Each year 700,000 to 800,000 parolees are released prison and are returned to the community (Durose, Cooper, & Snyder 2014; Porter, 2011; West, Sabol, Greenman, 2010), of whom approximately two-thirds will be reincarcerated within the three years following their releases (Durose et al., 2014). Although, scholars have pointed to parolees’ needs of services and resources (Hipp, Petersilia, & Turner, 2010), the majority of the literature has been limited to the examination of individual-level predictors of parolee outcomes. The current study aims to extend the parolee literature by identifying whether or not neighborhood disadvantage, mobility, and local institutions (i.e., churches, service providers) have an effect on parolee outcomes. To examine these effects, data on 3,077 parolees living within 209 Census block groups across Philadelphia, Pennsylvania were obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC) and the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole (PBPP). Furthermore, parolee outcome data were disaggregated by the behavior resulting in reincarceration [i.e., the commission of a new crime (CPV), technical parole violation (TPV)], as well as the length of time between release from prison and reincarceration. A series of multilevel models (HLM) were conducted to examine the effects of neighborhood-level and individual-level predictors of parolee reincarceration, as well as how these effects differed for CPVs versus TPVs, and varied across time. Based on results from the analyses, parolee outcomes were to some extent effected by neighborhood context and institutions (i.e., Evangelical Protestant churches, service providers). Additionally, neighborhood-level and individual-level effects varied based on the reason for reincarceration, and the amount of time that passed between release from prison and reincarceration. Lastly, although DOC referred service providers did not have a direct effect on parolee reincarceration, there were significant interaction effects with disadvantage, such that the effects of DOC service providers decreased the odds of reincarceration in more disadvantaged neighborhoods. The conditional effects of DOC service providers by level of neighborhood disadvantage highlights the need for service providers within such communities. Further investigation of neighborhood context, and the placement of much needed resources in communities where parolees reside, may be advantageous in increasing success amongst parolees.

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between socioeconomic status and mental health-related quality of life in a micropolitan community in Iowa and to determine the effect of neighborhood social cohesion, neighborhood violence, and unfair treatment on this relationship. I hypothesized that socioeconomic status would be correlated with mental health quality of life, such that those of low or middle socioeconomic status would have greater odds of reporting poor mental health quality of life than those of high socioeconomic status. Furthermore, I hypothesized that lower perceived neighborhood social cohesion, having reported neighborhood violence in the past six months, and having reported an experience of unfair treatment in the past six months would be associated with being of low socioeconomic status. I then explored which of these factors are the best predictors of poor mental health quality of life when considered together. The study is a secondary data analysis of health information gathered from a large, random-digit dial telephone survey of residents of Ottumwa, Iowa. To address the research questions, responses from a total of 1079 surveys were analyzed. Participants were clustered into three socioeconomic status groupings based on the following factors: annual household income, highest level of education completed, current work status, whether the respondent owned or rented their home, and whether the respondent's household fell at or below 125 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. Mental health quality of life was measured using questions from the CDC's Healthy Days Measure that specifically ask about mental health. Bivariate relationships between variables were calculated utilizing chi-square tests of independence. A series of logistic regression models were then conducted to further explore these relationships. Results showed that those belonging to the low socioeconomic status group had about four times the odds of reporting poor mental health quality of life than those in the high socioeconomic status group. The relationship did not hold true for those in the middle socioeconomic status group, as they had similar odds of reporting poor mental health quality of life than those in the high socioeconomic status group. Results also showed that neighborhood violence, low neighborhood social cohesion, and experiencing unfair treatment were also independently associated with reporting poor mental health quality of life as well as being of low socioeconomic status. Results of the logistic regression model containing the social and neighborhood factors showed that neighborhood social cohesion and perceived unfair treatment were significantly associated with greater odds of reporting poor mental health quality of life. These relationships remained after including demographic co-variates in the model. Low socioeconomic status, lower neighborhood social cohesion, and reporting experience of unfair treatment significantly predicted greater odds of reporting poor mental health quality of life. These results should be interpreted with caution, as data was cross-sectional and inferences about causality cannot be made. Further research investigating the possible causal pathway underlying this relationship is needed.

