På senaste tid har det individuella kravet på ekonomiska frågor ökat allt mer och mer i takt med den teknologiska framfarten. I samband med detta är det väldigt viktigt med finansiell kunskap, även kallat financial literacy, för att kunna utföra dessa vardagliga situationer. Vad är det då som förbättrar en individs financial literacy? Vissa studier hävdar att det är det finansiella beteende som är grunden till en god financial literacy, medan andra påstår att det har med räknekunskap att göra. Andra faktorer, såsom utbildning, kön och ålder konstateras spela en stor roll om man frågar andra aktörer. Vilken av dessa faktorer är då den viktigaste för att man ska ha en god financial literacy och kunna tackla dessa situationer som uppkommer i vardagen? För att kunna genomföra detta arbete gjordes en kvantitativ undersökning i form av en enkätundersökning där svar hämtades från 257 respondenter (18+). Materialet från enkätsundersökningen analyserades och jämfördes med tidigare forskning. I denna studie så kom vi fram till att den viktigaste faktorn för en god financial literacy är ekonomisk utbildning som sedan följs av räknekunskap och finansiellt beteende, som kan jämföras med den kognitiva förmågan hos individer som beskrivs av rational choice theory. Både kön och ålder visar skillnader i det finansiella beteendet men visar inget direkt samband till financial literacy.

Master of Public Health - MPH / The World Health Organisation estimates that more than 50% of medicines are inappropriately used globally. The situation is worst in developing countries such as Nigeria, where irrational prescribing practices account for wastage of resources, catastrophic medicines costs and poor access to health services. In 2005, the Social Health Insurance Programme was launched as a financially sustainable model to achieve cost effective and affordable health care services including medicines. This study investigated prescribing practices and availability of medicines in the Social Health Insurance Programme in accredited public sector secondary hospitals in the Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria.Methodology:The study is a descriptive, cross-sectional and retrospective survey of prescriptions of insured outpatients in the Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria. Four hospitals were selected by stratification of thirteen (13) public secondary hospitals in the territory into urban/peri-urban areas, followed by random selection of two hospitals from each stratum.A total of seven hundred and twenty (720) retrospective prescription encounters of insured outpatients were systematically selected from encounters between July 2009 and June 2010 at the selected facilities. Data on prescribing practices and the extent to which prescribed medicines were provided were assessed with the use of modified WHO/INRUD indicators. Descriptive statistics were generated with Epi-info (version 3.4.3) and SPSS (version 17.0)Results: Out of the seven hundred and twenty (720) prescriptions that were assessed analgesics/NSAID, antibiotics, antimalarials and haematinics/vitamins collectively accounted for 67.4% of the medicines prescribed.A comparison of the results with WHO/Derived reference values showed that average number of medicines prescribed per prescription (3.5 ±1, p<0.001) and the rate of antibiotic prescribing (53.7%, p=0.009) were higher than the WHO recommended ranges of (1.6-1.8) and (20.0- 25.4%) respectively.The use of generic names in prescribing (50.9%, p<0.0009) and medicines prescribed from the Essential Medicine List (74.2%, p=0.05) were considerably lower than the standard (100%) However, the rate of injection prescribing (12.49%, p=0.4) was within the recommended range (10.1–17.0%).The study also found that 85.1%, (p=0.001) of prescribed medicines were dispensed, while 93.4% (p=0.256) of essential medicines were dispensed which was lower than the recommended standard (100%). Overall, only 58%,(p<0.0001) of patients had all prescribed medicines completely dispensed and this was significantly lower than the desired standard (100%.) in social health insurance programmes.Conclusions:The findings of this study show trends toward irrational prescribing practices as characterized by poly-pharmacy, overuse of antibiotics, sub-optimal generic prescribing, as well as poor adherence to the use of NHIS-Essential Medicine List. There was sub-optimal provision of prescribed medicines. These are potential threats to the scheme‟s goal of universal access to health care in the year 2015. Pragmatic multi-component interventions are recommended to promote rational prescribing and improve equity in access to essential medicines.

