This study examined mother-infant attachment relationships as identified by a social work team working with a highly vulnerable cohort. Infants in the ultra-high risk population are most at risk of poor attachment styles. Mothers often have a history of childhood abuse and adversity, criminality, substance abuse, and poor mental health. When combined with socio-environmental aspects within families a high incidence of poor attachment is likely. This study investigated Social Workers’ identification of attachment issues using qualitative methodology in the form of document analysis of Social Worker case notes and semi-structured interviews with Social Workers. Results indicate that the accuracy and frequency of identifying attachment varied and that often the focus was on individual behaviours rather than the dynamic attachment processes of the mother-infant dyad. Disturbance in the attachment relationship was most clearly and accurately identified in cases that involved a major disruption to the mother-infant relationship. Attachment styles were identified as secure in almost every non-crisis case, particularly in the infant’s early years. Possible early manifestations of insecure attachment styles were not viewed through the lens of attachment theory, but rather in the context of behavioural and parenting problems. The potency of the Social Worker-mother relationship emerged as a factor that may in and of itself be crucial in helping mothers attach to their infants.

This thesis is an investigation of adolescents’ perceptions of their relationships with staff members working in their group home. Past research has found the majority of youth who have lived in care often experience greater hardships later in life compared to those youth in the normative population (Schmid et al., 2008). Resiliency promoting factors such as long-term positive relationships with nonparental caregivers have shown to protect some youth in care from future adversities (Masten, 2000). A cross-sectional exploratory survey was conducted using a convenience sample of 17 adolescents (Male n= 9) currently living in group home settings in Southern Ontario. Youth reported that they best got along with staff who made them laugh, had similar interests, were caring and consistent. Youth reported that positive relationships with staff are developed through continual interactions, open communication and trust. Reasons as to why relationships with staff are difficult were also reported by youth.

People continually make evaluations of their own and other people’s romantic relationships using various terms of relationship quality. Although relationship quality has been examined intensely among relationship researchers, existing theories have different views on what constitutes relationship quality (e.g., Rusbult, 1980; Sternberg, 1986). In five studies, I used a prototype approach to identify core features of relationship quality which are important for relationship functioning. I proposed that these core features are shared across relationship quality concepts (i.e., commitment, intimacy, love, passion, satisfaction, trust, and relationship quality; Fletcher, Simpson, & Thomas, 2000). Thus, I examined how shared and unique features of relationship quality concepts play a role in romantic relationship functioning. In Study 1, university students listed characteristics of each of the relationship quality concepts. These lists showed both shared features across concepts (e.g., caring, honesty, loyalty, and good communication) and unique features for each concept. In Study 2, another group of university students and a community sample rated how central each feature is to a corresponding concept. The results indicated that shared features were rated as more central to each of the concepts than the unique features. In Study 3, university students rated how important each feature is for good relationship functioning. Overall, as predicted, shared features were rated as more important for relationship functioning than unique features. I recorded reaction times in Study 4 as an implicit measure of judgments about whether shared and unique features were good indicators of relationship functioning. Participants made judgments on shared features more quickly than on unique features. Finally, Study 5 examined how the presence of these prototype features would be related to people’s evaluation of their ongoing romantic relationships. The presence of shared features and unique prototypical features predicted positive relationship evaluation more strongly than the presence of unique non-prototypical features. Overall, the results of these five studies support the idea that there are core characteristics of relationship quality across concepts (i.e., shared features). The current research makes contributions to the area of relationship research by identifying important aspects in evaluating the quality of romantic relationships.

Many families attend parenting programmes wanting assistance for their children’s behaviour problems and also for managing sibling relationships but there has been little research in this area. The aim of this research project was to assess the effects of the Triple P Level Four Positive Parenting Programme on the quality of the sibling relationships and parent-child relationships with four families drawn from a large city in New Zealand. Direct observation, semi informal parent interviews, questionnaires, child interviews, and anecdotal dated and timed notes were used to assess if there were changes in the quality of target child/sibling and the parent-child-sibling relationship and interactions. The Triple P Programme appeared to be an effective intervention for three of the four families according to final parent interviews. However, analysis of the direct observations indicated inconsistent and varied effects between and within measures.

People continually make evaluations of their own and other people’s romantic relationships using various terms of relationship quality. Although relationship quality has been examined intensely among relationship researchers, existing theories have different views on what constitutes relationship quality (e.g., Rusbult, 1980; Sternberg, 1986). In five studies, I used a prototype approach to identify core features of relationship quality which are important for relationship functioning. I proposed that these core features are shared across relationship quality concepts (i.e., commitment, intimacy, love, passion, satisfaction, trust, and relationship quality; Fletcher, Simpson, & Thomas, 2000). Thus, I examined how shared and unique features of relationship quality concepts play a role in romantic relationship functioning. In Study 1, university students listed characteristics of each of the relationship quality concepts. These lists showed both shared features across concepts (e.g., caring, honesty, loyalty, and good communication) and unique features for each concept. In Study 2, another group of university students and a community sample rated how central each feature is to a corresponding concept. The results indicated that shared features were rated as more central to each of the concepts than the unique features. In Study 3, university students rated how important each feature is for good relationship functioning. Overall, as predicted, shared features were rated as more important for relationship functioning than unique features. I recorded reaction times in Study 4 as an implicit measure of judgments about whether shared and unique features were good indicators of relationship functioning. Participants made judgments on shared features more quickly than on unique features. Finally, Study 5 examined how the presence of these prototype features would be related to people’s evaluation of their ongoing romantic relationships. The presence of shared features and unique prototypical features predicted positive relationship evaluation more strongly than the presence of unique non-prototypical features. Overall, the results of these five studies support the idea that there are core characteristics of relationship quality across concepts (i.e., shared features). The current research makes contributions to the area of relationship research by identifying important aspects in evaluating the quality of romantic relationships.