Thesis advisor: Rebekah Levine Coley / Research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) has demonstrated the high prevalence rates of such experiences, with about 60% of individuals in national U.S. samples reporting one or more types of ACEs as children (Chapman et al., 2013; Finkelhor et al., 2015). Further, research has established robust links between ACEs and a range of negative behavioral and health outcomes in adulthood (Felitti et al., 1998; Hughes et al., 2017; Kalmakis & Chandler, 2015; Wang et al., 2020; Wang & Maguire-Jack, 2018; Wolff et al., 2018). Less is known about when potential negative consequences of ACEs exposure emerge. The few studies that have examined the relationship between ACEs and early outcomes have employed inconsistent modeling strategies which has left the functional form of the relationship unclear, which could lead to either under-or over-estimating the risk associated with various levels of ACEs exposure (Crouch et al., 2019; Hughes et al., 2017; Lanier et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2019). Further, these studies have not comprehensively examined the potential moderating role of socio-ecological factors like neighborhood context. Theoretical frameworks suggest neighborhood resources might buffer children from negative consequences associated with ACEs while exposure to neighborhood-level adversities might exacerbate negative consequences. In order to address these gaps, the currently study examined the functional form of the relationship between ACEs experienced in the first four years of life and kindergarten behavioral outcomes and tested the moderating role of neighborhood resources and neighborhood adversities in a large, nationally representative sample of young children drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; N ≈ 10,700) linked with neighborhood administrative data. Using inverse probability weighting to strengthen internal validity, numerous modeling strategies supported a linear relationship between early childhood ACEs and kindergarten behavioral outcomes. Greater ACEs exposure was associated with significantly lower prosocial skills and significantly higher externalizing behavior problems, with small effect sizes of 0.075 to 0.143 standard deviation shifts in behaviors for each additional ACEs exposure. Interaction models found that ACEs were significantly associated with behavioral consequences regardless of neighborhood context. Overall, the robust modeling strategies employed provide the strongest evidence to date of the significant, linear relationship between ACEs and early behavioral consequences. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

No description available.

Web services have been developed as an attractive paradigm for publishing, discovering and consuming services. They are loosely-coupled applications that can be run alone or be composed to create new value-added services. They can be consumed as individual services which provide a unique interface to receive inputs and return outputs; or they can be consumed as components to be integrated into business processes. We call the first consumption case individual use and the second case business process use. The requirement of specific tools to assist consumers in the two service consumption cases involves many researches in both academics and industry. On the one hand, many service portals and service crawlers have been developed as specific tools to assist users to search and invoke Web services for individual use. However, current approaches take mainly into account explicit knowledge presented by service descriptions. They make recommendations without considering data that reflect user interest and may require additional information from users. On the other hand, some business process mechanisms to search for similar business process models or to use reference models have been developed. These mechanisms are used to assist process analysts to facilitate business process design. However, they are labor-intense, error-prone, time-consuming, and may make business analyst confused. In our work, we aim at facilitating the service consumption for individual use and business process use using recommendation techniques. We target to recommend users services that are close to their interest and to recommend business analysts services that are relevant to an ongoing designed business process. To recommend services for individual use, we take into account the user's usage data which reflect the user's interest. We apply well-known collaborative filtering techniques which are developed for making recommendations. We propose five algorithms and develop a web-based application that allows users to use services. To recommend services for business process use, we take into account the relations between services in business processes. We target to recommend relevant services to selected positions in a business process. We define the neighborhood context of a service. We make recommendations based on the neighborhood context matching. Besides, we develop a query language to allow business analysts to formally express constraints to filter services. We also propose an approach to extract the service's neighborhood context from business process logs. Finally, we develop three applications to validate our approach. We perform experiments on the data collected by our applications and on two large public datasets. Experimental results show that our approach is feasible, accurate and has good performance in real use-cases

No description available.

No description available.

