This thesis focuses on the use of interpreters in Swedish healthcare. The overall aim was to explore how individuals, healthcare professionals and family members experience and perceive the use of interpreters in healthcare. The study design was explorative and descriptive. The thesis included Serbo-Croatian(Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian)speaking individuals(n=17), healthcare professionals(n=24), official documents(n=60)and family members(n=10)of individuals using interpreters in healthcare. Individual interviews, written descriptions, review of official documents in the form of incident reports from a single case study and focus group interviews were used to collect data. Data were analyzed using phenomenography, qualitative content analysis and qualitative data analysis of focus group interviews. The overall finding from all perspectives was the wish to have a qualified interpreter whose role was as a communication aid but also as a practical and informative guide in healthcare. The perception of a qualified interpreter was someone highly skilled in medical terminology, Swedish and individuals’ native language with ability to adapt to different dialects, wearing non-provocative and neutral clothes, of the same gender, with a professional attitude and preferably in personal contact through face-to-face interaction. Besides being a communication aid, the interpreter was perceived as having an important role in helping individuals to find the right way to and within the healthcare system because foreign-born individuals were unable to understand information in healthcare. Another aspect was to have a well-developed organization with good cooperation between the parties involved in the interpretation situation, such as patients, interpreter, interpreter agency, family members and healthcare professionals to offer a good interpretation situation. In conclusion, the use of an interpreter was determined by individual and healthcare situational factors. Individualized holistic healthcare can be achieved by offering and using high-quality interpreters and cooperation within a well-developed interpreter organization.   Keywords: communication, healthcare service, patient-safe quality care, qualitative data collection, qualitative data analysis, users’ perceptions/experiences, utilization of interpreters.

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the cultural and motivational perspectives associated with the occupational or vocational decision-related processes of senior high school students. Two theoretical frameworks were developed to guide the investigation by integrating theories from the culture, motivation, decision-making, and vocational decision-making literatures. One theoretical framework investigated the roles of culture and motivation in the vocational decisions made by senior high school students, while the other examined the vocational decision-related processes of senior high school students in terms of the extent to which they may be amotivated about choosing a future occupation. A mixed methods approach (incorporating a cross-sectional and correlational research design for the quantitative component) was implemented using a specially developed questionnaire. In the first phase of the investigation, the questionnaire was administered to 492 Year 11 students attending a stratified random sample of six Independent high schools located in the Sydney metropolitan area. In the second and main phase, a refined version of the questionnaire was administered to 566 Year 11 students attending a stratified random sample of 16 government high schools located in the Sydney metropolitan area. Structural equation modelling, discriminant analyses, and qualitative techniques were used to analyse the data collected in the two phases. The major findings of the investigation included the development and confirmation (after modifications) of two new theoretically-justifiable models of vocational decision-related processes. One model provided empirical support for relationships between cultural orientation, values, and attitudes/intentions toward occupations, while the other identified relationships between amotivation, indecision toward occupations, expectancy-value variables, and influences from the family. Multiple themes that were identified in the qualitative data analyses supplemented and partially supported elements of the two empirical models, and enabled a richer understanding of the issues surrounding the vocational decision. The findings of the investigation may be used by career advisors, psychologists, educators, and families to advise and assist senior high school students faced with the vocational decision. The investigation may contribute to reducing the gap in the literature on the roles of culture and motivation in the vocational decision-related processes of senior high school students.

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the cultural and motivational perspectives associated with the occupational or vocational decision-related processes of senior high school students. Two theoretical frameworks were developed to guide the investigation by integrating theories from the culture, motivation, decision-making, and vocational decision-making literatures. One theoretical framework investigated the roles of culture and motivation in the vocational decisions made by senior high school students, while the other examined the vocational decision-related processes of senior high school students in terms of the extent to which they may be amotivated about choosing a future occupation. A mixed methods approach (incorporating a cross-sectional and correlational research design for the quantitative component) was implemented using a specially developed questionnaire. In the first phase of the investigation, the questionnaire was administered to 492 Year 11 students attending a stratified random sample of six Independent high schools located in the Sydney metropolitan area. In the second and main phase, a refined version of the questionnaire was administered to 566 Year 11 students attending a stratified random sample of 16 government high schools located in the Sydney metropolitan area. Structural equation modelling, discriminant analyses, and qualitative techniques were used to analyse the data collected in the two phases. The major findings of the investigation included the development and confirmation (after modifications) of two new theoretically-justifiable models of vocational decision-related processes. One model provided empirical support for relationships between cultural orientation, values, and attitudes/intentions toward occupations, while the other identified relationships between amotivation, indecision toward occupations, expectancy-value variables, and influences from the family. Multiple themes that were identified in the qualitative data analyses supplemented and partially supported elements of the two empirical models, and enabled a richer understanding of the issues surrounding the vocational decision. The findings of the investigation may be used by career advisors, psychologists, educators, and families to advise and assist senior high school students faced with the vocational decision. The investigation may contribute to reducing the gap in the literature on the roles of culture and motivation in the vocational decision-related processes of senior high school students.

