Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / Bibliography. Also availabe via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Montana, 2006. / "Autumn 2006." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-125).

No description available.

Thesis (D.C.P. / M. Sc.)--School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, University of Sydney, 2006. / Title from title screen (viewed 13 January 2009). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology/ Master of Science to the School of Psychology, Faculty of Science. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

The purpose of this thesis research was to understand the recovery and resilience of wetland-community to flash flood disasters and its associated risks in the north-eastern part of Bangladesh. I conducted my study using a case study approach following an interdisciplinary research paradigm. It was found that wetland-community is extremely vulnerable to flash flood hazards - both in biophysical and social terms. However, they possess certain coping thresholds, and are resilient to disaster losses. The adaptive capacity of the local communities has been severely curbed by a number of socio-ecological, economic, and political factors, leading to natural resource degradation, marginalization and exclusion of the poor from common pool resources by powerful groups. Response capacities of local institutions were severely constrained by their limited relative autonomy. For building resilience, i) effective management and access of the poor to natural resources, and ii) enhancing autonomy of local institutions are required. / February 2016

This thesis aims to understand how owner-managers of SMEs in a developing country manage their organizations in a turbulent environment, and how they seek to create resilience in their organizations in this context. Specifically, this thesis investigates the major factors influencing the management strategies of infrastructure construction sector SMEs in North Cyprus. The primary data for the research was collected from owner-managers of infrastructure construction SMEs in North Cyprus that held a Class-1 classification in the sector, allowing them to participate in infrastructure projects in North Cyprus. Twelve SMEs with Class-1 classification are identified in the Building Construction Association of North Cyprus (CT-BCA), of which nine out of twelve consented to participate in the research. A qualitative research approach was adopted, with primary data gathered through face-to-face semi-structured interviews with these owner-managers; the collected data was then subjected to thematic analysis. The research found that the most influential factors influencing the management strategies of SMEs in North Cyprus were the macro characteristics of the socio-political environment, the individual characteristics of the owner-managers, and the characteristics of the infrastructure construction sector itself. These factors, which are linked in deep and nuanced ways, were discovered to impact the perceptions of the owner-managers and to affect their approaches towards the management of their SMEs. By evaluating the interaction between these factors, this research identified that infrastructure construction SMEs in North Cyprus operate in a complex system, where the approach to their management is identified as dissipative. Overall, the findings indicate that SMEs in North Cyprus take a reactive approach to management within this complex system, an approach that is itself related to ever-changing relationships between the key individual and environmental factors mitigating owner-managers' personal, sectorial and wider country circumstances. In this complex context, these SMEs cannot follow a systematic approach to management. Therefore, the resilience of these SMEs is found to lie in the adaptation of management strategies of SME owner-managers in the presence of disturbances, by experimenting and adjusting themselves in the existence of disturbances throughout their history.

This PhD thesis explores the phenomenon of resilience in people with spinal cord injury (SCI). The purpose of this research is to understand how resilience is experienced and given meaning in people with SCI, as well how resilience is fostered, how it impacts upon health and well-being, and how it can be managed to achieve maximum benefits with regard to health and well-being. It is the first in depth narrative investigation of resilience in people with SCI. Using both life story interviews and the process of timelining, participants stories were collected. Following this they were then analysed using dialogical narrative analysis (Frank, 2010, 2012). This enabled participants stories to be examined with regard to their effects on resilience and health and well-being. The analysis shows that firstly, due to the intangible nature of resilience, participants had trouble in articulating exactly what resilience meant to them. Instead, resilience was shown through participants stories which could be grouped into four different narrative types: loss, adaptation, posttraumatic growth (PTG), and life-as-normal. Together, these narrative types constructed resilience, and as such, resilience in people with SCI has four facets or faces , like a four-sided dice. The process of resilience in people with SCI worked by participants drawing upon the different narrative types at different times depending upon the demands being placed upon them. The loss narrative was drawn upon immediately following injury, and was concerned with the narration of the physical, psychological and social losses participants incurred following SCI. The loss narrative fostered resilience by enabling participants to talk about their losses, enabling participants to survive the hardest time of their lives. The second narrative type was the adaptation narrative. This narrative type focussed upon rehabilitation in both the spinal unit and in the community. This narrative type built resilience via progression through rehabilitation towards a quality of life comparable to pre-injury levels. The PTG narrative was concerned with the ways in which participants had developed following SCI and built resilience by shifting the focus onto the positives to come out of participants experiences of SCI. The life-as-normal narrative was used by two participants across their entire life story and enabled participants to continue with their lives with minimal disruption. It built resilience by placing disability in the background and therefore making it unimportant. This thesis then concludes with the empirical, theoretical, methodological and practical implications arising from this research. The potential for resilience to help improve the health and well-being of people with SCI is discussed, as well as the ways in which resilience can have a maximum benefit on health and well-being of people with SCI.

