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Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed February 15, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-96).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 316-334). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

A number of different methods for assessing the aesthetic quality of environments have been developed over the past 30 years. From methods that rely upon "experts" to judge the scenic quality of a landscape to methods that rely upon "naive" observers, all methods share the same basic interest: To explain or predict aesthetic quality between different environments. Although a number of attempts at integrating different methodologies have been recently reported, these have failed to produce an integrative theory of environmental aesthetics due to experimental and theoretical problems inherent in each design. The present study was designed to derive fundamental aesthetic principles for landscapes through the integration of the formal aesthetic, psychological, and psychophysical methods. This study addressed three basic questions: (1) What traits or constructs are being measured by environmental assessment methods currently used?, (2) Are these constructs independent of the methods used to assess them?, and (3) Can an integrative theory of environmental aesthetics be developed empirically? To answer these questions, the study focused on the construct validity of the measures within each method across four different landscapes, ranging from Alaska to the Southwest. Three categories of ratings were collected for each landscape, corresponding to the published procedures of each method. Initial factor analyses were run within each method across the four landscapes to determine what general environmental characteristics were measured by each method. A second-order factor analysis was used to derive basic aesthetic characteristics which transcend both method of measurement and landscape type. Multiple regression analyses were then used to predict the common aesthetic characteristics from the physical data of the landscapes. The experiment was designed to facilitate a new understanding of (1) whether universal principles of aesthetic quality exist across different environments and methods of assessment and (2) if physical measures of the environment can be used to predict those universal characteristics.

This research addressed the need to assess the validity of existing health-related quality of life instruments, by evaluating two such instruments: the Quality of Well-Being Scale and the MOS-HIV-34 Health Survey. One hundred adult male HIV-infected patients across six HIV disease classifications were used as subjects in San Diego, California. The research had three objectives: (1) to evaluate the convergent validity of the two health-related quality of life instruments using four surrogate criterion measures--CD4 levels, beta-2 microglobulin levels, disease classification, and age; (2) to reweight the four preference weights of the Quality of Well-Being Scale using a category rating method and comparing these preference weights currently in use; and (3) to evaluate the linearity of the preference weights currently in use and the preference weights derived in this research using functional measurement theory. It was found that the Quality of Well-Being Scale had greater convergent validity than the MOS-HIV-34 Health Survey. The preference weights currently in use for the Quality of Well-Being Scale dimensions did not differ from those derived in the HIV-infected sample, thus supporting the continued application of the weights now in use for weighting the Quality of Well-Being Scale in HIV-infected patients. The preference weights currently in use and those derived in this research were linear, a finding which supports the use of the Quality of Well-Being Scale in health care policy decision-making.