A sense of school belonging has a powerful effect on students' emotional, motivational and academic functioning. This phenomenological research synthesized qualitative literature presenting pupil voice on school belonging, investigated how secondary school-aged students who have undergone a 'managed move' experience belonging, and sought their views on the role stakeholders might play in promoting school belonging for managed move students. The author discusses policy and practice implications and outlines a dissemination strategy. The first paper is an interpretative meta-synthesis involving a process of reciprocal translation and synthesis of seven qualitative studies was used to examine secondary school students' experiences of school belonging. The second paper is an empirical study investigating how secondary school students who have undergone a managed move experience school belonging, and what they feel would promote a sense of school belonging for other managed move students. This research employed purposive sampling, an interpretative case study design and semi-structured phenomenological interviews. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to analyse data. The meta-synthesis (Paper 1) generated four main concepts: school belonging and intersubjectivity; school belonging and knowledge, understanding and acceptance of individual identity; school belonging and experiences of in-group membership and school belonging and safety/security, and the 'higher-order concept' of school belonging as 'feeling safe to be yourself in and through relationships with others in the school setting'. Superordinate themes identified in the empirical study (Paper 2) were 'making friends and feeling safe'; 'feeling known, understood and accepted as a person in receiver school'; 'identification of and support for SEN/D' and 'supportive/unsupportive school practices/protocols'. Findings indicated that a sense of school belonging for these students resulted from positive social relationships with peers and an attendant sense of safety, security and acceptance. Managed move participants expressed the desirability but also the perceived difficulty of forging relationships in a new school and acknowledged the value of sensitive and subtle support.

University managed technology-based business incubators (UMTIs) have become increasingly popular. Some universities are forming private corporations and are encouraging professors/researchers to commercialize intellectual property (IP) based upon research conducted in their laboratories. The UMTI provides the infrastructure, access to high-tech laboratories, libraries, students and faculty, and a coalition of like-minded entrepreneurs. Universities face uncertainties when establishing UMTIs and need to minimize risk while maximizing benefits. This paper discusses results of a benchmarking study of eleven technology incubators and their risk mitigation policies. Experience with technology transfer and use of the UMTI as a living laboratory for students is presented.

This chapter describes the implementation of two service-learning courses within the setting of a primary-care clinic for homeless and indigent individuals. The two courses are a campus-wide Introduction to Community Service and a Community Health Nursing Practicum. Although these two courses have different learning outcomes, they both address the primarygoals of service-learning, including (1) developing students' understanding about the responsibility of citizenship and preparing students for effective roles in society; (2) improving students' communication skills, problem-solving skills, and project-specific skills; (3) enhancing students' self-esteem and sense of social reality; and (4) providing an interdisciplinary perspective (Kendall and Associates 1990). The sections that follow describe the setting that the two service-learning courses share, the university-wide course, and the community health nursing practicum. Common issues faced in both courses that are discussed include reflective learning practices, community/client impact, communicating expectations to the student and the site personnel, collaboration to accomplish both service and learning outcomes, and practical issues associated with service-learning in a clinic for the homeless and indigent.

In theory, as a greater share of capital is invested passively rather than actively managed, stock prices will be freer to diverge from fair value, resulting in marginally less efficient equity markets. The effect should be an amplification of managerial skill, which manifests itself in the tails of α distributions. I find evidence that mutual fund α distributions differ increasingly as a function of the share of assets invested in passive vehicles. However, I find no evidence that the “tailedness” of the distributions increases as a function of the share of assets invested passively. This may be a result of the limited sample size, or it may be that higher levels of passive share are required for this effect to materialize.

Approximately 46.6 million adults in the United States live with a mental illness as of 2017. Therefore, managed care being the system that facilitates access to mental health treatment needs to be addressed. Managed care (such as healthcare plans) seeks to facilitate healthcare service delivery by providing direction and guidance to utilization and prevention of services. The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore social work perspectives on the constraints of managed care as it impacts access to mental health treatment. This study conducted qualitative interviews through a non-random sample of professional colleagues of social workers in the in the manage care field. This study found five emerging themes including long wait times, lack of providers (to provide timely, effective mental health treatment), over diagnosing to justify services, profit-driven service delivery, and managed care not aligning with social work values. The implications of this study urge the need for accountability and consistency through policy change and reform.

Hundreds of state regulations were passed during the “managed care backlash” of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many of these anti-managed care regulations eased or eliminated constraints on patient utilization of health care services imposed by managed care organizations. Other regulations gave managed care providers more flexibility in the way they practiced care or helped patients appeal denials of claims. Despite the effort undertaken to pass these regulations, limited research exists on whether the regulations achieved their goal. To fill this gap, this study takes advantage of the variety of regulations enacted during the managed care backlash of the late 1990s and early 2000s to investigate their impact on patient-reported quality of care and mortality for managed care enrollees. The results indicate the regulations did improve patient-reported outcomes, but to varying degrees and only in the latter period of the backlash. Specifically, managed care enrollees who lived in states that adopted moderate-intensity regulations between 2000 and 2004 reported relatively better improvements in access to care and confidence in their provider than did managed care enrollees in states with low-intensity backlash regulations. The positive effect on access to care was similar in states that adopted high-intensity regulations. However, no positive effect was found for any outcome in the first period (1996-2000). These results show that states with the most intense regulatory backlash did not realize better patient-reported outcomes. Instead, states that pursued moderate-intensity backlash regulations experienced relatively better outcomes for their managed care enrollees.

