Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Commonwealth University, 2006. / Prepared for: School of Social Work. Bibliography: leaves 278-297. Also available online via the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 65 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-50).

Risk based audit (RBA) approaches represent a major trend in current audit methodology. The approach is based on risk analysis used to identify business strategy risk. The RBA has created a new set of research issues that need investigation. In particular, this approach has important implications for risk identification and risk assessment. The success of the RBA approach is contingent on understanding what factors improve or interfere with the accuracy of these risk judgments. I examine how budget constraints and decision aid use affect risk identification and risk assessment. Unlike previous budget pressure studies, I cast budget constraints as a positive influence on auditors. I expect more stringent budget constraints to be motivating to the auditor as they provide a goal for the auditor to achieve. I also expect budget constraints to induce feelings of pressure leading to the use of time-pressure adaptation strategies. When auditors have use of a decision aid, they take advantage of these motivational goals and/or use beneficial adaptive strategies. Overall, I find that auditor participants tend to be more accurate when identifying financial statement risks compared to business risks. Budget constraints have no effect on risk identification for financial or business risks; they also have no effect on financial risk assessments. On the other hand, business risk assessments are improved by implementing more stringent budget constraints, but only when a decision aid is also provided. Budget constraints can affect performance through a goal theory route or a time-pressure adaptation route. I investigate the paths through which budget constraints improve business risk assessments under decision aid use. I find that budget constraints directly affect performance, supporting a goal theory route. However, I do not find that budget constraints are mediated by perceived budget pressure as expected. Auditors appear to use a positive adaptive strategy to respond to perceived budget pressure, however perceived budget pressure is not induced by providing a more stringent budget.

This thesis comprises two articles based on qualitative empirical studies and a theoretical introduction. All three texts deal with the same problem area concerning musical meaning making and the concept development process in the course of composition learning. Each text could be read separately. The composition tasks in the empirical studies are both in electroacoustic music but the research problems and findings concern a broader sense of composition learning and even musical learning in general. The corpus of music education research on composition, rarely takes the body of artistic research and development literature into account, which means that contem- porary techniques and aesthetic discussions commonplace in composition education practice are not considered in music education research. This the- sis contributes to the research field of music education by acknowledging some of the fundamental research on composition, and discussing it from an education perspective. As a consequence, a contribution salient in the arti- cles is to begin to develop research methodology accordingly. The introduc- tion takes on a quest to map out the field in a new way by bringing together research in music education with artistic research on composition, writings on music philosophy, semiotics and cognitive psychology. The boundaries and interplay between semantic significance and syntactic meaning are ex- amined and discussed, as is the relation between aesthetic meaning making and learning. The articles deal with these issues in the context of composi- tion learning at a music program in upper secondary school. The one entitled Synthetic Activity is about fundamental aspects of soundgeneration and hence directed towards semiotics in the form of phonology and significance in connection to musical gesture and spectral content. The learning and meaning making processes of two composition students are studied as they engage in additive synthesis to build sounds, musical phrases and eventually a short musical composition. One of the most striking results is that the pro- ject came to be as much a listening experience as one of creative music mak- ing, and that the concept development process included rehearing and reas- sessing familiar sounds and music. The article Creative Structures or Struc- tured Creativity deals with form and syntactic structure, as the students learn to develop and apply composition algorithms to further their creative think- ing. The results show that there are several different layers to the concept development processes in this project. One layer concerns to be able to struc-7ture musical parameters on an aggregate level; to learn to plan musical de- velopments as space of possibility rather than as a determined linear se- quence of musical events. Another layer comprises problems of learning the programming environment and how to embody the musical algorithms in working computer-code. A third layer concerns letting the algorithmically generated materials influence your creative thinking. Tokens of the concept development process as described by Vygotskij (1987, 1999) in language- based learning were prominent also in the music composition learning of these studies. Implications for further research include formalizing criteria for the developmental phases of the concept development process in musical contexts.

This thesis asserts the notion of play and intuition are valuable resources within architectural design. The thesis further proposes a conceptual model of making that harnesses and integrates play, intuition, and other visceral evaluations into architectural design as well as other creative endeavors. This approach to making consists of four primary characteristics which influence each other throughout the development of a project. They are an artistic vehicle, iterative experimentation, visceral evaluations, and a playful mentality. An artistic vehicle is the variety of tools, materials, subject matter, techniques, mediums, and methods employed in the making of tactile forms. Iterative experimentation typically manifests itself as some form of trial and error where new iterations are somehow influenced by previous experimentation. Visceral evaluations are judgments rooted in feelings, instincts and other gut reactions. A playful mentality involves trusting these visceral evaluations, embracing mistakes as learning experiences, testing ideas just to see what will happen, being open to surprises and demonstrating a willingness to be unconventional. All of these characteristics come together to form explorative making. This approach entails the shaping, changing, and combining of material for the purposes of exploration and discovery while integrating visceral evaluations and a playful mentality into creative activities. Five galleries made up of case studies and my own speculative projects illustrate how explorative making can evolve and be adapted for the purpose of creating architectural form.

The current study provides evidence that individuals tend to adopt an integrative choice strategy when making sequential decisions under conditions of uncertainty. This contrasts with prior literature which proposes that decisions are made one at a time in isolation from one another (Camerer et al., 1997). By creating an experimental work task where only wage quality and feedback are manipulated, the resulting changes in intertemporal substitution between work and leisure are observed. In Experiments 1 3, a positive relationship between wages and time spent working that did not depend on task experience was observed. These results suggest that decisions are being made in consideration of other decisions, as isolated decisions would yield a negative relationship between wages and time spent working. In Experiment 4 these results were mitigated by the difficulty in differentiating between low and high wage quality days. These findings are taken to suggest that the results of prior studies are primarily due to self-control issues that subjects faced, which are not present in the present study.

