Decision makers require the right information at the right time, in the right place and in the right format so that they can make good decisions. Although business intelligence (BI) has the potential to improve decision making, there is little empirical evidence of how well this has been achieved. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the quality of decisions made using BI. The research question it addresses is what are the key antecedents of decision quality for users of business intelligence systems? The theoretical support for the model is developed based on the literature review that draws on decision support systems (DSS), group decision support systems (GDSS), and BI. Grounded on this literature review, the antecedents of decision quality are operationalized in this dissertation through independent variables such as the problem space complexity, the level of BI usage, the BI user experience, and information quality. The dependent variable is operationalized as decision quality and it captures the self-satisfaction with a decision made by users in a BI environment. The research model was tested using a survey of BI users whose names were provided by a marketing company. This research suggests that BI user experience is a more complex construct than has been initially thought.

Allen J. Lichtman and Daniel M. Rohrer write that "Unfortunately, formal debate theory tends to lag behind the actual practice of competitive debate" (70). This statement accurately describes the current controversy surrounding the counter-system counterplans and how they may affect traditional debate theory. These counterplans are increasingly employed by negative teams in intercollegiate debate, but so far, there is no contemporary attempt to explain how they fit into current debate theory. This study will analyze this new genre of counterplans by answering the following questions.

Meaning-making is an important process to the personal and professional development of students in higher education. Today’s educators need to acknowledge and encourage the meaning-making process in order for these quarter-life students to enjoy an enriched life of meaning, as well as excel in academia. I challenge educators to apply meaning-making to their own lives in order to gain a deeper understanding of their personal purpose in their lives and as educators on college campuses. Written within a Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, my thesis proposes that, through the deep and personal meaning-making process, students and educators can create a more meaningful experience in the classroom on today’s higher education campuses.

The extraordinary conditions of a disaster, require the mobilisation of all available resources, inducing the rush of humanitarian partners into the affected area. This phenomenon called the proliferation of actors, causes serious problems during the disaster response phase including the oversupply, duplicated efforts, lack of planning. The aim of this research is to provide a solution to reduce the partner proliferation problem. To that end the main research question is put forward as “How to reduce the proliferation of partners in a disaster response”? Panel analysis of the historic record of 4,252 natural onset disasters between 1980 to 2013 via regression analysis, MA and AHP gives rise to the formation of a predictive decision-making platform called PREDIS. It is capable of predicting the human impact of the disaster (fatality, injured, homeless) of up to 3% of errors and enables the decision makers to estimate the required needs for each disaster and prioritises them based on the disaster type and socio-economics of the affected country. It further renders it possible to rank and optimise the desired partners based on the decision maker’s preferences. Verification of the PREDIS through a simulation game design using a sample group of decision makers, show that this technique enables the user to decide within one hour after the disaster strike using the widely available data at the time of the disaster. It also enables non-experts to decide almost identically to experts in terms of the similarity of the choices and the speed of the decision. The lack of an extensive database for the potential humanitarian partners from which to choose, is the limitation of this research in addition to the lack of standardised set of minimum requirements for the suitable partners. The model is also as strong as its data feed which is inconsistent in various humanitarian sources.

D.Cur. / With the dawn of the new democratic dispensation in South Africa, numerous structural changes in the form of new legislation on health care were introduced by government. The purpose hereof is to transform health care delivery in order to bring about equality, accessibility, availability and applicability of health care to the citizens of South Africa. However, such changes have given rise to rationalization and the restructuring of health care services and health care personnel. Against the background of the so-called brain drain of health care personnel, it possibly contributed to a situation where numerous health care services find themselves with a shortage of expert human and material resources. These changes have influenced the quality of decisionmaking in health care services in general, and nursing in particular. Furthermore, based on an investigation of disciplinary case studies of the SANe, it appears that there is an increase in the number of disciplinary cases against nurses. These disciplinary cases reflect the nature of the decisions made by nurses. From these disciplinary case studies, it appears that decision-making by nurses do not comply with the reasonable expectations as stipulated in the legal-ethical framework of the nursing profession. Furthermore, it appears that decisions made by nurses in order to promote the health of the individual, group and/or community, are unsafe, ineffective and unacceptable in terms of the reasonable expectations as stipulated in the legal-ethical framework of the nursing profession. It can be concluded, that decision-making by these nurses no longer complies with the regulation in terms of the Nursing Act (Act 50 of 1978, as ammended), namely to deliver safe nursing to the citizens of South Africa. As a possible solution to the aforementioned problem, the researcher sees the description of a system for quality decision-making as being necessary in nursing. This goal can be achieved by the following objectives: the exploration and description of the expectations of the stakeholders with regard to quality decision-making in nursing, the integration of these expectations during iv the conceptualization of quality decision-making in nursing, as well as the formulation of standards for quality decision-making in nursing.Based on a qualitative, explorative, descriptive and standard-generation design, the study was conducted in four phases to achieve the objectives of the study. During the first phase, the expectations ofthe stakeholders with regard to quality decision-making in nursing were explored and described. In phase two, the identified themes on quality decision-making were conceptualized. In phase three standards for quality decision-making in nursing were formulated through inductive and deductive reasoning from the results of the previous two phases. In phase four a system for quality decision-making in nursing was described based on a theoretical foundation of the systems theory.