Cette thèse, dont l’objet est l’étude des émotions d’un point de vue linguistique, se positionne dans le cadre théorique de la linguistique cognitive. Son objectif principal est d’étudier le processus de lexicalisation et de conceptualisation des émotions, représentées par des mots-clés, dans le contexte littéraire de ce qu’on pourrait appeler « fiction juridique ». La première partie du travail examine les relations interdisciplinaires en jeu dans l’interconnexion entre le langage, la cognition et les émotions. La second partie est consacrée à l’étude lexicographique complexe des mots-clés exprimant des émotions dans le contexte littéraire de quatre romans mettant en scène la justice. Dans une troisième partie, sont mis au jour les « patrons » métaphoriques sous-jacents à la lexicalisation et à la conceptualisation en discours des différentes catégories d’émotions, ce qui permet d’illustrer la dépendance entre le lexique des émotions et ses conceptualisations les plus fortes. Enfin, cette thèse utilise une méthodologie dérivée du logiciel ATLAS.ti qui permet une approche qualitative de l’étude des émotions telles qu’elles sont exprimées en discours. / This thesis is written within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics and focuses on the ways emotion keywords lexicalize and conceptualize in the language of legal fiction. The first part of the work provides an interdisciplinary discussion about the interconnection between language, cognition, and emotion. This is followed, in a second part, by the complex lexicographical study of five emotion keywords in legal fiction, a genre of texts which has remained overlooked by researchers in the field. The third part brings to light the metaphorical patterns of different types of emotion keywords in order to show how they lexicalize and conceptualize in language, and demonstrate the dependency between the types of emotion keywords and their strongest and weakest conceptualizations. In addition, this thesis offers an application of the software ATLAS.ti, which allows a qualitative approach to the study of emotions as expressed in language.

The current study explores the experiences of mental health care professionals in Sweden who conduct therapy with the assistance of an interpreter. Seven participants took part in semi-structured interviews that were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith, 1996). Three main themes emerged from the analysis of the interview transcripts: (1) communication and translation - highlighting the communicative challenges and benefits that arise when using an interpreter, (2) the interpreter as a person and as a professional - describing the variation of interpreters in terms of behavior, personality, roles, and professionalism, and their impact on psychological treatment, and (3) dynamics and relations - featuring the interpreter’s impact on the dynamics and the process of building a patient-therapist alliance. The results show that all participants find it difficult to determine the accuracy of the translation, and several techniques used by the clinician to ensure a correct translation were pointed out. Moreover, findings highlight the essentiality of non-verbal cues and body language in communication and that the role and the behavior, in addition to several personal factors of the interpreter has an impact on the patient-therapist alliance and therapy dynamics. In addition, the study illuminates the patient’s impact on the interpreter as many interpreters themselves have been through traumatic experiences, which in turn may affect the therapeutic process. The findings of the current study show how important it is for clinicians, mental health services, and interpreting services to take the interpreters’ impact on the clinician, the patient, and the therapeutic outcome  into account. The study aims to contribute to a better understanding of clinicians’ experiences of working with interpreters to improve the use of - and collaboration with - interpreters and thereby raise the standard of psychological treatment for refugees and asylum seekers.