Three treatments designed to reduce the consumption of alcohol by native American high school students were assessed and compared. Selfreferred and staff-referred clients were randomly assigned to three treatment groups: (1) alcohol education and a peer-assisted selfcontrol procedure, (2) a peer-assisted self-control procedure, and (3) a self-monitoring only procedure. All three treatments were conducted by trained peer counselors for 14 weeks. The alcohol education and peer-assisted self-control and the peer-assisted self-control demonstrated reductions in peak blood alcohol concentration, frequency of drinking incidents, and alcohol consumption. The self-monitoring only group demonstrated changes only in frequency of drinking incidents. No significant differences were found between the three treatment programs. Alcohol knowledge was found not to differ between groups and was not found to be related to changes in any of the drinking parameters. Selfesteem changes were found to be highest for Group 2 and were found to relate to changes in all the drinking parameters. Permissive versus abstinence attitudes were not found to differ between groups, but for all subjects higher abstinence attitude scores were found to be significantly related to decreases in peak blood alcohol concentration.

Web services composition is emerging as a promising technology for the effective automation of application-to-application collaborations. The application integration problems have been subject of much research in the past years. However, with growth in importance of business process automation and highly dynamic nature of the Internet, this research has taken on a new significance and importance. Adequate solutions to this problem will be very important to make enterprise systems more flexible, robust and usable in the future. In this dissertation, we present a novel approach for the declarative definition and scalable orchestration of composite Web services in large, autonomous, heterogeneous, and dynamic environments. We first propose a composition model for composing Web services in a personalized and adaptive manner. We model composite Web services based on statecharts. To cater for large amounts of dynamic Web services, we use the concept of service community that groups services together and is responsible for the runtime selection of services against user's preferences. We use the concept of process schema that specific users can adjust with their personal preferences. A set of exception handling policies can be specified to proactively react to runtime exceptions. We then propose a tuple space based service orchestration model for distributed, self-managed composite services execution. We introduce the concept of execution controller that is associated with a service and is responsible for monitoring and controlling service executions. The knowledge required by a controller is statically extracted from the specification of personalized composite services. We also present techniques for robust Web services provisioning. The techniques presented in this dissertation are implemented in Self-Serv, a prototype that provides a set of tools for Web service composition and execution. Finally, we conduct an extensive usability and performance study of the proposed techniques. The experimental results reveal that our system i) provides an efficient support for specifying, deploying, and accessing composite services; ii) is more scalable and outperforms the centralized approach when the exchanged messages become bigger; and iii) is more robust and adaptive in highly dynamic environments.

<p>Till följd av marknadens utveckling har beroendet av informationsutbyte och samverkan i olika nätverk ökat. De senaste årtiondenas fokus på informationsutbyte och samarbete ledde till att Supply Chain Management uppstod. Flera forskare har karakteriserat lyckad styrning av samverkan som en kärnkompetens som krävs för att vara konkurrenskraftig. Ägande och kontrollfunktioner som tidigare låg inom samma verksamhet har förändrats och tillämpningen av VMI har uppkommit. VMI innebär att leverantören övertar ansvaret för lagerstyrningen hos kunden. Samarbetet kräver effektivt informationsflöde inom försörjningskedjan och ett bättre informationssystem, vilket ökar möjligheten att förbättra kedjans effektivitet. Vi hade, med den här utgångspunkten i åtanke, för avsikt att besvara problemformuleringen: Hur hanteras information i VMI-styrda relationer inom koncerner? Syften med undersökningen var att undersöka hur lagerstyrning i form av VMI fungerar i en koncern, förklara hur VMI påverkar informationsflöde och relationer i en koncern samt att analysera betydelsen av VMI för informationsutbytet. Efter teoretiska studier genomfördes en undersökning på en koncern där VMI har införts och givit resultat. Resultaten från intervjuerna har sedan analyserats och vi har kommit fram till följande. För att hantera information i VMI-styrda relationer krävs att det finns bra system, en tydlig ansvarsfördelning och förtroende mellan parterna.</p>

From February to September of 2001, a significant body of qualitive data was collected to investigate barriers for Hispanic participation in Oregon's managed care Medicaid program. As a means to investigate this topic, comments were solicited from physicians, hospital administrators, social service agencies, and low-income Hispanics through semi-structured focus groups and individual interviews. This methodology presents the reader with a rich enthnohistoric and cultural context to the local issues surrounding Hispanic under-participation in Oregon's managed care Medicaid program. Finally, through an analytical framework of critical medical anthropology, connections are drawn from local barriers to state and corporate policies. / Graduation date: 2002