The Brazilian-Portuguese Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III (BP-MCMI-III) is a newly developed translation of the original MCMI-III and requires validation before it can be used in cross-cultural research and clinical settings. This study was the first validation study with the BP-MCMI-III and examined the validity of its Alcohol Dependence and Drug Dependence scales for identifying substance-related disorders in a Brazilian sample. The diagnostic validity of these scales was examined by comparing participants' scores on the BP-MCMI-III against group status (controls versus patients receiving substance abuse treatment) and against clinical diagnoses made based on a DSM-IV-TR symptom checklist. In addition, diagnostic validity statistics were also computed for both scales. The construct validity of the Alcohol Dependence scale was examined by comparing the subjects' scores with their performance on a Brazilian version of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT). The total sample used in this study consisted of 126 Brazilians residing in the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Of the total sample, 75 were inpatients at treatment facilities for substance abuse and 51 were not receiving treatment for alcohol- or drug-related problems at the time of testing. The results of this study supported the validity of the BP-MCMI-III for diagnosing substance-related disorders among Brazilians.

Thesis (M Sport Sc)-- Stellenbosch University, 1998. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The purpose of this study was to develop a practical, reliable psychological skills inventory to assess the psychological skills of athletes. This primarily involved identifying the relevant psychological skills that affect sport performance. A variety of developmental procedures were applied in the construction of this inventory, including the consultation of sport psychology literature, identification of articles which characterise successful athletes, analysis of research articles pertaining to the psychological Skills, and review of available psychological tests. The initial inventory consisted of 82 items which evaluated six psychological skills: achievement motivation, goal setting, anxiety control, maintaining confidence, concentration and mental rehearsal. The inventory was completed by 304 students from the Department of Human Movement Science at the University of Stellenbosch. The respondents' data were divided into two groups depending on their achievement in sport. The results indicated that the inventory was able to differentiate between successful and less successful athletes on the psychological skills measured. Other aspects were statistically analysed, namely language, age, and gender differences, correlation between individual item and achievement level, and the contri,bution of each item to its psychological skill. The final inventory consists of 60 items, with ten items from each of the six psychological skills. Information obtained from the inventory can identify the strengths, weaknesses and deficiencies in the psychological skills of athletes, so that a psychological skills training programme can be developed. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING:Die doel van hierdie studie was om 'n praktiese, betroubare sielkundige inventaris te ontwerp om die sielkundige vaardighede van sportlui vas te stel. Dit het hoofsaaklik bestaan uit die identifisering van relevante sielkundige vaardighede wat sportprestasie beinvloed. 'n Verskeidenheid van prosedures was toegepas in die konstruksie van die inventaris, insluitend konsultasie van sportsielkundeliteratuur, identifesering van artikels wat suksesvolle sportlui beskryf, ontleding van narvorsingsartikels met betrekking tot sielkundige vaardighede en 'n oorsigstudie van relevante sielkundige toetse. Die aanvanklike inventaris het bestaan uit 82 items, wat ses sielkundige vaardighede getoets het, naamlik prestasiemotivering, doelwitstelling, aktiveringsbeheer, handhawing van selfvertroue, konsentrasie en verstandelike oefening. Die inventaris is deur 304 studente van die Departement Menslike Bewegingskunde aan die Universiteit van Stellenbosch voltooi. Die respondente se data is in twee groepe, afhangende van hul prestasie in sport, verdeel. Die resultate het aangedui dat die inventaris tussen suksesvolle en minder suksesvolle atlete onderskei met betrekking tot die sielkundige vaardighede wat gemeet is. Ander aspekte is statisties ontleed, naamlik taal, ouderdom, geslag, korrelasie tussen afsonderlike items en prestasievlak, asook die bydrae van elke item tot sy sielkundige vaardigheid. Die finale inventaris behels 60 items, met tien items van elk van die sielkundige vaardighede. Inligting wat van die inventaris verkry word, kan die sterkpunte en tekortominge van atlete bepaal, wat as basis vir die ontwikkeling van 'n sielkundige program kan dien.