My dissertation is about how engineering educators can use natural language processing (NLP) in implementing open-ended assessments in undergraduate engineering degree programs. Engineering students need to develop an ability to exercise judgment about better and worse outcomes of their decisions. One important consideration for improving engineering students' judgment involves creating sound educational assessments. Currently, engineering educators face a trad-off in selecting between open- and closed-ended assessments. Closed-ended assessments are easy to administer and score but are limited in what they measure given students are required, in many instances, to choose from a priori list. Conversely, open-ended assessments allow students to write their answers in any way they choose in their own words. However, open-ended assessments are likely to take more personal hours and lack consistency for both inter-grader and intra-grader grading. The solution to this challenge is the use of NLP. The working principles of the existing NLP models is the tallying of words, keyword matching, or syntactic similarity of words, which have often proved too brittle in capturing the language diversity that students could write. Therefore, the problem that motivated the present study is how to assess student responses based on underlying concepts and meanings instead of morphological characteristics or grammatical structure in sentences. Some of this problem can be addressed by developing NLP-assisted grading tools based on transformer-based large language models (TLLMs) such as BERT, MPNet, GPT-4. This is because TLLMs are trained on billions of words and have billions of parameters, thereby providing capacity to capture richer semantic representations of input text. Given the availability of TLLMs in the last five years, there is a significant lack of research related to integrating TLLMs in the assessment of open-ended engineering case studies. My dissertation study aims to fill this research gap. I developed and evaluated four NLP approaches based on TLLMs for thematic analysis of student responses to eight question prompts of engineering ethics and systems thinking case scenarios. The study's research design comprised the following steps. First, I developed an example bank for each question prompt with two procedures: (a) human-in-the-loop natural language processing (HILNLP) and (b) traditional qualitative coding. Second, I assigned labels using the example banks to unlabeled student responses with the two NLP techniques: (i) k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), and (ii) Zero-Shot Classification (ZSC). Further, I utilized the following configurations of these NLP techniques: (i) kNN (when k=1), (ii) kNN (when k=3), (iii) ZSC (multi-labels=false), and (iv) ZSC (multi-labels=true). The kNN approach took input of both sentences and their labels from the example banks. On the other hand, the ZSC approach only took input of labels from the example bank. Third, I read each sentence or phrase along with the model's suggested label(s) to evaluate whether the assigned label represented the idea described in the sentence and assigned the following numerical ratings: accurate (1), neutral (0), and inaccurate (-1). Lastly, I used those numerical evaluation ratings to calculate accuracy of the NLP approaches. The results of my study showed moderate accuracy in thematically analyzing students' open-ended responses to two different engineering case scenarios. This is because no single method among the four NLP methods performed consistently better than the other methods across all question prompts. The highest accuracy rate varied between 53% and 92%, depending upon the question prompts and NLP methods. Despite these mixed results, this study accomplishes multiple goals. My dissertation demonstrates to community members that TLLMs have potential for positive impacts on improving classroom practices in engineering education. In doing so, my dissertation study takes up one aspect of instructional design: assessment of students' learning outcomes in engineering ethics and systems thinking skills. Further, my study derived important implications for practice in engineering education. First, I gave important lessons and guidelines for educators interested in incorporating NLP into their educational assessment. Second, the open-source code is uploaded to a GitHub repository, thereby making it more accessible to a larger group of users. Third, I gave suggestions for qualitative researchers on conducting NLP-assisted qualitative analysis of textual data. Overall, my study introduced state-of-the-art TLLM-based NLP approaches to a research field where it holds potential yet remains underutilized. This study can encourage engineering education researchers to utilize these NLP methods that may be helpful in analyzing the vast textual data generated in engineering education, thereby reducing the number of missed opportunities to glean information for actors and agents in engineering education. / Doctor of Philosophy / My dissertation is about how engineering educators can use natural language processing (NLP) in implementing open-ended assessments in undergraduate engineering degree programs. Engineering students need to develop an ability to exercise judgment about better and worse outcomes of their decisions. One important consideration for improving engineering students' judgment involves creating sound educational assessments. Currently, engineering educators face a trade-off in selecting between open- and closed-ended assessments. Closed-ended assessments are easy to administer and score but are limited in what they measure given students are required, in many instances, to choose from a priori list. Conversely, open-ended assessments allow students to write their answers in any way they choose in their own words. However, open-ended assessments are likely to take more personal hours and lack consistency for both inter-grader and intra-grader grading. The solution to this challenge is the use of NLP. The working principles of the existing NLP models are the tallying of words, keyword matching, or syntactic similarity of words, which have often proved too brittle in capturing the language diversity that students could write. Therefore, the problem that motivated the present study is how to assess student responses based on underlying concepts and meanings instead of morphological characteristics or grammatical structure in sentences. Some of this problem can be addressed by developing NLP-assisted grading tools based on transformer-based large language models (TLLMs). This is because TLLMs are trained on billions of words and have billions of parameters, thereby providing capacity to capture richer semantic representations of input text. Given the availability of TLLMs in the last five years, there is a significant lack of research related to integrating TLLMs in the assessment of open-ended engineering case studies. My dissertation study aims to fill this research gap. The results of my study showed moderate accuracy in thematically analyzing students' open-ended responses to two different engineering case scenarios. My dissertation demonstrates to community members that TLLMs have potential for positive impacts on improving classroom practices in engineering education. This study can encourage engineering education researchers to utilize these NLP methods that may be helpful in analyzing the vast textual data generated in engineering education, thereby reducing the number of missed opportunities to glean information for actors and agents in engineering education.

