Patience is among the most common colloquially known virtues, and yet its empirical attention is among the smallest of all virtues. In this dissertation, I focused on the conscientiousness-based virtue of patience in terms of theory and intervention. In my first study, I examined the effects of a preliminary intervention workbook designed to promote patience. In my second study, I examined a number of correlates informed by patience literature as potential antecedents, mechanisms, and outcomes of patience and, using structural equation modeling, present a theory of patience. Finally, in my third study, I beta tested the patience intervention workbook along with outcome measures posited in my proposed theory of patience in order to examine this theory under experimental and longitudinal design. In Study 1, the patience workbook did indeed produce higher patience outcomes at post-test relative to the control condition but was not significantly different from a positivity workbook condition. Participants in the patience workbook condition also improved in trait self-control, trait forgivingness, and trait negativity. In Study 2, familiarity with an identified stressor and perceived stress related to that stressor predicted state patience for that stressor, consistent with an ego-depletion model of patience. Additionally, patience predicted mental (resilience, anxiety, satisfaction with life, depression, positive affect, and negative affect), physical, relational (communicative competence and perceived social support), and spiritual (spiritual attitudes and involvement) health outcomes. Study 3 replicated the support for an ego-depletion model of patience, and those in the patience intervention workbook improved in trait and state patience, anxiety, and depression, extending and partially supporting the outcomes found in Study 2. The present studies support the use of a workbook intervention to promote patience and additional virtue and mental health outcomes. Implications of these results and future research directions are discussed.

This study attempts to analyze the efficiency of intervention policy in Turkey during the period between 4.1.2005 and 31.12.2012 with a sub period which is between 4.1.2007 and 31.12.2010. For our study purpose, therefore we investigated how interventions with pre-announced auctions as a whole influence the exchange rates. Further, we analyze whether there is an asymmetric effect among the buying and selling transactions with respect to their impact on the exchange rates. In the study, the E-GARCH model is employed to find the asymmetric effect. The final object of this study is whether buying auctions which are conducted to serve for only purpose of increasing international reserves influence the exchange rates. We evaluate the efficiency of transactions in the same direction of central bank statements. In conclusion, the findings did not amount to any significant impact of total transaction on exchange rates. The study findings also suggest that there is asymmetric effect among the selling and buying transactions. The amounts of selling transaction have a negative impact on both level and volatility while buying auctions did not have any significant effect on them. As a new research result, we found that buying auctions served well with respect to their contributions to reserves while they do not...

Early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) is currently the most studied and most practiced intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder. There has been increasing evidence supporting the use of EIBI, but there have been limited evaluations of the effectiveness of EIBI intensity. The current study addressed this gap using data obtained from St.Amant Autism Program and comparing children receiving an average of 22 and 30 hours per week for a period of one year. Significant main effects of time were found for standardized measures of cognitive functioning, adaptive functioning, and autism severity. Future research should aim to address this research question with a larger sample size and a low-intensity control group. / May 2016

ABSTRACT The ubiquitous effect of HIV/AIDS on workplaces in South Africa has increased the pressure on large companies to implement effective responses to the disease. As companies have begun to explore workplace interventions, several theoretical guidelines or codes of practice have come into existence and with this, the concept ‘best practice’ has been brought into the spotlight. With limited precedent to establish what ‘best practice’ really means, contemporary HIV/AIDS literature has yet to establish a clear understanding of the concept. As a result, critical questions have been raised around the value of ‘best practice’ in the workplace programmes of large South African companies and there has been a call for ‘best practice’ interventions to be more precisely defined. The research had two primary objectives. The first was to establish a greater level of understanding regarding the meaning of ‘best practice’ and of the specific interventions that make-up successful workplace programmes. The second was to determine the value of the ‘best practice’ in promoting and managing effective workplace programmes. The research employed an interpretive analysis as part of a qualitative methodology over a period of ten months. An in-depth thematic analysis of fourteen codes and guidelines and several ‘best practice’ documents formed the basis of interview research instruments. Data was collected during a series of thirty-nine in-depth interviews across twenty-one large companies and fifteen workplace HIV/AIDS experts, consultants and service providers. A focused research questionnaire - based on overlapping content in the codes and guidelines - was used to establish views regarding specific workplace interventions and to verify the existence of nine principal components of successful workplace programmes. The investigation of a wide range of perceptions and organisational factors found to affect the uptake and continuity of ‘best practice’ allowed for a greater understanding of the concept ‘best practice’ within the context of workplace HIV/AIDS programmes and enabled the development of a generic conceptual framework for companies to use in evaluating ‘best practice’ interventions. Within this, the research identified a specific need for renewed focus on the measurable outcomes and intensified efforts in promoting the continuous improvement of workplace HIV/AIDS intervention

