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Abstract Given the increasing concern for the global environmental issues and the related need for preservation of the ecosystem, voluntary non-financial disclosure has become more and more important to almost all economies today. However, empirical literature shows findings that are mixed, inconsistent and often contradictory; ranging from positive, to negative, to statistically insignificant relationships. Hence, this study aimed to assess the impact of voluntary non-financial disclosure on selected listed companies. In terms of scope, the study involves 50 Swedish companies with mandatory non-financial disclosure requirements and 76 international companies with voluntary non-financial disclosure. A period of 7 years was considered in the study that secondary data of manufacturing firms from 2014 to 2020 is used. Results showed that energy management and corporate social responsibility have a negative but insignificant impact on profitibility. Whilst diversity on board showed a positive impact on profitability, this impact was insignificant. Size of the firm was the only variable which showed a positive significant impact on profitability. It was concluded that disclosure of information on energy management, corporate social responsibility and diversity on board have no significant impact on financial performance of manufacturing companies regardless of whether they engage in voluntary or mandatory non-financial disclosure. More so, it was concluded that voluntary non-financial disclosure has no short-term impact on profitability of manufacturing firms.

Organizations often take trust for granted or ignore it, although trust is important for organizational learning and performance. Organizations must continuously learn if they are to survive, and trust facilitates individual and organizational learning. However, many authors either mention the importance of trust, or assume trust is present, and then discuss other topics as if little can be done to better understand the antecedents of trust or to improve trust in an organization. In particular, prior to this study, researchers had not explored the influence of adult attachment and disclosiveness on organizational trust. Human resources development professionals can play a vital role by helping leaders in their organizations attain strategic goals, however, no research study done previously has focused on how trust in an organization is influenced by adult attachment and disclosiveness. There is a need to better understand organizational trust because in today's global economy, an organization's ability to survive may depend in part on individual and organizational learning facilitated by trust. This study focused on a main research question "What portion of the variance in employees' perceptions of organizational trust do employees' adult attachment and disclosiveness explain?" During this research, a revised instrument for measuring organizational trust was developed. The findings of this study showed that disclosiveness did not have a statistically significant influence on organizational trust. In contrast, fearful attachment, in particular was shown to have a modest, statistically significant, and negative influence on organizational trust. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this research was to explore what women who are, or have been, in therapy for an eating disorder find helpful about that therapy. Since the perspectives and voices of women in therapy are largely absent from the treatment literature, participants were asked to talk about their experiences in therapy, particularly those aspects they identified as helping them change in desirable ways. In-depth interviews were conducted with nine women and one therapist who treated each of them individually. Qualitative methods of analysis were employed that privileged the voices of participants and used the therapist's comments to add depth to the understanding of the results. The results of this research are organized to help clinicians arrange their thinking about how to work with clients who have eating problems. Five categories, or aspects, of helpfulness were created: relationship aspects, self of therapist aspects, within therapy aspects, outside therapy but related to treatment aspects, and having nothing to do with therapy aspects. Participants' voices are used to add depth and details to each of these aspects. Suggestions for therapists are included. / Ph. D.

This study is a 2 X 4 factorial design investigating the effects of (1) four levels of symbolic environmental manipulation (artwork) and (2) two conditions of therapist demand characteristic (claiming or disclaiming of the artwork as reflective of personal taste) on the self disclosing behavior of 80 female college freshmen in an intake interview-analogue. The artwork manipulation consists of (1) an erotic art condition with four prints, (2) a mixed-content condition with one thematic print in each of the areas of sexuality, aggression, family concerns, and achievement, (3) an abstract art control condition with four prints, and (4) a no-art control condition. Dependent measures include: (1) the scaled intimacy value of the questions selected by the subjects, (2) the duration of actual self-disclosure, and (3) an intimacy/breadth rating of transcripts of taped actual disclosure. A main effect of artwork on self-disclosure was predicted specifically for sexual disclosure in the erotic artwork condition and generally for disclosure on all topics in the mixed-content condition, as a result of the cueing effect of the artwork stimuli. An interaction of artwork and therapist demand characteristic was predicted also as an interactive result of cueing and reciprocity of non-verbal disclosure by the interviewer, through the claimed personal symbolic artwork. In addition, in conditions in which artwork cues are present, subjects were predicted to be more comfortable disclosing and more likely to attribute their disclosure externally, a main effect of artwork on attribution and comfort. An interaction of artwork and therapist demand was also predicted such that subjects with relevant artwork claimed by the interviewer would report ·maximum comfort and external attribution. The hypotheses were not confirmed, and no significant results were found. Subjects apparently found the interviewer herself more salient than environmental cues. Subject comfort was correlated with perceived comfort of the interviewer and external attribution of self-disclosing behavior to interviewer traits. / Ph. D.

The need to publish and disseminate data continues to grow. Administrators of large-scale educational assessment should provide examinee microdata in addition to publishing assessment reports. Disclosure avoidance methods are applied to the data to protect examinee privacy before doing so, while attempting to preserve as many item statistical properties as possible. When important properties like differential item functioning are lost due to these disclosure avoidance methods, the microdata can give off misleading messages of effectiveness in measuring the test construct. In this research study, I investigated the preservation of differential item functioning in a large-scale assessment after disclosure avoidance methods have been applied to the data. After applying data swapping to protect the data, I attempted to empirically model and explain the likelihood of preserving various levels of differential item functioning as a function of several factors including the data swapping rate, the reference-to-focal group ratio, the type of item scoring, and the level of DIF prior to data swapping. / Ph. D.