect to the physician¡¦s ¡§Current Prescription¡¨, so the research hypothesis is partially supported. 4. ¡§Environment Factors¡ÐMedical Provider¡¨ has limited effect to physician¡¦s ¡§Current Prescription¡¨. Among all the physician specialties, only Cardiovascular, Nephrology and Meta/Endo physicians show a difference in ¡§Current Prescription¡¨ among all specialties. ¡§Type of Hospital¡¨ shows no effect on ¡§Current Prescription¡¨, thus the research hypothesis is not supported. According to the findings above, pharmaceutical companies should increase call frequency from sales representatives to the physicians; increased call frequency will effectively increase the brand awareness of the new launch products and also to increase the new product prescription rate. Improvement of Sales Training and after sales service can also be a key area for improved for the pharmaceutical companies to improve the effectiveness and efficiency for product promotion. In addition, product efficacy and treatment differentiation messages should also be customized for physicians in different specialties and in different types of hospitals; increased frequency and customized messages will ensure the success of the new product launch.

In this study, time series analysis and factor analysis of multivariate analysis were applied to surface water quality monitoring data sets. In order to gain a better understanding on water pollution situations and sources of different river basin, we have done some statistical analysis according to the water quality monitoring data from the database of Environmental Protection Administration Executive Yuan in the years from 2004 to 2008. The statistical analysis is based on the aforementioned contents to find the common latent factors of the water pollution and try to explain the main sources of water pollution of river basins. Specifically the water quality monitoring data of the Tamsui River and the Kao-Ping River basin are analyzed. In seriously polluted areas, from the time series results they reveal that the water quality monitoring data has significant serial correlations. Therefore we firstly use vector autoregression (VAR) model to eliminate the dynamic dependencies of data, and later perform the factor analysis for the residuals. With this analysis procedure, the resulting models and factor variables from the factor analysis, sufficiently explained water quality variables with the potential relationship between environmental pollution in the region.