In the domain of reasoning and decision making, some dual-process theorists have suggested that people are highly efficient at detecting conflicting outputs engendered by competing intuitive and analytic processes (De Neys & Glumicic, 2008; De Neys, Vartanian & Goel, 2008). For example, De Neys and Glumicic (2008) demonstrated that participants’ reason longer about problems that are characterized by a conflict between a stereotypical personality description and a base-rate probability of group membership. Crucially, this increase occurred even when participants gave the nominally erroneous stereotypical response (i.e., “neglecting” the base-rate probability), indicating that their participants detected that there was a conflict and, as a result, engaged in slow, analytic processing to resolve it. However, this finding, and much of the additional support for the efficient conflict detection hypothesis, has come from base-rate neglect problems constructed with probabilities (e.g., 995 doctors and 5 nurses) that were much more extreme than typically used in studies of base-rate neglect. I varied the base-rate probabilities over five experiments and compared participants’ response time for conflict problems with non-conflict problems. It was demonstrated that the integral increase in response time for stereotypical responses to conflict problems was fully mediated by extreme probabilities. I conclude that humans are not as efficient at detecting when they are engaging in biased reasoning as De Neys and colleagues have claimed.

This study will examine how the structure of preferences of group members in a decision-making group, as well as the information they have, affects the collection and the processing of information by individual members of a decision making group. Structure of preferences in this study will represent each individual group members’ preference towards a particular course of action. Using an experimental method of analysis, this study will examine how the preference structure of a group affects what and how much information a group member will analyze before making a decision. I hypothesize that the structure of the group members’ preferences should affect the subjects’ search and process of information. This study aims to answer the following questions; do group preferences affect the search and processing of information? Do group members thoroughly survey the objectives and alternatives in the decision making process?

Concurrent construction, in which multiple construction activities are carried out concurrently or overlapping, is a method developed to reduce time-to-market and increase the value of the project to the owner or user. When overlapping activities, the additional cost for overlap is affected by the interaction between overlapped activities which is affected by the construction work methods used. Thus concurrent planning of construction projects can lead to a benefit for the owner through investigating the interactions between work methods under overlap and finding the best degrees of overlap. However, the determination of the best solution from all the possible combinations of multiple methods and degrees of overlap is affected by the decisionmaking approach: by a centralized decision-maker (e.g., the project manager) with less accurate information about cost estimates or by a decentralized decision-maker(s) (e.g., subcontractors) with a myopic viewpoint. The objective of this dissertation is to compare the solutions from the two decision-making approaches and to identify the conditions in which one approach is preferred to the other. Thus project owners can benefit from choosing a better approach for concurrent planning under their own conditions. A Monte Carlo simulation model for each decision-making approach was developed: an algorithm for finding the best solution was developed by heuristic methods. Several parameters were incorporated into the models to reflect different conditions for the decision-making approaches: number of activities, number of methods, the project manager’s solution capacity, the uncertainty in the project manager’s knowledge and attitudes towards risk. The comparison of the two approaches was implemented with random cost under different conditions. Furthermore, the model was applied to a hypothetical construction project. From the simulations the major conclusions include: (1) The decentralized approach becomes preferred with more activities; (2) Considering more methods provides more potential for higher benefit to the owner in the decentralized approach; (3) The decentralized approach is recommended under risk-averse attitude and high uncertainty in the project manager’s knowledge.

As one of the factors influencing consumers purchase behavior, decision-making styles are crucial for understanding consumer shopping behavior and for developing successful marketing strategies. Decision-making styles have been mainly viewed as a relatively enduring consumer personality that seldom changes even when applied to different goods and situations. Recently, a study showed that consumer decision-making styles are influenced by product type, suggesting that decision-making styles are individual response patterns in a specific decision context rather than personality trait based. Despite extensive research regarding consumer decision making styles, relatively little attention has been paid to identify whether consumer decision-making styles are truly personality trait based or context-dependent. Thus, this work challenged the theory that decision-making styles are personality trait based and investigated whether decisionmaking styles are context dependent. Three independent studies, focusing on extending our knowledge regarding consumer decision-making styles, were conducted. The first study examined whether consumer decision-making styles depend on channel type (online versus offline channels). In addition, it explored new types of decision-making styles which better represent current consumer needs and preferences. Study results supported previous arguments suggesting that decision-making styles are not personality trait based but vary across contexts. Results also demonstrated the need to continuously observe consumers’ decision-making styles and capture emerging new styles. The second study explored whether product characteristics, specifically intangibility and non-standardization, influence consumer decision-making styles in an online context. At the same time, this study examined whether there is any interaction effect between product type and product involvement. The results showed that certain types of online decision-making styles are influenced by product type. The results also showed that product involvement has an important role in influencing online decision-making styles. The third study investigated whether consumer online decision-making styles influence loyalty toward online travel agencies. The results of the study provide support for five out of eleven hypotheses, indicating that consumers’ online decision-making styles significantly influence loyalty toward online travel agencies. Finally, the overall findings, limitations of the studies, agenda for future research, and practical and theoretical implications were discussed.