Les services Web proposent un paradigme intéressant pour la publication, la découverte et la consommation de services. Ce sont des applications faiblement couplées qui peuvent être exécutées seules ou être composées pour créer de nouveaux services à valeur ajoutée. Ils peuvent être consommés comme des services individuels qui fournissent une interface unique qui reçoit des inputs et retourne des outputs (cas 1), ou bien ils peuvent être consommés en tant que composants à intégrer dans des procédés métier (cas 2). Nous appelons le premier cas de consommation « utilisation individuelle » et le second cas de consommation « utilisation en procédé métier ». La nécessité d'avoir des outils dédiés pour aider les consommateurs dans les deux cas de consommation a impliqué de nombreux travaux de recherche dans les milieux académiques ou industriels. D'une part, beaucoup de portails et de moteurs de recherche de services ont été développés pour aider les utilisateurs à rechercher et invoquer les services Web pour une utilisation individuelle. Cependant, les approches actuelles prennent principalement en compte les connaissances explicites présentées par les descriptions de service. Ils font des recommandations sans tenir compte des données qui reflètent l'intérêt des utilisateurs et peuvent demander des informations supplémentaires aux utilisateurs. D'autre part, plusieurs techniques et mécanismes associées aux procédés métier ont été élaborés pour rechercher des modèles de procédé métiers similaires, ou utiliser des modèles de référence. Ces mécanismes sont utilisés pour assister les analystes métiers à la conception de procédés métiers. Cependant, ils sont lents, source d'erreurs, grands consommateurs de ressources humaines, et peuvent induire à l’erreur les analystes métier. Dans notre travail, nous cherchons à faciliter la consommation de services Web pour une utilisation individuelle ou en procédé métier en proposant des techniques de recommandation. Notre objectif est de recommander aux utilisateurs des services qui sont proches de leur intérêt et de recommander aux analystes métier des services qui sont pertinents pour un procédé métier en cours de conception. Pour recommander des services pour une utilisation individuelle, nous prenons en compte l’historique des données d'utilisation de l'utilisateur qui reflètent ses intérêts. Nous appliquons des techniques de filtrage collaboratif bien connues pour faire des recommandations. Nous avons proposé cinq algorithmes et développé une application Web qui permet aux utilisateurs d'utiliser des services recommandés. Pour recommander des services pour une utilisation en procédé métier, nous prenons en compte les relations entre les services du procédé métier. Nous proposons de recommander les services en fonction de leurs localisations dans le procédé métier. Nous avons définit le contexte de voisinage d'un service. Nous avons présenté des recommandations basées sur l'appariement de contexte de voisinage. Par ailleurs, nous avons développé un langage de requête pour permettre aux analystes métier d'exprimer formellement des contraintes de filtrage. Nous avons proposé également une approche pour extraire le contexte de voisinage à partir de traces d’exécution de procédés métier. Enfin, nous avons développé trois applications afin de valider notre approche. Nous avons effectué des expérimentations sur des données recueillies par nos applications et sur deux grands ensembles de données publiques. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que notre approche est faisable, précise et performante dans des cas d'utilisation réels / Web services have been developed as an attractive paradigm for publishing, discovering and consuming services. They are loosely-coupled applications that can be run alone or be composed to create new value-added services. They can be consumed as individual services which provide a unique interface to receive inputs and return outputs; or they can be consumed as components to be integrated into business processes. We call the first consumption case individual use and the second case business process use. The requirement of specific tools to assist consumers in the two service consumption cases involves many researches in both academics and industry. On the one hand, many service portals and service crawlers have been developed as specific tools to assist users to search and invoke Web services for individual use. However, current approaches take mainly into account explicit knowledge presented by service descriptions. They make recommendations without considering data that reflect user interest and may require additional information from users. On the other hand, some business process mechanisms to search for similar business process models or to use reference models have been developed. These mechanisms are used to assist process analysts to facilitate business process design. However, they are labor-intense, error-prone, time-consuming, and may make business analyst confused. In our work, we aim at facilitating the service consumption for individual use and business process use using recommendation techniques. We target to recommend users services that are close to their interest and to recommend business analysts services that are relevant to an ongoing designed business process. To recommend services for individual use, we take into account the user's usage data which reflect the user's interest. We apply well-known collaborative filtering techniques which are developed for making recommendations. We propose five algorithms and develop a web-based application that allows users to use services. To recommend services for business process use, we take into account the relations between services in business processes. We target to recommend relevant services to selected positions in a business process. We define the neighborhood context of a service. We make recommendations based on the neighborhood context matching. Besides, we develop a query language to allow business analysts to formally express constraints to filter services. We also propose an approach to extract the service's neighborhood context from business process logs. Finally, we develop three applications to validate our approach. We perform experiments on the data collected by our applications and on two large public datasets. Experimental results show that our approach is feasible, accurate and has good performance in real use-cases

