Bibliography: leaves 173-188. / vii, 188 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Statistics, 1994

<p>An area within psychology that looks at the strengths and positive sides of human life has emerged the last decade. It is called positive psychology and one area related to that is positive adaptation. The main purpose of this paper is to describe the natural history of females’ positive extrinsic and intrinsic adaptation from childhood to adulthood, with a focus on typical positive patterns of adaptation and how these patterns develop within the same individual. The sample consisted of about 500 Swedish girls and data were taken at age 13, 15, and 43 from the longitudinal research program Individual Development and Adaptation (IDA). Variable-oriented methods were used to study basic relationships among factors both within age and between childhood and adulthood and person-oriented methods were used to study typical patterns of adaptation and how these patterns develop, using cluster analyses and cross-tabulation of clusters. The overall results show, as expected, more distinct typical positive adaptation patterns in the intrinsic than the extrinsic area in both childhood and adulthood. Significant longitudinal developmental streams between typical positive adaptation patterns in childhood and adulthood were found and these are discussed from a dynamic system perspective suggesting the interaction between factors thru reinforcing feedback processes.</p>

A robust literature documents numerous negative implications of neuroticism for romantic relationships. The current study was the first to demonstrate necessary information regarding how couples can protect against these implications. Given the role of negative affect in the association between neuroticism and relationship difficulties, and given the role of sex in reducing negative affect, the current 8-wave longitudinal study of 72 newlywed couples tested the prediction that sexual frequency would moderate the association between neuroticism and marital satisfaction. Lagged multilevel modeling analyses supported this prediction. Specifically, although neuroticism was negatively associated with changes in marital satisfaction among spouses engaging in less frequent sex over the prior 6 months, neuroticism was unrelated to changes in satisfaction among spouses reporting more frequent sex over the prior 6 months. These findings join others in highlighting the importance of considering the broader context of the relationship to developing a complete understanding of relationship development.

An area within psychology that looks at the strengths and positive sides of human life has emerged the last decade. It is called positive psychology and one area related to that is positive adaptation. The main purpose of this paper is to describe the natural history of females’ positive extrinsic and intrinsic adaptation from childhood to adulthood, with a focus on typical positive patterns of adaptation and how these patterns develop within the same individual. The sample consisted of about 500 Swedish girls and data were taken at age 13, 15, and 43 from the longitudinal research program Individual Development and Adaptation (IDA). Variable-oriented methods were used to study basic relationships among factors both within age and between childhood and adulthood and person-oriented methods were used to study typical patterns of adaptation and how these patterns develop, using cluster analyses and cross-tabulation of clusters. The overall results show, as expected, more distinct typical positive adaptation patterns in the intrinsic than the extrinsic area in both childhood and adulthood. Significant longitudinal developmental streams between typical positive adaptation patterns in childhood and adulthood were found and these are discussed from a dynamic system perspective suggesting the interaction between factors thru reinforcing feedback processes.

Introduction The present study explored the nature of the semantic deterioration normally displayed in the course of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The aim was to disentangle the extent to which semantic memory problems in patients with AD are best characterized as loss of semantic knowledge rather than difficulties in accessing semantic knowledge. Method A longitudinal approach was applied. The same semantic tests as well as same items were used across three test occasions a year apart. Twelve Alzheimer patients and 20 matched control subjects, out of a total of 25 cases in each group, remained at the final test occasion. Results and Conclusions Alzheimer patients were impaired in all the semantic tasks as compared to the matched comparison group. A progressing deterioration was evident during the study period. Our findings suggest that semantic impairment is mainly due to loss of information rather than problems in accessing semantic information.