i ABSTRACT Sense of purpose is strongly associated with positive health behaviors and academic achievement (Turner-Musa & Lipscomb, 2007, Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics FIFCFS, 2010). The purpose of this qualitative research study was to develop grounded theory by the exploration of sense of purpose by describing and interpreting attitudes, beliefs, and practices among Black American families participating in an outreach program in Southern, IL. Grounded theory was used to explain the phenomenon of sense of purpose, and the relationship among optimism, faith, hope, spirituality and sense of meaning. A non probability purposive sample was used for the study. The sample consisted of 10 families, which were comprised of 26 individual, seven Black American mothers, one Black American father, one Black American grandmother, one Caucasian guardian and 16 children. Data collection included audio-taping first order narratives derived through individual interviews, field notes and observations in the homes of the participating families. Findings included identifying common and less common categories. The common categories were God, relationships, education, communication, financial security, autonomy and independence, leadership qualities, perseverance, self efficacy, life lessons, cooperation and opportunities. Less common categories, appearing in at least one family, were discipline and structure, and celebration of life. The central category linking all the categories and constructs together was identified as communication. Some causal affects influenced the prevalence of certain categories and how they were connected to the five constructs. These causal affects were poverty, parental education levels, and illness.

The combination of local farming practices (i.e. tiling, channelization) and global climate change has led to an increase in not only the severity, but also the frequency of extreme weather events in the Midwest, including droughts and floods. These can result in severe damage to watersheds, ecosystems, and communities. Climate change adaptations are vital to the maintenance of both sustainability and resilience of agro-ecosystems during severe weather events. They can allow agricultural producers to maintain the many functions of these systems, including food, fiber, and fuel production as well as water filtration, soil stability, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity. Implementation of these adaptations can be difficult for multiple reasons, but information sources, experts, and communities can assist with adoption through the diffusion of information. To assess the ability and willingness of agricultural producers to make these adaptations, and the role of information sources, I utilized survey data in three separate scenarios: 1.) producer interest in the adoption of switchgrass production, a novel adaptation; 2.) the adoption differences between producers who own farmland and those that rent farmland, and 3.) the opinions of experts and community members on the adoption of eight different climate change adaptations by farmers. The first study assesses the adoption of switchgrass, a dedicated biofuel perennial, which can be the first step in the transformation from an unsustainable, energy intensive production regime into a regime that provides both environmental sustainability (through water quality improvements) and financial stability for farmers. This study examines which characteristics predict interest in growing switchgrass through the analysis of a survey completed by farmers in the Clear Creek watershed in rural Iowa. Knowledge of switchgrass, education, and income are all highly correlated with interest in growing switchgrass. Long-term contracts with bio-refineries would also help farmers decrease adoption risk. Additionally, producers who use government agencies as information sources are more knowledgeable of switchgrass production. Results can help establish policies that could influence farmers to shift production from annual crops to perennial native biomass energy crops, and thus would increase the sustainability of the entire system. In areas where agricultural production is intensive, switchgrass production provides the potential to move from a contributor to climate change into a sector that contributes to the mitigation of climate change via reduction in energy-intensive input uses, production of renewable fuels, and sequestration of carbon in the soils. The second study focuses on conservation practice adoption among agricultural producers who rent land versus those who own the land they farm. Tenants and part-owners are farming an increasing number of acres in the United States, while full-owners are farming fewer acres. This shift in ownership is a potential cause for concern because some previous research indicated that tenant and part-owner farmers were not as likely to adopt conservation practices as farmers who owned the land they farmed. This study also uses survey data from the Clear Creek watershed in Iowa, and compares adoption of conservation practices and preferences for conservation information sources between farmers who rent some portion of the land they farm (tenants and part-owners) and farmers who own all of the land they farm (full-owners). Results show that renters are more likely to practice conservation tillage than full-owners, though they are less likely to rotate crops yearly. In addition, renters report using federal government employees (specifically, Natural Resource Conservation Service and Farm Service Agency employees) as their primary sources of conservation information, while full-owners most frequently rely on neighbors and friends and County Extension. These findings are significant for conservation policy because, unlike some past research, they indicate that renters are not resistant to conservation adoption. Finally, the last study examines the opinions of experts and community members about agriculture producers' ability and willingness to adopt adaptations in a large watershed in Iowa. A web-based survey of community members, government officials, and agricultural experts assesses perceptions of: barriers and drivers of adoption, and the adoption of specific adaptation practices. Through their knowledge of the community and their expertise in agriculture, the government, and the environment, the respondents are able to provide valuable information about climate change adaptations and the likelihood of adoption. Results show that transformative adaptations 1.) have more adoption barriers and 2.) will require severe weather events to occur more frequently than incremental adaptations for adoption to occur. This study will help to determine the factors that need to be addressed by governing agencies and resource management groups in order to reduce agro-ecosystem vulnerability to climate change events and provide adaptive capacity and resilience in the face of these emerging threats.