ABSTRACT Indoor air pollution has been associated with acute lower respiratory infections amongst children less than five years old in developing countries. Very little is known about the potential role of behavioural change in reducing child indoor air pollution exposure. This thesis explores three questions: did people change their behaviours following exposure to an intervention that promoted the health benefits of behavioural change? Were changes in behaviour attributable to the intervention? What were the motivations and barriers to behavioural change? The evaluation included a quantitative and a qualitative study. The quantitative study utilised a quasiexperimental before-after design amongst an intervention village (n=98 households). Results were compared to a similar control village (n=121) that did not receive the intervention. Baseline data were collected during winter 2003 and follow-up data were collected during winter 2004 (12 months later). A qualitative evaluation, using two rounds of 4 focus group interviews each, was used to answer questions that emerged from the quantitative study. Indoor air quality - PM10, CO and CO (measured on the youngest child) - were measured over a 24 hour period in randomly selected households before and after the intervention in the intervention (n=36) and control (n=38) groups. After adjusting for confounding factors, there was no statistical association between having the received the intervention and the likelihood of burning outdoors at follow-up (OR=1.16; 95% CI 0.6-1.8). Indoor air quality data showed significant median reductions in PM10 (94-96%), CO (85-97%) and CO (child) (83- 95%) amongst households that burned outdoors compared to those that burned indoors. Results from the qualitative study suggest that motivations for outdoor burning included: health considerations, reaction to participating in the study, reduced drudgery and prestige. Barriers to outdoor burning included the need for space heating during winter, perceptions of low indoor air pollution risk and gender relations. This study highlights the potential for exposure reduction through behavioural change and is original for three reasons. It is the first behavioural intervention study designed to reduce indoor air pollution in a rural African setting. Secondly, it is the first intervention study in the indoor air pollution field to identify the factors that influenced behavioural change. Thirdly, it is one of the first studies to align debates about behavioural change in the field of indoor air pollution with those in the broader environmental health promotion literature.

The focus of this study was the challenge of implementing school improvement interventions from inception through the system to the school, within a framework of the multiple layers of South Africa's complex education system. These are the macro level, (the provincial and national political and bureaucratic decision makers), the meso-level (the role and function of district offices and external agents), and the micro level (local contexts at the site of the school). This study does not intend to evaluate school improvement interventions but rather to research and interrogate the mediation of the interventions at various levels and within the contextual realities of an education system in transition. The problem is three-pronged and is premised on understanding the link between the study of implementation and of school improvement within education in transition. The hypothesis put forward is that, on the one hand, contextual realties, contestation and contradictions at various levels of a complex organization shape the outcomes of a school improvement intervention. On the other hand, school improvement strategies must be further located within the framework of implementation in order to explore the complexities of getting things done in an emerging democracy. The challenge posed is whether a coherent link between implementation and school improvement can be achieved while taking into cognizance the three levels and the contextual realities informed by the legacy of the past. I identified two case studies of school improvement initiatives undertaken in the Gauteng province. The first was initiated during the first phase of the new democratic government, an EQUIP intervention programme initiated by the first Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for education in Gauteng. I chose EQUIP because the design and initiation of this intervention symbolized the political ideology of this first period of government. The second school improvement initiative, the Education Action Zone (EAZ) intervention, was chosen because it reflects a significant shift in political ideals in the second period of government. This study argues that school improvement in the emerging South African context must respond to the contested nature of transforming societies and the serious lack of cohesion and capacity at all levels of the system. In order to respond to this difficult terrain, implementation within a cyclic model must be an integral part of the design of a school improvement intervention. There must be a clear understanding of the political, cultural and technical nuances in each of the three environments. Implementation is dependent on actors in them, and the contextual realties shape the level of agency played by the people in each. The linkage also determines the fidelity, compliance, and communication of the message of the intervention as actors within each have different levels of power and authority to influence the change process.