Magister Public Health - MPH / Background: The irrational use of medicines, and increasingly antimicrobials, remains a key health problem in many developing countries including Zambia. Inappropriate, ineffective and inefficient use of medicines is common in health facilities at all levels. There are many factors influencing irrational prescribing and dispensing of antimicrobials including patients, prescribers, dispensers, the supply system (including industry influences), government regulations and medicines information and misinformation. Study aim: The aim of the study was to assess the rational use and availability of antimicrobials at primary level health facilities under the Lusaka district community health office, Zambia. Study design: The study was a cross-sectional descriptive study, with prospective and retrospective components. A standardized research methodology, including tools and indicators, adapted from the World Health Organization, was employed. Study population and sampling: The study population included all the 30 government primary level health facilities (health centres) in Lusaka District, from which 20 primary health facilities were sampled using a combination of purposive and random sampling. Using the WHO standard indicators of rational drug use, this study assessed 800 patient encounters, 520 medicines inventory records, and other baseline data, from 20 health facilities at three different levels under the Lusaka district community health office, Zambia. Data collection: The data collection tools were numbered and labeled. Tool 1: Prescribing Indicator Form was used to collect prescribing data; Tool 2: Patient Care (Pharmacy) Form was used to record dispensing data; Tool 3: Antimicrobial Availability Form for recording data for the availability of the key indicator antimicrobials and their substitutes; Tool 4: Facility Indicator Consolidation Reporting Form was used for consolidating the data collected for each health facility under study; and Tool 5: Facility Medicines Use Indicator Consolidation Form was used for the consolidation of the drug use data for the entire study. Third year Pharmacy Technology students were trained for the data collection process. The patients were first observed from outside the prescriber's room and the dispensing area for consultation and dispensing times respectively, and then they were interviewed to collect the prescribing and dispensing data. The tools were pre-tested. Data analysis: After data checking and consolidation, quantitative data were categorized into continuous numerical variables. Calculations were done manually and using computerized analysis (Epi Info package) and presented as simple frequency and means. Ethics: Ethical clearance for the study was obtained from University of the Western Cape Senate Research Committee. Permission was obtained from the Lusaka Provincial and District health offices, being the authorities that are overseeing the health facilities included in the study. Furthermore, permission was obtained from the health centre in-charges. Consent was obtained from healthcare providers and patients. Key results and discussion: The study found that at the primary level facilities there were more Clinical Officers (55%) than Medical Doctors (25%) and Registered Nurses (20%) in charge of prescribing. The main dispensers were Pharmacy Technologists (85%); there were no Pharmacists available in any of the facilities. A third [259 (32.4 %)] of all the 800 patients in the study were children below 12 years of age. Across the clinics, a mean of 2.94 medicines were prescribed per prescription, with an extremely low rate of prescribing drugs by generic name (36.7%). The proportion of prescriptions including an antibiotic was 36.2 % and 3.4 % included an injectable drug. Linking the antimicrobials and injections to patient diagnoses indicated that many were probably irrational, prescribing decisions. Amoxicillin and metronidazole were by far the most commonly prescribed antimicrobials at 32.0 % and 17.2 % of total antimicrobials, respectively. The essential drugs list was available in 80.0% of facilities and a high percentage of medicines were prescribed from the essential medicines list (81.2%). The overall mean percentage of medicines packages correctly labeled was considerably low at 44.8 %. The average consultation time was short at 4.0 (range 1-8.4) minutes, whereas the dispensing times were equally short and averaged at 116.6 (range 15-360) seconds, with the range of 15 to 360 seconds. The average percentage of first line antimicrobials available at health facilities was 79 %; and the average percentage of second line, substitute, antimicrobials available was 15 %. Conclusion: In line with studies from other settings, this medicines use study found considerable overuse and irrational use of antimicrobials in the primary health care clinics in Lusaka District. Irrational medicine prescribing was common and poor dispensing practices were also seen, resulting in poor use of and adherence to medicines and, consequently, poor therapeutic outcomes. Recommendations: Several recommendations have been formulated. They include: Reinforcing the Drug Therapeutic Committees (DTCs) at the national and the local facility level to help manage medicines use; clarification of prescribers and dispensers roles and responsibilities; development, enforcement or adaption of standard operating procedures (SOPS) for prescribing and dispensing; and improvement of prescribing and dispensing practices through introduction of appropriate education, supervision and audit.

There has been an endless discussion on the efficient-market hypothesis between different academic schools. Many recent studies have opened up towards the paradigm shift in rational thinking problem. This thesis deals with the issue of asymmetric information interpretation during altered mental states. The purpose of this study is to discover the effect on agent's behaviour using a practical tool such as a daily trade plan. If traders succumb to irrationality, they probably make poor choices below their potential levels. Therefore the experiment was conducted with students of FM VŠE. The variables were measured before and after the intervention which was applying the trade plan. The additional data collection mapped the personal context of self-reflection and management of well-being. The results indicate the advantage of using the daily trade plan for manipulating the factors that can negatively influence the quality of decision-making.

