Social support plays an important role in our physical and mental health, and is also recognised as a key factor for the success and well-being of athletes. It would be of significant interest for researchers and practitioners to identify the components of perceived and received social support, support antecedents, and subsequent consequences of support. The first aim of this thesis was to apply a univariate generalisability theory approach to examine the components of perceived and received support. The second aim was to apply a multivariate generalisability theory approach to identify the antecedents and consequences of perceived and received support across different levels of analysis. Four studies were conducted applying either a fully crossed or partially nested design to examine components of social support when athletes rated coaches or their most important support providers within their existing social networks. Further, in Studies 3 and 4, participants also completed a performance task in the presence of support providers. Univariate analyses demonstrated that consistently across all studies the relational and social components accounted for the largest amount of variance in both perceived and received support. These findings suggest that perceivers rated certain providers to be particularly supportive, in comparison to how they rated other providers. Across all studies multivariate analyses revealed that provider personality and social identity related to perceptions of support at the relational and social level. In Studies 1 and 4, coach competency also related to perceptions of support at the relational and social level. When athletes perceived certain providers to exhibit specific personality traits, particularly the trait of agreeableness, felt certain coaches were highly competent, and shared a common identity with providers, those providers were also perceived to be particularly supportive. Studies 3 and 4, however, were unable to identify antecedents of received support at any level of analysis, suggesting that perceived and received support have distinct antecedents. Further, in Studies 3 and 4, perceived and received support had unique relationships with self-confidence and performance across the different components. At the perceiver and trait level, when athletes felt they generally received support from providers, they generally felt more confident. In comparison, at the relational and social level, if athletes perceived certain providers to be particularly supportive, they performed better in their presence. The support received from those providers was also beneficial through enhancing self-confidence and, in turn, performance. The findings from the current thesis significantly further conceptual understanding of perceived and received support by identifying their correlates at the different levels of analysis. The current thesis also offers evidence based recommendations for social support interventions.

Scant literature is available on victims of sexual abuse who are still presiding in the same environment in which the sexual abuse occurred. Sexual abuse has been shown to cause symptoms of depression, feelings of low self-worth, low moral judgment and feelings of guilt. This study attempted to enhance the career resilience of a sexual abuse survivor by means of life design counselling. The research questions focussed mainly on the characteristics of sexual abuse and career resilience, the influence of sexual abuse on career resilience and how life design counselling can contribute to the career resilience of survivors of sexual abuse. The study was based on a single case study (intrinsic) design and a QUALITATIVE-quantitative approach. The observations and qualitative findings suggested that childhood sexual abuse (CSA) did influence the survivor?s intrinsic representations about herself as well as about others. The findings confirm the impact of CSA on survivors, highlighting previous research on CSA and its influence on future development (personal and emotional), as well as future career resilience and career adaptability. Life design counselling made it suitable as an intervention to be used with survivors of sexual abuse since it explores clients? subjective identity forms as influenced by their experiences and culminates in the writing of new stories. The study contributed to a more complete and comprehensive understanding of CSA and indicated that the life design counselling therapeutic intervention positively enhanced the participant?s self-insight. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Educational Psychology / MEd / Unrestricted

Background: Transferring cost-effectiveness information between geographic domains offers the potential for more efficient use of analytical resources. However, it is difficult for decision-makers to know when they can rely on costeffectiveness evidence produced for another context. Objectives: This thesis explores the transferability of economic evaluation results produced for one geographic area to another location of interest, and develops an approach to identify factors to predict when this is appropriate. Methods: Multilevel statistical models were developed for the integration of published international costeffectiveness data to assess the impact of contextual effects on country-level; whilst controlling for baseline characteristics within, and across, a set of economic evaluation studies. Explanatory variables were derived from a list of factors suggested in the literature as possible constraints on the transferability of costeffectiveness evidence. The approach was illustrated using published estimates of the cost-effectiveness of statins for the primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease from 67 studies and related to 23 geographic domains, together with covariates on data, study and country-level. Results: The proportion of variation at the country-level observed depends on the appropriate multilevel model structure and never exceeds 15% for incremental effects and 21% for incremental cost. Key sources of variability are patient and disease characteristics, intervention cost and a number of methodological characteristics defined on the data-level. There were fewer significant covariates on the study and country-levels. Conclusions: Analysis suggests that variability in cost-effectiveness data is primarily due to differences between studies, not countries. Further, comparing different models suggests that data from multinational studies severely underestimates country-level variability. Additional research is needed to test the robustness of these conclusions on other sets of cost-effectiveness data, to further explore the appropriate set of covariates, and to foster the development of multilevel statistical modelling for economic evaluation data in health.

Deep learning approaches have been explored for surgical tool classification in laparoscopic videos. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are prominent among the proposed approaches. However, concerns about the robustness and generalisability of CNN approaches have been raised. This paper evaluates CNN generalisability across different procedures and in data from different surgical settings. Moreover, generalisation performance to new types of procedures is assessed and insights are provided into the effect of increasing the size and representativeness of training data on the generalisation capabilities of CNN. Five experiments were conducted using three datasets. The DenseNet-121 model showed high generalisation capability within the dataset, with a mean average precision of 93%. However, the model performance diminished on data from different surgical sites and across procedure types (27% and 38%, respectively). The generalisation performance of the CNN model was improved by increasing the quantity of training videos on data of the same procedure type (the best improvement was 27%). These results highlight the importance of evaluating the performance of CNN models on data from unseen sources in order to determine their real classification capabilities. While the analysed CNN model yielded reasonably robust performance on data from different subjects, it showed a moderate reduction in performance for different surgical settings.

This work considers the theoretical, epistemological and methodological criteria for a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to the study of spiritual experience founded within a qualitative paradigm. Spirituality is noted to be of increasing significance in society and as a developing discipline within the academy and spiritual experience is offered as an opening to greater understanding and appreciation of an individual's understandings of their spirituality. The methodology provides an interpretative approach towards an opportunity for resonance, identification and empathy between individual and reader through richly descriptive narratives offering insights into such experiences and developing themes and threads of particular interest prior to seeking universal and semi universal traits between or amongst narratives. Practical methods for applying the methodology are considered, including ethical and researcher reflexive issues. The assessment of the methodology includes its application to a case study, located within contemporary Christianity in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Scotland, which due to limitations of space focuses particularly on the notion of the Gift and assists in the determination of the efficacy and validity of hermeneutic phenomenology in the study of spiritual experience.