D.Litt. et Phil. / The aim of this study was to determine possible relationships between sense of coherence, temperament and decision-making and to explore the nature of these relationships. The study was based on the assumption that people attempt to make sense of complex environments and that differences in certain biological and psychological characteristics may lead to differences in the way that people make decisions in complex environments. Temperament was defined as a biological or physiological aspect that influences human behaviour. Sense of coherence was conceptualised as a psychological, global orientation that influences the way in which individuals understand their environments and can therefore give rise to individual differences in behaviour. Decision-making style was defined as a specific behavioural manifestation of the manner in which individuals make sense of complex environments and it was postulated that decision-making would probably be influenced by temperament and sense of coherence. In order to explore the current study’s research questions, a sample of 189 third year and Honours students in Psychology at a tertiary institution was used. The ages of the participants ranged from 19 tot 34 years and the average age was 22 years. More women (91.5%) participated in the study than men (8.5%). As a result of practicalities it was impossible to use a random sample. Three self-report measurements were used to respectively measure sense of coherence, temperament and decision-making style. These were the Orientation to Life Questionnaire, Pavlovian Temperament Survey and Melbourne Decision Making Questionnaire. The Pavlovian Temperament Survey measures three characteristics of the nervous system namely Strength of Excitation, Strength of Inhibition and Mobility of the Nervous Processes. An additional sub-scale was added to measure Balance of the Nervous Processes. The Orientation to Life Questionnaire measures Comprehensibility, Manageability, Meaningfulness as well as total Sense of Coherence. The Melbourne Decision Making Questionnaire measures four decision-making styles: one effective style, Vigilance and three ineffective styles, Procrastination, Hypervigilance and Buck Passing. The raw data that were collected from the completed questionnaires were subjected to several statistical analyses. The data were tested for normality of sub-scale distributions, which lead to logistical regression analyses being used to determine if temperament and sense of coherence can predict differences in decision-making style. Pearson product moment correlations as well as canonical correlations were also used. Multiple analyses of variance were used to determine whether biographical variables could account for any differences in sense of coherence, temperament and decision-making style. The results indicated that differences due to language, year of study or work status did not affect scores with regard to sense of coherence, temperament or decision-making style. The sample could therefore be regarded as quite homogeneous and the effect of confounding variables could be limited. However, generalisability of the results was also compromised. It was found that Strength of Excitation, Strength of Inhibition and Mobility of the Nervous Processes displayed relationships with Sense of coherence as well as the individual aspects of sense of coherence namely Comprehensibility, Manageability and Meaningfulness. This finding points to the possibility that physiological responses and psychological assessment of complex environments are related. Even though Balance of the Nervous Processes was not indicated as related to sense of coherence, it was found that this characteristic of the nervous system may possibly relate to decision-making. In line with these findings, the results indicated the possibility of relationships between a person’s psychological assessment of situations and behavioural outcomes as relationships were found between sense of coherence and decision-making style. It was indicated that certain temperament dimensions possibly displays an inverse relationship with decision-making styles, and especially the use of a hypervigilant decision-making style. However, the role of temperament in the use of a vigilant decision-making style is unclear. Lastly, the results indicated that the emotional assessment of stimuli as meaningful and challenging may possibly give rise to the use of a vigilant decision-making style. The assessment of situations as chaotic and unstructured could possibly relate more to the use of ineffective decision-making styles. An overall conclusion that can be made is that relationships between sense of coherence, temperament and decision-making style do indeed exist but that the nature of the relationships is quite complex. It seems as if different mechanisms are at play with regard to determining the use of effective and ineffective decision-making styles. These mechanisms could possibly lie in the emotional and cognitive assessments of situations. It seems as if a healthy emotional assessment of situations as challenging and meaningful precede the use of an effective, cognitively-based decision-making style. The cognitive assessment of situations as chaotic and unstructured could possibly lead to a more emotional decision-making response and decisions may be postponed, its responsibility may be shifted or it may be handled in a panicky manner. The results of this study should be interpreted with care since the sample was quite homogeneous and not particularly large. The exclusive use of the Melbourne Decision Making Questionnaire to measure decision-making is also problematic and the inclusion of an objective measurement of decision-making efficiency would have been preferable. It is also unclear whether reported decision-making style is equal to true decision-making style. Lastly, it was also decided to move away from Antonovsky’s (1987) recommendations that sense of coherence be treated as one global construct and the individual sub-scales were analysed separately. Future research can make use of similar variables and statistical techniques with bigger and more diverse samples to facilitate the development of an explanatory model for behaviour within complex environments. If the same variables are used, other measurements should be included to expand the conceptual framework. Future research could also test the current findings in practice for example in training or therapy.