The purpose of the study was:1. To develop an inventory of music teacher roles which pertained to the setting, community schools of the arts (CSAs).2. To discover how music teachers perceive their actual job roles vs. their ideal job roles in CSAs.An instrument was structured using the roles found in the work of Onderdonk (1995), Barnes (1972), Moller (1981), White (1964), and input from experts. Roles were categorized into three areas: community, school, and professional. The population of teachers was drawn from member schools of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts (NGCSA) for the year 2005-2006. The final study population consisted of 139 CSA teachers from 16 schools across the USA.Overall, teachers indicated that roles in the professional category were and should be performed more often than community and school roles. The school and community categories were deemed equal to each other (actually and ideally). Teachers indicated that community, school, and professional roles in CSAs were complex, consisting of 31 roles (7 community, 10 school, and 14 professional). A ranked and tiered inventory of the 31 valid roles and a portrait of the CSA music teacher were created. As an aggregate, teachers ideally desired to increase the frequency with which they performed the following roles: Advocate, Attendee of Faculty/Committee Meetings, Attendee of School Activities, Performer/Demonstrator/Coach, and Student/Lifelong Learner. As an aggregate, teachers desired to decrease the frequency with which they performed the role of School Leader. Teachers indicated balance in regard to modeling, performing, parental education, discipline, tradition, and leadership.Implications for CSA administrators, personnel of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, teacher educators and trainers, and future research include: finding paths to develop part-time leaders, developing content for coursework and professional development specific to CSA teachers, and promoting awareness that investment in current/future teachers should be given similar value and energy to fundraising efforts. In order to educate/train future CSA teachers, coursework which includes preparation as instrumental/pedagogical experts, as well as content which provides training in educational philosophy, history, curriculum development, role modeling, culture, and technology were recommended.

Cross-cultural assessment in South Africa has become more prominent since the first democratic elections held in April 1994, and stronger demands for the cultural appropriateness of psychological tests have arisen. The use of psychometric testing, including personality assessment in the workplace, is now strictly controlled by legislation, among others the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (Act 108 of 1996), the Labour Relations Act (66 of 1995), and the Employment Equity Act (55 of 1998), and the Health Professions Act (56 of 1974). Much controversy has arisen regarding the relevance and applicability of assessment instruments in South Africa. The majority of assessment procedures still make use of imported instruments that are either used in their original or adapted form. Psychological assessment instruments imported from abroad have an insufficient suitability in the multicultural South African context. There are various perspectives regarding the appropriate measurement of personality across cultures. In this research study implicit perspectives of personality, the lexical approach, indigenous psychology and the emic approach were used to determine the personality perspectives of the Tsonga culture in South Africa. The objectives of this study were to investigate how personality is conceptualised in literature, to identify the problems surrounding personality measurement for the South African context, to explore how personality perspectives could be determined and to investigate the personality descriptive terms in the Tsonga language group. A qualitative research design was used to collect the data of this research. A total of 5 502 personality descriptors were obtained through the 1 0-item interview questionnaires. Content analysis was used to analyse, reduce and interpret the data obtained from the participants. The personality descriptors obtained were reduced by removing superfluous words. These personality descriptors were then interpreted and categorised into a total of 109 personality dimensions. These characteristics were categorised into nine clusters, namely Optimism, Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, Narrow-mindedness, Intelligence, Conscientiousness, Aggressiveness, Dominance and Sociability. The following personality dimensions had the highest frequency: Emotional Stability, Caring, Helpful, Hard working, Advising, Generous, Traditional, Aggression, Recreational, Substance use, Religious, Sociable and Loving. Recommendations for future research were made. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

