Domestic violence is a pervasive problem. Approximately one quarter of all women will be assaulted by a partner in their lifetime. It is difficult to predict how resilient a woman will be after being abused, and how severe the negative consequences may be. The present study sought to identify variables that are the strongest predictors of traumatic symptoms after experiencing domestic violence, and also test social support as a moderator of these trauma symptoms. One hundred and twenty two women incarcerated in a local south Florida county jail participated in the study. They were administered the BWSQ-3, DAPS, and AAS-R. Types of abuse experienced, number of abusive relationships, time in abusive relationship, and severity of injuries were all found to be significant predictors of clinically significant trauma symptoms; types of abuse experienced and severity of injuries contributed over and above the other variables. It was observed that approximately 71% of women identified as having a secure attachment style sought help outside the relationship for the abuse. It was also determined that women with a secure attachment style significantly differed from those with a preoccupied or fearful attachment style in the rates at which they sought help. The final analysis indicated social support effectively moderates the resulting trauma symptoms after being abused; women who have experienced mild to moderate abuse, who also have adequate social support, had lower rates of clinically significant trauma symptoms. The present findings are important for guiding treatment and the development and implementation of more effective interventions.

The purpose of this research design is to explore the meaning of death for the female adolescent. A qualitative design was used as the method of research. Twelve participants were selected from a snowball sample ten females and two males. Four participants reported witnessing the death of an individual, five reported a moderated death experience in which they were not present but were told after the fact and three reported no significant experience with death. The study indicated relationships and cause of death as among the pre-conditions towards meaning development for the adolescent female. The two main themes derived from the pre-conditions are an understanding of the inevitability of death for themselves and the experience of death as qualia. Consequences to the experience of death include increased emotional tolerance under stress and a perceived increased maturity suggesting resilience in the adolescent female following a loss. Future areas of research are also addressed.

Protecting modern engineered systems has become increasingly difficult due to their complexity and the difficulty of predicting potential failures. With the added threat of terrorism, the desire to design systems resilient to potential faults has increased. The concept of a resilient system – one that can withstand unanticipated failures without disastrous consequences – provides promise for designing safer systems. Resilience has been recognized in research settings as a desired end product of specific systems, but resilience as a general, inherent, measurable property of systems had yet to be established. To achieve this goal, system resilience was related to an established concept, the resiliency of a material. System resilience was defined as the amount of energy a system can store before reaching a point of instability. The energy input into each system as well as the system’s exergy were used to develop system stress and system strain variables. Process variable changes to four test systems – a steam pipe, a water pipe, a water pump, and a heat exchanger – were applied to obtain series of system stress and system strain data that were then graphed to form characteristic system response curves. Resilience was quantified by performing power-law regression on each curve to determine the variable ranges where the regression line accurately described the data and where the data began to deviate from that power-law trend. Finally, the four test systems were analyzed in depth by combining them into an overall system using the process simulator ASPEN. The ranges predicted by the overall system data were compared to the ranges predicted for the individual equipment. Finally, future work opportunities were outlined to show potential areas for expansion of the methodology.

Protecting modern engineered systems has become increasingly difficult due to their complexity and the difficulty of predicting potential failures. With the added threat of terrorism, the desire to design systems resilient to potential faults has increased. The concept of a resilient system – one that can withstand unanticipated failures without disastrous consequences – provides promise for designing safer systems. Resilience has been recognized in research settings as a desired end product of specific systems, but resilience as a general, inherent, measurable property of systems had yet to be established. To achieve this goal, system resilience was related to an established concept, the resiliency of a material. System resilience was defined as the amount of energy a system can store before reaching a point of instability. The energy input into each system as well as the system’s exergy were used to develop system stress and system strain variables. Process variable changes to four test systems – a steam pipe, a water pipe, a water pump, and a heat exchanger – were applied to obtain series of system stress and system strain data that were then graphed to form characteristic system response curves. Resilience was quantified by performing power-law regression on each curve to determine the variable ranges where the regression line accurately described the data and where the data began to deviate from that power-law trend. Finally, the four test systems were analyzed in depth by combining them into an overall system using the process simulator ASPEN. The ranges predicted by the overall system data were compared to the ranges predicted for the individual equipment. Finally, future work opportunities were outlined to show potential areas for expansion of the methodology.