This dissertation examines various facets of the analysis of complex networks. In the first part, we study the resilience of networks, by examining various attempts to quantify resilience. Some of the measures studied are vertex attack tolerance, integrity, tenacity, toughness and scattering number. We prove empirically that, although these measures are NP-hard to calculate, they can be approximated to within reasonable amounts by a novel heuristic called Greedy-BC that relies on the graph-theoretic measure betweenness centrality. After verifying the accuracy of Greedy-BC, we test it on several well-known classes of networks: Barabasi-Albert networks, HOTNets and PLODs. Experiments determine that random-degree PLOD nets have the highest resilience, perhaps because of their random nature. The second part concerns clustering. We use the resilience measures and the Greedy-BC heuristic from part 1 to partition graphs. Many experiments are conducted with a generalized algorithm, NBR-Clust, using all discussed resilience measures, and expanding the data to a wide variety of real-life and synthetically generated networks. A parametrized resilience measure beta-VAT is used to detect noise, or outliers, in noisy data. Results are extended to another facet of network analysis -- that of cluster overlap. Attack sets of NBR-Clust are found to contain overlaps with high probability, and an algorithm is developed to identify them. One remaining problem with NBR-Clust is time complexity. The usefulness of the method is limited by the slowness of Greedy-BC, and particularly by the slowness of computing betweenness centrality. In an extensive series of experiments, we test several methods for approximating and speeding betweenness centrality calculations, and are able to reduce the time to cluster a 10,000-node graph from approximately 2 days with the original method of calculation, to a few minutes. In another exploration of the algorithmic aspects of resilience, we attempt to generalize some of the results obtained to hypergraphs. It is found that resilience measures like VAT and algorithms like Greedy-BC transfer well to a hypergraph representation. The final part of the dissertation reviews applications of the new clustering method. First NBR-Clust is used to cluster data on autism spectrum disorders. Because classifications of these disorders are vague, and the data noisy, the clustering properties of NBR-Clust are useful. Results hopefully lead to a better understanding of how to classify autism spectrum disorders. Second, we use NBR-Clust to examine gene assay data with the hope of identifying genes that confer resistance to powdery mildew disease in certain species of grapevines.