Homelessness is an important social problem in Canada, and the needs and experiences of women may differ from those of other homeless people. Little research has looked beyond rehousing to examine community integration following homelessness. Predictive models of three distinct facets of community integration for women who have experienced homelessness are presented and tested in this thesis. The first model examines physical integration, which is defined in terms of attaining and retaining stable housing. The second model predicts economic integration, defined in terms of participation in work or education. The third model predicts psychological integration, defined as psychological sense of community in one’s neighbourhood. Data for this research comes from a two-year longitudinal study conducted in Ottawa. Participants were women aged 20 and over (N =101) who were homeless at the study’s outset. Family status was an important predictor of community integration. Women who were accompanied by dependent children were more likely than those unaccompanied by children to be physically, economically and psychologically integrated in their communities. Having access to subsidized housing predicted becoming rehoused and living in one’s current housing for longer. Greater perceived social support predicted living in one’s current housing for longer. Past work history and mental health functioning predicted economic integration. Lower levels of education predicted returns to full-time studies. Living in higher quality housing and having more positive contact with neighbours predicted psychological integration, while living in one’s current housing for longer predicted lower levels of psychological integration. Overall, participants achieved a moderate level of community integration. The majority had been housed for at least 90 days at follow-up. However, only a minority were participating in the workforce or education at follow-up. Participants achieved only a moderate level of psychological integration. Results are discussed in terms of implications for policy and service provision. Improvements in the availability and quality of affordable housing, as well as employment support are recommended. Special attention needs to be paid to providing adequate and effective services for women who are unaccompanied by dependent children. / Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la societé et la culture

Overcrowding is a serious problem in prisons and jails. Most people who are in prison and jail have substance abuse problems. Long-term, intensive, therapeutic community, substance abuse treatment in prison has proven effective in reducing arrests, amounts of incarceration and time until first arrest. Jails, with their shorter times of incarceration, make long-term treatment impossible and therapeutic communities or milieu therapy difficult. There are few substance abuse treatment programs in jails and even fewer outcome evaluations to determine effectiveness so it is not known if jail treatment is effective. Graduates of the Inmate Recovery Program (a short term, day treatment style, jail-based substance abuse treatment program) were compared four years before and up to five years after treatment with a nontreated control group and a treatment drop-out group. The IRP group had fewer arrests, less time incarcerated, a bigger drop in rates of incarceration and a longer time lapse until first arrest than the drop-outs. The IRP group had less arrests, a longer time lapse until first arrest, a bigger drop in rate of incarceration and less incarceration in two out of five years than the control group. IRP produced a conservative net avoided cost of incarceration of $786,593.89 alone. This is equivalent to an average savings of $3,480.50 per client for the average three and a half years after treatment. Experiences prior to IRP also impacted treatment results. Subjects with fewer previous prison sentences; fewer prior arrests; less time incarcerated the year of treatment; more prior alcohol and drug related arrests; a job, or another legal source of income; who were older; and had more DUII arrests before treatment were associated with fewer arrests and less time incarcerated after treatment. This information may help improve future IRP performance. Therefore the Inmate Recovery Program has a variety of favorable impacts and appears to also be a cost-effective program. / Graduation date: 1996

Homelessness is an important social problem in Canada, and the needs and experiences of women may differ from those of other homeless people. Little research has looked beyond rehousing to examine community integration following homelessness. Predictive models of three distinct facets of community integration for women who have experienced homelessness are presented and tested in this thesis. The first model examines physical integration, which is defined in terms of attaining and retaining stable housing. The second model predicts economic integration, defined in terms of participation in work or education. The third model predicts psychological integration, defined as psychological sense of community in one’s neighbourhood. Data for this research comes from a two-year longitudinal study conducted in Ottawa. Participants were women aged 20 and over (N =101) who were homeless at the study’s outset. Family status was an important predictor of community integration. Women who were accompanied by dependent children were more likely than those unaccompanied by children to be physically, economically and psychologically integrated in their communities. Having access to subsidized housing predicted becoming rehoused and living in one’s current housing for longer. Greater perceived social support predicted living in one’s current housing for longer. Past work history and mental health functioning predicted economic integration. Lower levels of education predicted returns to full-time studies. Living in higher quality housing and having more positive contact with neighbours predicted psychological integration, while living in one’s current housing for longer predicted lower levels of psychological integration. Overall, participants achieved a moderate level of community integration. The majority had been housed for at least 90 days at follow-up. However, only a minority were participating in the workforce or education at follow-up. Participants achieved only a moderate level of psychological integration. Results are discussed in terms of implications for policy and service provision. Improvements in the availability and quality of affordable housing, as well as employment support are recommended. Special attention needs to be paid to providing adequate and effective services for women who are unaccompanied by dependent children. / Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la societé et la culture