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abstract: In this study, the Arizona State University Mathematics and Science Teaching Fellows 2010 program was analyzed qualitatively from start to finish to determine the impact of the research experience on teachers in the classroom. The sample for the study was the 2010 cohort of eight high school science teachers. Erickson's (1986) interpretive, participant observational fieldwork method was used to report data by means of detailed descriptions of the research experience and classroom implementation. Data was collected from teacher documents, interviews, and observations. The findings revealed various factors that were responsible for an ineffective implementation of the research experience in the classroom such as research experience, curriculum support, availability of resources, and school curriculum. Implications and recommendations for future programs are discussed in the study. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2012

Submitted by JÚLIO HEBER SILVA (julioheber@yahoo.com.br) on 2017-06-22T17:43:22Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Waldeliza Fernandes da Cunha - 2014.pdf: 7807593 bytes, checksum: 717a77754bc79ad1938f18f6c1d8a99e (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Cláudia Bueno (claudiamoura18@gmail.com) on 2017-07-07T20:22:49Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Waldeliza Fernandes da Cunha - 2014.pdf: 7807593 bytes, checksum: 717a77754bc79ad1938f18f6c1d8a99e (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-07T20:22:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Waldeliza Fernandes da Cunha - 2014.pdf: 7807593 bytes, checksum: 717a77754bc79ad1938f18f6c1d8a99e (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-10-30 / The objective of this study was to evaluate efficiency, profitability and quality of housing, físicos- chemical parameters and acceptability of capybara meat grown in semi-intensive system, as well as knowing the profile and beliefs of consumers of exotic meat. The thesis is composed of five chapters, the chapter 1, initial considerations that addresses the motivations of research and so on and finally concludes as all, as this is the thesis summary. We conducted a literature review on the topic, from biology and habits of the capybara, the market of wild animals and meat quality. Subsequently characterized the carcass and cuts capybara as income, profitability and microbiology. For this, we used six coming adult capybaras (76kg) the commercial breeding of Jatai GO, slaughtered in the experimental abattoir IF Goiás Campus Ceres. The results showed hot carcass dressing (WHR) in relation to body weight (BW) of 52,9%. The yields of retail cuts (RCC) in descending order were: ham and (31,33%), shoulder (26,67%), rib (17,33%) and loin (10,67%), the profitability of housing is incremented when the cuts are marketed separately, there was no contamination by Salmonella. The physicochemical analyzes, we evaluated the proximate composition, water holding capacity (WHC), shear force (FC) and the color, the cuts from the loin, shank and the palette of six capybaras were used. The results showed that capybara meat has low levels in relation to Domestic meat lipids, highlighting the palette. There was no difference between the cuts for the CRA, HR ranged from 5,3 to 7,1, indicating softness. For color, the palette contents were lower in red (a *) for revealing lower lipid contents. Assessing the acceptability of capybara meat cuts and types of crackling, offering up different types of meat to consumers. The results showed that the capybara meat had similar acceptance pork and lamb, being lower than the beef. To know the profile and beliefs of consumers (end and distributors) of these products in the towns of Caldas Novas, Ceres and Goiânia, GO . The results showed that respondents consume meat of any wild form, capybara meat is the most consumed in the form of meatballs. It was evident that even family and friends influenced the consumption of these products. Finally, we observed the existence of belief that meat from animals raised in captivity is healthier, attributing the quality, price and availability of the product as determinants of increased consumption of meat of wild animals in these regions studied. We conclude that capybara meat has the potential consumer and marketing. / Objetivou-se com esse trabalho avaliar rendimento, rentabilidade e qualidade da carcaça, parâmetros físicos- químicos e aceitabilidade da carne de capivara criadas em sistema semi-intensivo, bem como conhecer o perfil e crenças dos consumidores da carne exóticas. A tese foi composta por cinco capítulos, sendo o capítulo1, Considerações iniciais, que aborda as motivações da pesquisa e assim por diante e finalmente se conclui como um todos, pois este é o resumo tese. Realizou-se uma revisão de literatura sobre o tema, desde a biologia e hábitos da capivara, mercado de animais silvestres e qualidade de carne. Posteriormente, caracterizou a carcaça e os cortes de capivara quanto ao rendimento, rentabilidade e microbiologia. Para isso, utilizou-se seis capivaras adultas (76kg) vindas do criatório comercial de Jataí GO, abatidas no abatedouro experimental do IF Goiano Campus Ceres. Os resultados