Student Number : 0009911A - PhD Thesis - School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies - Faculty of Humanities / The study of sacred leadership at Mapungubwe involves an analysis of how the emerging elite centralised rainmaking and other public rituals. These developments occurred in the Shashe-Limpopo basin between AD 1000 and AD 1300. Mapungubwe was the last in a sequence of capitals in the basin. The first was Schroda (AD 900-1000), followed by K2 (AD 1000- 1220) and then Mapungubwe (AD 1220-1300). This sequence corresponds to a series of cultural, socio-political and economic transformations that led to class distinction and sacred leadership, two distinctive features of the region’s early state system. The development of Mapungubwe was a local indigenous accomplishment that occurred in the prehistoric period but in the relatively recent past. This offers possibilities for using current indigenous knowledge to develop relevant ethnographic models. Over a period of four years, I explored Venda, Sotho-Tswana and Shona traditional agriculture strategies and belief systems through their oral histories, cosmologies and practices. I identified three systems of rainmaking practices. Practice A is associated with kin-based chiefdoms. Practise B exists among class-based polities with sacred leadership. Practice C represents the devolution of complexity after the disintegration of the Zimbabwe culture. These data provide models to clarify the roles of rainmaking and agriculture in the evolution of Mapungubwe.

"Will highly educated women have more children in the future?" In this contribution, I address this question by looking at both fertility and fertility intentions; i.e., the number of children people plan to have over their reproductive lives. Intended births are highly correlated with actual births, and in low-fertility settings, childbearing has become associated with the couple's agency. On the other hand, education, which is a marker of income and social status, has remained an important driver of fertility choices. Hence, understanding the reproductive decision-making of women and men with low, medium, and high levels of education is crucial when seeking to determine whether - and if so, to what extent - there is scope for additional policy interventions aimed at raising fertility levels.

Lai Cheung Fai. / Cover title. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Bibliography: leaves 110-111.

This thesis investigates and analyses the changing configuration of the Thai macroeconomic policy making in Thailand, before, during and after the 1997 financial crisis, in order to understand the dynamics of the interaction among different actors within a country and between a country and the dominant ‘neo-liberal’ perspective of the international financial institutions and other institutions of global governance that have impacts on Thai economic policy. Traditionally, Thai policy making is referred as ‘a bureaucratic polity’ and being ‘bifurcated’ between clientalistic sectoral policy situated in line ministries and autonomous macroeconomic policy located around the Bank of Thailand, Ministry of Finance, National Economic and Social Development Board, and the Bureau of Budget. This thesis argues that these prevailing conceptual frameworks, although having contributed important knowledge in the Thai case, are not adequate in explaining the change in the policy configuration over the period in question due to their inability to capture the dynamic and complex interplay within macroeconomic policy making. To overcome these shortcomings, this thesis builds on Rangsun’s framework by introducing a more dynamic framework and integrating three main theoretical strands on the nature of policy making, namely the state-centred, society-centred, and international perspectives to explain the complex relationship among all actors involved in the Thai policy-making arena. This thesis finds that as Thailand has experienced fundamental changes that have occurred in the domestic politics and socioeconomic landscape since the late 1980s, the roles of new actors in the realm of policy making, including political parties, elected politicians, businessmen, and international actors have been significantly enhanced. As a result, the nature of the economic policy-making process has emerged as being influenced by different forces, both domestic and international, as well as being constrained by the superstructure and institutions such as constitution, political regime, pattern of the world economy and social relations. More importantly, the process of policy making is not static, but dynamic, and is also highly complex, varying according to time and context. Furthermore, this thesis contends that the political economy of policy making is a dialectic process in which the meaning and interpretation of policy are themselves important sites of contestation over the policy-making process between contending power blocs.