Although HIV/AIDS is the 9th leading cause of death in African-American children, 80% of HIV-infected children in the U.S. live into school-age years. This study focuses on associations between HIV illness severity, family factors, and long-term cognitive functioning of these children. Participants included 42 perinatally HIV-infected children (mean age = 72.4 months), 93% of whom were African-American. Mean intellectual functioning was more than one standard deviation below the normative mean; whereas, overall language and attention functioning were generally not different from the normative sample. First, this study described changes in functioning over time and/or between genders. Analyses of variance were conducted for five outcome variables (i.e., full scale IQ, verbal IQ, performance IQ, expressive and receptive one word picture vocabulary test). Expressive language scores increased over time. For receptive language, males’ skills improved significantly over time, while the decline in females’ skills did not reach significance. Second, the associations between Time Two illness severity (i.e., viral load), and Time One familial variables (i.e., adult-to-child ratio in the home, number of caregivers lost to death, number of months since caregiver death), with outcome variables at Time Two (i.e., intellectual, language, and attentional/hyperactivity functioning) were examined. For intellectual and expressive language, only the respective Time One functioning independently contributed a significant amount to Time Two functioning. For receptive language, Time One receptive language and the adult-to-child ratio in the home significantly predicted Time Two functioning. As the number of adults per child increased, there was an improvement in receptive language functioning. For both measures of language, the interaction between Time Two illness severity and Time One months since caregiver death significantly predicted Time Two functioning. With no loss of caregiver, more ill children demonstrated better language abilities than less ill children. Across illness groups, children performed similarly after a recent caregiver death. With greater time since caregiver death, the less ill children performed better than their more ill peers. For attention/hyperactivity, no predictor variables were significant. Interventions that consider family factors, as well as medical information, as potential influences on future child functioning may aid in the battle against this chronic illness.

Longitudinal data arise commonly in many fields including public health studies and survey sampling. Valid inference methods for longitudinal data are of great importance in scientific researches. In longitudinal studies, data collection are often designed to follow all the interested information on individuals at scheduled times. The analysis in longitudinal studies usually focuses on how the data change over time and how they are associated with certain risk factors or covariates. Various statistical models and methods have been developed over the past few decades. However, these methods could become invalid when data possess additional features. First of all, incompleteness of data presents considerable complications to standard modeling and inference methods. Although we hope each individual completes all of the scheduled measurements without any absence, missing observations occur commonly in longitudinal studies. It has been documented that biased results could arise if such a feature is not properly accounted for in the analysis. There has been a large body of methods in the literature on handling missingness arising either from response components or covariate variables, but relatively little attention has been directed to addressing missingness in both response and covariate variables simultaneously. Important reasons for the sparsity of the research on this topic may be attributed to substantially increased complexity of modeling and computational difficulties. In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of the thesis, I develop methods to handle incomplete longitudinal data using the pairwise likelihood formulation. The proposed methods can handle longitudinal data with missing observations in both response and covariate variables. A unified framework is invoked to accommodate various types of missing data patterns. The performance of the proposed methods is carefully assessed under a variety of circumstances. In particular, issues on efficiency and robustness are investigated. Longitudinal survey data from the National Population Health Study are analyzed with the proposed methods. The other difficulty in longitudinal data is model selection. Incorporating a large number of irrelevant covariates to the model may result in computation, interpretation and prediction difficulties, thus selecting parsimonious models are typically desirable. In particular, the penalized likelihood method is commonly employed for this purpose. However, when we apply the penalized likelihood approach in longitudinal studies, it may involve high dimensional integrals which are computationally expensive. We propose an alternative method using the composite likelihood formulation. Formulation of composite likelihood requires only a partial structure of the correlated data such as marginal or pairwise distributions. This strategy shows modeling tractability and computational cheapness in model selection. Therefore, in Chapter 4 of this thesis, I propose a composite likelihood approach with penalized function to handle the model selection issue. In practice, we often face the model selection problem not only from choosing proper covariates for regression predictor, but also from the component of random effects. Furthermore, the specification of random effects distribution could be crucial to maintain the validity of statistical inference. Thus, the discussion on selecting both covariates and random effects as well as misspecification of random effects are also included in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 of this thesis mainly addresses the joint features of missingness and model selection. I propose a specific composite likelihood method to handle this issue. A typical advantage of the approach is that the inference procedure does not involve explicit missing process assumptions and nuisance parameters estimation.