<p>A payment scheme specifies when payments are made between firms in a supply chain. It has direct implications on how supply chain inventory is financed and managed. Longer supply chains due to globalization and the recent credit crisis have increased the pressure to make financing the supply chain more efficient. It was recently reported that 81% of UK firms say that market conditions have brought procurement and finance strategies in closer alignment. Meanwhile, information technology platform advancements provide opportunity for increased variety of payment schemes. It is therefore important to understand how different payment schemes should be captured in inventory decisions. This dissertation examines the impact of supply chain finance (the set of financial payment transactions that are triggered by supply chain events) on inventory management from both normative and behavioral perspectives. </p><p>We seek to address the following questions. From a normative perspective: How does the optimal inventory policy depend on the supply chain financing structure? What is the right inventory financing scheme for a supply chain? From a behavioral perspective: How do real managers psychologically process payments when making inventory decisions, and how are they affected by the supply chain financing scheme? The results are reported in three chapters, described below.</p><p>In the first chapter, "Payment schemes and the financed inventory," we present a model of payment schemes in an echelon supply chain. A payment scheme specifies when payments are made between firms. Standard inventory decision models make strict assumptions about the payment scheme in order to avoid explicitly tracking financial flows. These assumptions, however, often do not hold in practice. We show that these assumptions can be relaxed. In particular, we introduce a model that allows us to track the financial flow of inventory models depending on the inventory policy and the payment scheme. We also define two new measures - financed inventory and margin backorders. These new measures allow us to leverage the structure of the payment scheme to define an equivalent problem that does not have to explicitly track financial flows. We apply this method to the base stock model and economic order quantity model to demonstrate the sensitivity of the optimal inventory policy to the payment scheme. Our results provide simple closed-form formulas for inventory managers and also sheds light on what is the right payment scheme for a supply chain.</p><p>The second chapter, "The effect of payment schemes on inventory decisions: The role of mental accounting," focuses on managerial behavior: how do manager's mentally process and evaluate payments when making an inventory decision? Keeping the net profit structure constant, we study how the payment scheme affects inventory decisions in the newsvendor problem. Specifically, we examine three payment schemes which can be interpreted as the inventory order being financed 1) by the newsvendor herself, 2) by the supplier, and 3) by the customer. We find in laboratory experiments that the order quantities may be higher or lower than the expected profit-maximizing solution depending on the payment scheme. Specifically, the order quantity under newsvendor own financing is greater than that under supplier financing, which is, in turn, greater than the order quantity under customer financing. This observed behavior biases orders in the opposite direction as what a regular or hyperbolic time-discounted utility model would predict, and cannot be explained by loss aversion models. Instead, the findings are consistent with a model that underweights the order-time payments, which is consistent with the "prospective accounting" assumption in the mental accounting literature. A second study shows the results hold even if all actual payments are conducted at the same time, suggesting that the framing of the payment scheme is sufficient to induce mental accounting of payments at different times. We further validate the robustness of our model under different profit-margin conditions. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the psychological processes involved in newsvendor decisions and have implications for supply chain financing practices and supply chain contract design.</p><p>The third chapter, "Reference prices and transaction utility in inventory decisions," studies another aspect of mental accounting in inventory decisions - the phenomenon that individuals often view a price as relative to other prices when making an evaluation. We present a descriptive model of the effects of reference prices and transaction utility in a newsvendor setting. The model predicts that an individual's order is irrationally increasing in past purchasing costs, decreasing in past selling prices, and decreasing in the proportion of high profit margin to low profit margin products in the decision portfolio. Three laboratory experiments support the model's predictions. These results suggest that managerial supervision and/or intervention are most valuable after a sudden increase or decrease in the cost or price of a product, or for a product that differs significantly in profit margin from other products in the category. We further extend the study to a supply chain setting. We show analytically that the supplier's optimal wholesale price is lower when the newsvendor is subject to reference effects compared to when the newsvendor is rational, and that the supplier's optimal retail price may be higher or lower depending on whether the reference effect is stronger for the newsvendor or for customers. Finally, we show that supply chains may suffer from a behavioral inefficiency we call a behavioral price whip: an increase in the transfer price between two nodes may influence the upstream node to order more than is rational while the downstream node demands less than is rational. These results suggest that suppliers should carefully evaluate the reference effect on both customers and retailers, and that everyday low pricing has a behavioral benefit over high-low pricing.</p> / Dissertation

In two-location inventory systems, unidirectional transshipment policies are considered when an item is not routinely stocked at a location in the system. Unlike the past research in this area which has concentrated on the simple transshipment policies of complete pooling or no pooling, the research presented in this thesis endeavors to develop an understanding of a more general class of transshipment policy. The research considers two major approaches: a decomposition approach, in which the two-location system is decomposed into a system with independent locations, and Markov decision process approach. For the decomposition approach, the transshipment policy is restricted to the class of holdout transshipment policy. The first attempt to develop a decomposition approach assumes that transshipment between the locations occurs at a constant rate in order to decompose the system into two independent locations with constant demand rates. The second attempt modifies the assumption of constant rate of transshipment to take account of local inventory levels to decompose the system into two independent locations with non-constant demand rates. In the final attempt, the assumption of constant rate of transshipment is further modified to model more closely the location providing transshipments. Again the system is decomposed into two independent locations with non-constant demand rates. For each attempt, standard techniques are applied to derive explicit expressions for the average cost rate, and an iterative solution method is developed to find an optimal holdout transshipment policy. Computational results show that these approaches can provide some insights into the performance of the original system. A semi-Markov decision model of the system is developed under the assumption of exponential lead time rather than fixed lead time. This model is later extended to the case of phase-type distribution for lead time. The semi-Markov decision process allows more general transshipment policies, but is computationally more demanding. Implicit expressions for the average cost rate are derived from the optimality equation for dynamic programming models. Computational results illustrate insights into the management of the two-location system that can be gained from this approach.