Ce travail examine le problème de l'intervention d'un État ou d'un peuple dans les affaires d'un autre tel qu'il fut formulé dans le libéralisme naissant et à partir de la conjoncture ouverte par la Révolution française de 1789. Après un détour par les auteurs du droit des gens, il examine les écrits de Burke et de Godwin afin de donner à voir la nature polémique et les origines révolutionnaires du concept d'intervention. Puis, prenant comme fil directeur l'œuvre de John Stuart Mill, qui s'est penché de manière récurrente sur ce problème, en lui apportant des réponses diverses et contradictoires, il s'efforce d'en montrer l'équivocité. Loin de pouvoir se ramener à un simple chapitre de la théorie de la guerre ou du droit international, la question de l'intervention militaire fut au contraire réfléchie en relation avec l'économie, la politique ou encore la morale - les penseurs libéraux, tels que John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Constant, ou encore Richard Cobden, s'efforçant, dans chacun de ces champs et en faisant circuler les concepts, les maximes et les raisons, d'élaborer un ou des principes de non-intervention. Il propose enfin une nouvelle traduction et une lecture des « Quelques mots sur la non-intervention » de John Stuart Mill, en exhumant la nature dialectique de cet article de 1859. / This study examines the issue of intervention from a State or a people within the affairs of another as formulated in the nascent Liberalism and from the situation brought about by the French Revolution of 1789. After considering the authors of the law of nations, the study examines the writings of Burke and Godwin in order to highlight the controversial nature and revolutionary origins of the concept of intervention. Then, following the work of John Stuart Mill as a guiding theme, a philosopher who has provided diverse and contradictory answers in his recurrent study of this issue, an attempt is made to demonstrate the equivocal nature of intervention. Far from being a simple matter of war theory or international law, the issue of military intervention has on the contrary been considered in relation to economies, politics, and even morals - liberal thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Constant, and Richard Cobden, having endeavored, in each of these fields and by spreading concepts, maxims and reasons, to elaborate one or several principles of non-intervention. Lastly, a new translation and an interpretation of "A Few Words on Non-Intervention" by John Stuart Mill are proposed by highlighting the dialectical nature of this 1859 article.

Children with disabilities might experience multiple transitions during their early years. One important transition that occurs for many children with disabilities or developmental delays and their families is the transition from Early Intervention (EI) to Early Childhood Special Education (ECSE) services at three years of age. The stress of this transition may be exacerbated for families of young children with disabilities as the shifts between services involve many choices and decisions depending on the child’s level of need. Effective transition procedures for children with disabilities sets the stage for future positive or negative transition experiences and optimal learning experiences in the school setting. The study of transition is multifaceted and researchers, as well as professionals, attempt to understand the complexities of the transition experiences of young children with disabilities and their families. There is a common assertion in the literature that providers assist in the transition by providing environmental supports and involving families in transitions, yet provider perspectives and specifics of how they are involved in transition is mostly absent in studies about transition. Some researchers suggest that little is known about how relationships between families and service providers, which often begin during the transition between systems, are established. The purpose of this study is to investigate the common practices that EI professionals engage in during the EI-to-ECSE transition, and the perceptions of EI professionals during the EI-to-ECSE transition focusing on determining which actions, policies, and procedures contribute to make the experience a positive one for all of those involved. The research questions are answered through two focus groups and two interviews with Early Intervention providers in the Southern part of Illinois. The major themes that emerged are related to professionalism, working within the EI system, and supporting families. EI providers discussed their roles, staff shortages, schedules and funding, parent education, and collaboration. Implications and future research are discussed.

In modern international law, it is a near consensus that no state can use force against another - the main exceptions being self-defense and actions mandated by a U.N. Security Council resolution. However, one more potential exception exists: forcible intervention undertaken upon the invitation or consent of a government, seeking assistance in confronting armed opposition groups within its territory. This dissertation seeks to analyze the consent-exception in a wide context, and attempting to delineate its limits - including, perhaps, cases in which government consent power is not only negated, but might be transferred to opposition groups.

The research of my dissertation studies the methods of designing and analyzing sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (SMART) for comparing multiple adaptive interventions. As a SMART typically consists of numerous adaptive interventions, inferential procedures based on pairwise comparisons of all interventions may suffer substantial loss in power after accounting for multiplicity. I address this problem using two approaches. First, I propose a likelihood-based Wald test, study the asymptotic distribution of its test statistics, and apply it as a gate-keeping test for making an adaptive intervention selection. Second, I consider a multiple comparison with the best approach by constructing simultaneous confidence intervals that compare the interventions of interest with the truly best intervention, which is assumed to be unknown in inference; an adaptive intervention with the proposed interval excluding zero will be declared as inferior to the truly best with a pre-specified confidence level. Simulation studies show that both methods outperform the corresponding multiple comparison procedures based on Bonferroni's correction in terms of the power of test and the average width of confidence intervals for estimation. Simulations also suggest desirable properties of the proposed methods. I apply these methods to analyze two real data sets. As part of the dissertation, I also develop a user-friendly R software package that covers many statistical work related to SMART, including study design, data analysis and visualization. Both proposed methods can be implemented by using this R package. In the end of the dissertation, I show an application of designing a SMART to compare multiple patient care strategies for depression management based on one of the proposed methods.