What do we do when we realise that others with whom we interact already know something about relevant qualities of ours? Do we relying on the information that we naturally emit to get our message across, or do we take actions to try to change the situation in our favour? And, does the information that we emit, generated intentionally or unintentionally, allow us to cooperate with others and conflict to be resolved peacefully? Drawing on signalling and 'countersignalling' theories, and a recent behavioural theory, I explore these questions using two experiments in which the relevant qualities are trustworthiness and toughness, and observational data from the 1997 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities concerning violence among prisoners. In the experiments, subjects, who do not know what will follow, initially create a natural indicator of their qualities, and subsequently, have the opportunity to send another indicator, this time fully informed. In one experiment, consistent with countersignalling theory, subjects whose generosity is clear deign to send further information, while those whose generosity can be called under question choose to update their initial action the most. In the other, the toughest subjects put the most effort into getting their message across. Consistent among both, senders' actions correspond to receivers' evaluations. Finally, I find that pertinent information can allow conflicts to be resolved successfully; it is linked with less violence in prison and in a laboratory-based contest.

This study investigates the existence of the value premium in South Africa’s equity market, and tests extrapolation as a possible explanation for it. The value premium refers to the widely reported superior performance of share price returns of value companies compared to growth companies. The value premium represents an anomaly in mainstream rational finance theory, because it should not persist, unless it could be explained as the result of some composite form of risk. What is highly vexing is the fact that the value premium not only persists in most financial markets over a long period, but that the risk explanation cannot be upheld convincingly. This contributed to the rise of behavioral finance, an approach which introduces psychological factors to provide new explanations for financial phenomena. The behavioral finance explanation for the value premium observation is extrapolation (the tendency to project recent experience too far into the future). This study applies propositions and methods from behavioral finance to investigate the South African equity market. The existence of a value premium in South Africa was investigated by using twenty-nine years’ worth of accounting and share price data. The study employed one- and two-dimensional tests for portfolio formation, and tracked share price returns for up to five years after portfolio formation. The results indicated that a statistically and economically significant value premium existed in South Africa for the period between 1972 and 2001. Extrapolation as a potential explanation for the value premium observation was investigated by applying internationally used methods. Extrapolation was found to provide a robust explanation for the South African value premium.

We develop a new autoregressive conditional process to capture both the changes and the persistency of the intraday seasonal (U-shape) pattern of volatility in essay 1. Unlike other procedures, this approach allows for the intraday volatility pattern to change over time without the filtering process injecting a spurious pattern of noise into the filtered series. We show that prior deterministic filtering procedures are special cases of the autoregressive conditional filtering process presented here. Lagrange multiplier tests prove that the stochastic seasonal variance component is statistically significant. Specification tests using the correlogram and cross-spectral analyses prove the reliability of the autoregressive conditional filtering process. In essay 2 we develop a new methodology to decompose return variance in order to examine the informativeness embedded in the return series. The variance is decomposed into the information arrival component and the noise factor component. This decomposition methodology differs from previous studies in that both the informational variance and the noise variance are time-varying. Furthermore, the covariance of the informational component and the noisy component is no longer restricted to be zero. The resultant measure of price informativeness is defined as the informational variance divided by the total variance of the returns. The noisy rational expectations model predicts that uninformed traders react to price changes more than informed traders, since uninformed traders cannot distinguish between price changes caused by information arrivals and price changes caused by noise. This hypothesis is tested in essay 3 using intraday data with the intraday seasonal volatility component removed, as based on the procedure in the first essay. The resultant seasonally adjusted variance series is decomposed into components caused by unexpected information arrivals and by noise in order to examine informativeness.

Monomeric red fluorescent proteins (RFPs) are used extensively for applications in molecular biology research, and are especially suited for whole body imaging applications due to their longer excitation and emission wavelengths, which are less damaging and penetrate deeper into animal tissue. However, these proteins suffer from reduced brightness compared to other fluorescent proteins, and require further engineering, which is often achieved through random methods, incurring large time and resource costs. Here we propose a rational design approach to improve the quantum yield of RFPs by reducing conformational variability of the chromophore. We engineered mRojoA, a mutant containing a π-stack involving Tyr197 and the chromophore phenolate, to include the P63F/H/Y mutations on its other side, by simultaneously mutating neighbouring positions 16, 143, and 163. The brightest mutants that we found in each library, mRojo-VYGV, mRojo-VFAV, and mRojo-VHSV, exhibited 1.8- to 2.4-fold increases in brightness, and quantum yield increases of up to 2.1-fold. In all three mutants, the increases in brightness were predominantly due to improvements in the quantum yield and not the extinction coefficient. Solving the crystal structures of two of these mutants along with a dim variant allowed us to strongly infer a link between rigidity of the chromophore and increased quantum yield. In addition, back-mutating position 63 in the highest quantum yield mutant, mRojo-VYGV, reversed the improvement in quantum yield, indicating that Y63 was the primary residue responsible for the improved brightness of the protein. Unfortunately, the mCherry-VYGV mutant did not achieve a similar increase in quantum yield or brightness. This is likely due to the lack of a second bulky aromatic residue at position 197, which is present in mRojoA. Nevertheless, this rational approach could be applied to some other RFPs whose chromophores exhibit increased conformational variability in order to further improve their brightness.