No description available.

Au Québec, le policier a l’autorité de faire respecter plusieurs lois et d’assurer le maintien de l’ordre. Puisque le policier peut être confronté à une multiplicité de problématiques, il est, dans certaines circonstances, contraint à employer une force pour se protéger lui-même ou pour protéger toute autre personne contre la mort ou contre des lésions corporelles graves. Cependant, bien que l’usage de la force par la police soit l’un des éléments les plus visibles et les plus controversés de l’intervention policière, les connaissances sur ce sujet spécifique demeurent limitées. Afin de pallier à certaines lacunes de la recherche et de la théorie, l’objectif général de ce mémoire vise à identifier les facteurs individuels, situationnels et contextuels liés au niveau de force utilisé par la police lors d’une intervention dans les postes de quartier et dans les secteurs de recensement. Les données dans le cadre de cette étude proviennent des rapports d’incidents déclarés d’usage de la force d’un service de police canadien pour une période couvrant les années 2007 à 2011, les données issues du recensement canadien de 2006 et les données criminelles issues du Programme de déclaration uniforme de la criminalité (DUC). La stratégie analytique privilégiée est la modélisation hiérarchique qui permettra de tester les liens entre les différents niveaux d’analyse. Au terme des analyses multiniveaux, les résultats indiquent que plusieurs facteurs ont un impact sur le niveau de force utilisé par le policier. Au niveau des déterminants individuels du sujet, c’est le fait d’être un homme, de résister physiquement à l’intervention et de posséder une arme qui est associé à des niveaux plus élevés de force. Au niveau des facteurs contextuels, on découvre que la proportion de minorité visible et le désavantage social ont un impact appréciable sur le niveau de force utilisé par le policier. Ces résultats nous amènent donc à conclure que les policiers tiennent surtout compte de la situation immédiate (facteurs individuels et situationnels) pour évaluer le degré de dangerosité ou de menace, mais qu’ils sont également influencés par l’endroit où ils se trouvent. D’autres études sont toutefois nécessaires pour vérifier la constance de nos résultats. / In Quebec, the officer has the authority to enforce various laws and to maintain order. Since the police officer may be faced with a multiplicity of problems, he is, in certain circumstances, forced to use physical force to protect himself or to protect any person against death or serious injury. However, although the phenomenon of police force raises a good number of criticism and it is widely publicized, only a few studies have connected individual, situationnal and contextual factor to police use of force practices. The purpose of this thesis is to examine and to understand the phenomenon of police use of force in Quebec by identifying individual, situational and contextual factors on levels of police force. The data for the current study are derived from three primary sources : the incident reports of use of force of a Canadian police force for a period covering the years 2007 to 2011, 2006 Canadian Census and Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR). The use of multilevel models reveals that several factors have an impact on the level of police use of force. Individual and situationnal findings suggest that police are more likely to use higher level of force when they encounter males, citizens who physically resist and citizens who possess or display a weapon. Contextual findings indicate that the proportion of racial heterogeneity and concentrated disadvantage have an impact on levels of police force. Findings lead us to conclude that the nature of the immediate situation (individual and situational factors) is one of the most prominent explanations for police decision making, but police behavior can also be accounted for by variation in demographic and institutional characteristic of communities. However, further studies are needed to verify the consistency of our results.