evidenciaram rendimento da carcaça quente (RCQ) em relação ao peso vivo (PV) de 52,9%. Os rendimentos dos cortes comerciais (RCC) em ordem decrescente foram: e pernil (31,33%), paleta (26,67%), costela (17,33%) e lombo (10,67%), a rentabilidade da carcaça é incrementada quando os cortes são comercializados separadamente, não houve contaminação por Salmonella. Nas análises físico-químicas, avaliou-se a composição centesimal, capacidade de retenção de água (CRA), força de cisalhamento (FC) e a cor, foram utilizados os cortes do lombo, pernil e a paleta de seis capivaras. Os resultados demonstraram que a carne de capivara tem teores de lipídeos baixo em relação a carnes domesticas, destacando a paleta. Não houve diferença entre os cortes para a CRA, a FC variou entre 5,3 a 7,1, indicando maciez. Para cor, a paleta apresentou menor teor de vermelho (a*) por revelar menor teor de lipídeos. Avaliando a aceitabilidade da carne de capivara tipos de cortes e torresmo, ofertando-se diferentes tipos de carne aos consumidores. Os resultados evidenciaram que a carne de capivara apresentou aceitação semelhante a carne suína e ovina, sendo inferior à carne bovina. Para conhecer o perfil e crenças dos consumidores (finais e distribuidores) desses produtos nas cidades de Caldas Novas, Ceres e Goiânia, GO.. Os resultados mostraram que os entrevistados consomem carne de silvestres de forma eventual, sendo a carne de capivara a mais consumida na forma de almôndega. Evidenciou-se ainda que a família e os amigos influenciavam no consumo desses produtos. Finalmente, observou-se a existência de crença de que a carne de animais criados em cativeiro é mais saudável, atribuindo-se a qualidade, preço e disponibilidade do produto como fatores determinantes de elevação do consumo de carnes de animais silvestres nestas regiões estudadas. Conclui-se que a carne de capivara tem potencial de consumo e comercialização.

The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the potential use of Sandplay psychotherapy with an adolescent who presented with poor self-esteem. In conducting my research I assessed one adolescent’s selfesteem by means of quantitative and qualitative measures and identified potential aspects that might require intervention, related to self-esteem. After the initial assessment, Sandplay psychotherapy was implemented as intervention, after which the participant’s self-esteem was re-assessed, comparing the results with those obtained during the initial assessment (baseline data). For the purpose of my study, I fulfilled the role of researcher, involving an intern educational psychologist in assessing the participant and conducting the intervention, thereby fulfilling the role of therapist. I followed a triangulation mixed methods intervention research approach, primarily relying on the interpretivist paradigm yet being informed and elaborated upon by a post-positivist component. I studied a single clinical case situated within the context of psychotherapy outcome research. This enabled me to draw conclusions on how suitable and helpful Sandplay psychotherapy might be (or not) for an adolescent who presented with poor self-esteem. In collecting quantitative data, I employed the Self-Esteem Index (Brown&Alexander, 1991) both prior to and after the intervention had been completed. In support, a qualitative post-modern assessment was included in the form of the Rosebush technique (Oaklander, 1988). Other qualitative data collection and documentation measures include observations, semi-structured interviews (with the participant and her parents), photographs of the sand trays and a semi-structured reflection journal (of the participant), as well as reflection journals of the researcher and therapist. Based on the pre- and post-assessments I was able to compare results of the participant’s self-esteem before and after the Sandplay psychotherapy intervention had been completed. Subsequent to thematic qualitative data analysis and my comparison of the quantitative results I obtained, three main themes emerged. Firstly, the self-esteem of the participant seemed to have improved following the intervention, since her limited self-knowledge, feelings of inferiority and her uncertainty in unknown situations seemingly changed into age-appropriate self-knowledge, feelings of self-worth and facing the unknown. Secondly, she displayed changes in the emotional domain of development post-intervention. She seemed more content with her situation, reportedly feeling more safe and secure as opposed to feeling academically pressured, as was the case at the onset of my study, and having a positive future perspective. Thirdly, changes in her social domain of development occurred as she displayed age-appropriate skills, acted more assertively and felt more accepted and ready to establish relationships. Based on the findings of my study, I can conclude that it seems possible to facilitate the improvement of adolescents’ self-esteem by conducting Sandplay psychotherapy. Besides an improvement in terms of overall self-esteem, the participant in my study seemingly displayed improvement in the areas of relationships and social skills, as well as conflict resolution skills. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Educational Psychology / unrestricted