Departing from a theoretical problem, reinforced by a practical dilemma, this study set out to explore the dialectics between the transactional and relationship perspective that PR and advertising marketers must handle in their customer relations. Formulating the study from established transaction and relationship marketing theories and using qualitative interviews with PR and advertising practitioners, we have explored how two contradicting perspectives surface in the customer interactions. The results show that there is a need for both perspectives to coexist and that the balance in between them is constantly shifting.

No description available.

The focus of this thesis is the relationship between the articulation ofspeech and the acoustics of produced speech. There are several problems thatare encountered in understanding this relationship, given the non-linearity,variance and non-uniqueness in the mapping, as well as the differences thatexist in the size and shape of the articulators, and consequently the acoustics,for different speakers. The thesis covers mainly four topics pertaining to thearticulation and acoustics of speech.The first part of the thesis deals with variations among different speakersin the articulation of phonemes. While the speakers differ physically in theshape of their articulators and vocal tracts, the study tries to extract articula-tion strategies that are common to different speakers. Using multi-way linearanalysis methods, the study extracts articulatory parameters which can beused to estimate unknown articulations of phonemes made by one speaker;knowing other articulations made by the same speaker and those unknown ar-ticulations made by other speakers of the language. At the same time, a novelmethod to select the number of articulatory model parameters, as well as thearticulations that are representative of a speaker’s articulatory repertoire, issuggested.The second part is devoted to the study of uncertainty in the acoustic-to-articulatory mapping, specifically non-uniqueness in the mapping. Severalstudies in the past have shown that human beings are capable of producing agiven phoneme using non-unique articulatory configurations, when the artic-ulators are constrained. This was also demonstrated by synthesizing soundsusing theoretical articulatory models. The studies in this part of the the-sis investigate the existence of non-uniqueness in unconstrained read speech.This is carried out using a database of acoustic signals recorded synchronouslyalong with the positions of electromagnetic coils placed on selected points onthe lips, jaws, tongue and velum. This part, thus, largely devotes itself todescribing techniques that can be used to study non-uniqueness in the sta-tistical sense, using such a database. The results indicate that the acousticvectors corresponding to some frames in all the phonemes in the databasecan be mapped onto non-unique articulatory distributions. The predictabil-ity of these non-unique frames is investigated, along with verifying whetherapplying continuity constraints can resolve this non-uniqueness.The third part proposes several novel methods of looking at acoustic-articulatory relationships in the context of acoustic-to-articulatory inversion.The proposed methods include explicit modeling of non-uniqueness usingcross-modal Gaussian mixture modeling, as well as modeling the mappingas local regressions. Another innovative approach towards the mapping prob-lem has also been described in the form of relating articulatory and acousticgestures. Definitions and methods to obtain such gestures are presented alongwith an analysis of the gestures for different phoneme types. The relationshipbetween the acoustic and articulatory gestures is also outlined. A method toconduct acoustic-to-articulatory inverse mapping is also suggested, along withva method to evaluate it. An application of acoustic-to-articulatory inversionto improve speech recognition is also described in this part of the thesis.The final part of the thesis deals with problems related to modeling infantsacquiring the ability to speak; the model utilizing an articulatory synthesizeradapted to infant vocal tract sizes. The main problem addressed is related tomodeling how infants acquire acoustic correlates that are normalized betweeninfants and adults. A second problem of how infants decipher the number ofdegrees of articulatory freedom is also partially addressed. The main contri-bution is a realistic model which shows how an infant can learn the mappingbetween the acoustics produced during the babbling phase and the acous-tics heard from the adults. The knowledge required to map correspondingadult-infant speech sounds is shown to be learnt without the total numberof categories or one-one correspondences being specified explicitly. Instead,the model learns these features indirectly based on an overall approval rating,provided by a simulation of adult perception, on the basis of the imitation ofadult utterances by the infant model.Thus, the thesis tries to cover different aspects of the relationship betweenarticulation and acoustics of speech in the context of variations for differentspeakers and ages. Although not providing complete solutions, the thesis pro-poses novel directions for approaching the problem, with pointers to solutionsin some contexts. / QC 20111222 / Computer-Animated language Teachers (CALATea), Audio-Visual Speech Inversion (ASPI)

This thesis covers two distinct measurement development issues and has a third purpose that is to verify the similarities and differences between relationship and service quality (discriminant validity).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.