This study investigated the level of leadership practices and retention rates of freshman students at Texas Woman's University. The data for the study were collected using the Leadership Practices Inventory, Student Version. The sample for the study consisted of 151 freshman students. The students were each placed in one of three control groups. Group A students (the treatment group) were in the Neighbors Educated Together Program (NET). Group B students (control group) were in one of two university-sponsored programs (COLORS or University 1000), and Group C students (control group) were the residual group of first-time college freshmen. These three groups were surveyed prior to their participation in the NET program or a university-sponsored program and again at the end of 14 weeks. In addition, retention rates were examined on the 12 class day of the spring semester. The study found statistically significant differences (p <. 05) on the pretests and posttests between Group C, residual students, and the other two groups on the Enabling the Followers to Act subscale, the Inspiring a Shared Vision subscale, and Encouraging the Heart subscale. Group A, NET students, and Group B, COLORS/University 1000 students, showed no statistically significant differences between groups. The difference from the residual group could indicate that students who self-select into programs such as NET, COLORS, and University 1000 are more likely to engage in practices measured by the subscale prior to enrollment in the respective programs. No statistically significant differences were found on the Challenging the Process or Modeling the Way subscales. The lack of significance shows that there are no differences in practices for any of these groups prior to enrollment at the university or as a result of participation in a university-sponsored program such as NET, COLORS, or University 1000. A chi-square test was performed following the 12 class day for the Spring 2001 th semester. Approximately 89% of the students in Group C Residual, 97% of Group B COLORS/University 1000, and 91% of Group A NET were retained. The chi- square frequency test revealed no statistically significant differences in level of retention between groups.

The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) is a popular screening and research instrument for measuring severity of depression. The instrument was translated to Portuguese for use in Brazil in 1979; however, it was not until recently that its psychometric properties have been tested empirically for the Brazilian population. The purpose of the present study was to explore the BDI's psychometric properties in a northern region of Brazil and to test for possible relationships between certain demographic variables and BDI outcomes. Samples used in this study were from an urban area in Roraima, the northernmost state of Brazil. The BDI showed adequate levels of internal consistency in nonclinical and clinical samples. Female respondents had significantly higher scores than male respondents. Those who had lower levels of education, income, or occupational status had significantly higher scores than those with higher levels of these variables. Adolescents had significantly higher scores than adults from all age groups except those from age 19 to 22. No significant difference was found between those who identified themselves as “indigenous” and those who identified themselves as “non-indigenous.” Regression analysis results showed that the combination of gender, education, and age best accounted for the variance in BDI scores. An ANCOVA revealed that clinically depressed adults had significantly higher BDI scores than nonclinically depressed adults. Factor analysis results showed that there were two main factors in the item structure for both female respondents and male and female respondents combined: one factor of mainly cognitive-affective items and the other factor of mainly somatic items. The results were discussed in terms of the future use of the BDI in Brazil.

This research study was performed in an attempt to fill an apparent void regarding the relative utility and comprehensiveness of three published, theoretically-based, idiographic, initial assessment inventories: Integral Intake (II), Life-Style Introductory Interview (LI), and Multimodal Life History Inventory (MI). “Experts” -- defined as professors of counseling or psychology and licensed practitioners who have been practicing as counselors or psychologists for at least five years - read through the inventories and then evaluated them by responding to both (qualitative) open-ended questions as well (quantitative) rankings and ratings. The researcher posed three primary research questions: 1) how do participants' evaluations differ regarding the overall helpfulness of the three inventories; 2) how do participants' evaluations differ regarding the comprehensiveness -- both relative to each of the eight dimensions of the client (thoughts, emotions, behaviors, physical aspects of the client, physical aspects of the client's environment, culture, spirituality, and what is most meaningful to the client) and overall -- of the three inventories; and 3) how do participants' evaluations differ regarding the efficiency with which the three inventories assessed the eight dimensions. Results indicated that participants consistently evaluated the II and MI as more helpful, comprehensive, and efficient than the LI - both overall and relative to the eight specific dimensions. The LI was consistently evaluated as the worst of the three inventories -- on all dimensions. The MI was evaluated as the best inventory on four dimensions: the client's thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physical aspects. The II was evaluated as the best inventory on seven dimensions: physical aspects of the client's environment, client's culture, client's spirituality, what is most meaningful to the client, and, notably, on overall comprehensiveness, overall efficiency, and overall helpfulness. Another goal of this research was to obtain feedback from the participants relative to how to improve the II. This goal was also accomplished and the researcher will implement this feedback into subsequent versions of the Integral Intake.

The United States is one of the few developed countries in the world that has not adopted the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as its primary financial reporting guidelines. Instead, most American companies prepare financial statements adhering to the United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP). In recent years, there has been much debate regarding the feasibility and impact of a US adoption of IFRS. One area of financial reporting that would be significantly impacted by a switch from US GAAP to IFRS is inventory accounting. Specifically, inventory measurement and costing methods. The goal of this research is to examine the impact that a US adoption of IFRS would have on inventory reporting practices and investor perception of inventory-related accounts. To achieve this goal, I propose several business scenarios that each highlights a different aspect of inventory accounting, then proceed to analyze how these scenarios would be financially represented under IFRS and US GAAP. Results indicate that while the two sets of accounting standards result in different annual account balances, these differences even out over time. As such, I argue that experienced investors will not be significantly impacted should the United States ultimately choose to adopt IFRS.