This thesis investigates the anomalous underperformance of distressed stocks in the US computer and electronics industry. It shows that such anomaly can be explained by a parallel analysis of risk based rational pricing and profitability (earnings) levels to returns relationship propositions. For the 1990 to 2006 period, distressed stocks have on average underperformed their non-distressed counterparts. However, once the conditional relationship with profitability is taken into account, the distress risk is rewarded by a continuous positive return hence priced appropriately. In the computer and electronics industry growth stocks (low B/M) outperform on average value stocks (high B/M). The size factor has not been confirmed to be significant in explaining stock returns for this specific industry over the 1990 to 2006 period. The study also reveals that B/M and size factors do not proxy for distress risk. The B/M factor follows an inverted u-shape along the distress risk deciles axis. As result, stocks in low and high distress portfolios share similarly low B/M values. Cash flow based bankruptcy predictors estimated on a quarterly basis from a Cox proportional hazard model, that are used as proxy for a continuous distress risk factor in asset pricing tests, are able to predict bankruptcies at higher accuracy rates than the Z-Score as alternative measure.

D.Litt. et Phil. / Incidence and prevalence rates of child sexual abuse and incest are shockingly high. Children of both genders are sexually abused every 25 minutes in South Africa. This abuse results in emotional, spiritual, social, interpersonal, sexual, psychosomatic, neurological and cognitive disturbances. Many of these consequences persist into adulthood. Adult survivors do not always link their symptoms or problems with their childhood sexual abuse experiences. Those that do seek help for those symptoms only in adulthood. Specialised treatment models have been developed for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. These treatment approaches neglect the spiritual consequences of childhood sexual abuse and have overlooked the value of incorporating the religious or spiritual beliefs of clients into the therapy. Hypnotherapeutic strategies have been successful in treating traumatic conditions, yet, they are not intended for treatment of adult survivors of childhood incest and sexual abuse. This study results in an understanding of the long-term spiritual consequences of adult abuse survivors. A treatment approach, integrating concepts of existing abuse focused models, hypnotherapeutic strategies and the spiritual beliefs of clients is developed to compensate for the aforementioned limitations. To enhance the treatment outcome, principles of Tibetan psychology and rational-emotive therapy were integrated into the treatment approach. The experiences of five female adult survivors’ of the long-term spiritual consequences of the abuse, and their experiences of the hypnotherapeutic approach was assessed in a pilot study. Questions regarding the consequences of the abuse, hypnosis and spirituality were included in the pilot study questionnaire. The results obtained from this study were integrated into the intervention study. The intervention study also consisted of five adult females and the therapy process was defined with reference to the long-term consequences and strategies comprising five modalities (spiritual concepts, Tibetan psychology, cognitive therapy, hypnotherapy, and existing incest focused treatment models). The data obtained from the pilot and intervention studies were qualitatively analysed within an action research methodology. The action research approach consists of four action research cycles. The first cycle comprised the literature review; the second the pilot study; the third the intervention study, and; the fourth, an integration of the above cycles. Findings obtained from the pilot study showed that participants do suffer serious long-term spiritual consequences as a result of having been sexually abused as children. Participants of the pilot study unanimously concluded that the hypnotherapeutic strategies made the therapy more meaningful for them. This corresponds with findings from clinically researched studies. Participants particularly benefited from their visualisations, their self-hypnosis audio-tapes, breathing techniques and from the integration of their personal spiritual beliefs and visualisations into the therapy. The hypnotic trance resulted in greater recall of childhood memories. The interpersonal functioning of the participants improved as well as feelings of guilt, sadness, fear and anger. Conclusions drawn from the interventions study indicate that the synthesis of strategies obtained from the four modalities proved to be a valuable therapeutic treatment approach with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. As a direct result of the therapy clients were able to heal many negative consequences of the abuse. Clients established healthier interpersonal boundaries, resolved feelings of sadness, fear, aggression, resentment and self-doubt. A few clients formed healthier body-images, became more assertive and self-confident. Certain clients were able to forgive the perpetrators and others found it easier to interact with the perpetrators after their therapy. Furthermore, clients were able to find meaning in their abuse experiences and some decided to be of service to mankind after their therapy. This study is a comprehensive guideline for professionals working with such survivors. Findings in this study may assist professionals to acquire an understanding of the experience of childhood sexual abuse and hypnotherapy as experienced by female survivors. It provides insight into the long-term psychological and spiritual consequences suffered from the abuse. It is hoped that the findings of this study will inform future research, contribute towards theory-building in this field, and assist professionals with their clinical practices. / Prof. W.J. Schoeman Dr. R. Pelser.