According to recent data, approximately eighteen percent of children under age 18 live in single-parent households. The majority of research has focused on negative outcomes associated with one-parent households in comparison with their two-parent counterparts, including poor academic performance and increased delinquency rates in children. The current literature neglects to evaluate potentially advantageous factors resultant of being raised in a single-parent home. The proposed study utilizes an exploratory positive psychology approach to investigate levels of resiliency and adaptive skill sets present in college students raised in single-parent households in comparison to degree of cumulative risk encountered. Analyses of these variables will be completed through ordinary least squares multiple regression. Furthermore, parenting style will be examined as a potential moderator of resiliency. Finally, this study proposes the adoption of a new paradigm in ongoing investigation of this unique population. / text

This qualitative study endeavored to interview professional immigrants in order to better understand the adjustment and career-related challenges that professional immigrants encounter when they immigrate to Canada and pursue educational retraining. The main purpose of the study was to explore retraining decisions and outcomes and uncover the factors that influence career resiliency amongst professional immigrants. It was discovered that most professional immigrants have a desirable pre-immigration career and come to Canada to provide a better standard of living for themselves and/or their children. Professional immigrants often expect that they will be able to continue in their vocational field after arriving in Canada with little or no retraining. Unfortunately, most professional immigrants encounter significant initial career barriers such as discrimination, a lack of social networks, and non-recognition of foreign education and work experience. These barriers often lead to issues such as unemployment, under-employment, unfair treatment, psychological distress and a reduced standard of living. To help cope with these difficulties, most professional immigrants rely on social support and personal actions. In particular, encountered career challenges often prompt professional immigrants to adopt educational retraining as a career-enhancing strategy. The specific retraining experiences and career outcomes of participants were explored and discussed in detail. In summary, some participants were able to re-establish a career in Canada that was as satisfying as their pre-immigration career, however, most participants were unable to establish a career that is equivalent to their pre-Canadian career status. A number of participants even found themselves’ unemployed or grossly under-employed despite living in Canada for at least six years and having completed retraining. Overall, participants in this study represented a wide range of experiences which served to guide the formation of a new theoretical model for career resiliency. In addition to accounting for the influence of individual, relational and contextual factors, the newly presented Relative Encompassment Model of Career Resiliency accounts for the influence of relative comparisons, which were found to influence participant’s attitudes, perceptions and coping abilities. The important implications for theory, policy and practice are discussed. Suggestions for future research on career resiliency are also made.

This qualitative study endeavored to interview professional immigrants in order to better understand the adjustment and career-related challenges that professional immigrants encounter when they immigrate to Canada and pursue educational retraining. The main purpose of the study was to explore retraining decisions and outcomes and uncover the factors that influence career resiliency amongst professional immigrants. It was discovered that most professional immigrants have a desirable pre-immigration career and come to Canada to provide a better standard of living for themselves and/or their children. Professional immigrants often expect that they will be able to continue in their vocational field after arriving in Canada with little or no retraining. Unfortunately, most professional immigrants encounter significant initial career barriers such as discrimination, a lack of social networks, and non-recognition of foreign education and work experience. These barriers often lead to issues such as unemployment, under-employment, unfair treatment, psychological distress and a reduced standard of living. To help cope with these difficulties, most professional immigrants rely on social support and personal actions. In particular, encountered career challenges often prompt professional immigrants to adopt educational retraining as a career-enhancing strategy. The specific retraining experiences and career outcomes of participants were explored and discussed in detail. In summary, some participants were able to re-establish a career in Canada that was as satisfying as their pre-immigration career, however, most participants were unable to establish a career that is equivalent to their pre-Canadian career status. A number of participants even found themselves’ unemployed or grossly under-employed despite living in Canada for at least six years and having completed retraining. Overall, participants in this study represented a wide range of experiences which served to guide the formation of a new theoretical model for career resiliency. In addition to accounting for the influence of individual, relational and contextual factors, the newly presented Relative Encompassment Model of Career Resiliency accounts for the influence of relative comparisons, which were found to influence participant’s attitudes, perceptions and coping abilities. The important implications for theory, policy and practice are discussed. Suggestions for future research on career resiliency are also made.

As a recently emerging network paradigm, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has attracted considerable attention from both industry and academia. The most significant advantage of SDN is that the paradigm disassociates the control logic (i.e., control plane) from the forwarding process (i.e., data plane), which are usually integrated into traditional network devices. Thanks to the property of centralized control, SDN enables the flexibility of dispatching flow policies to simplify network management. However, this property also makes the SDN environment vulnerable, which will cause network paralysis when the sole SDN controller runs malfunction. Although several works have been done on deploying multiple controllers to address the failure of a centralized controller, their drawbacks are leading to inefficiency and balance loss of controller utilization, provoking resource idling as well as being incapable to suffice flow outburst. Additionally, the network operators often put a great deal of effort into discovering failure nodes to recover their networks, which can be mitigated by applying failure detection before the network deterioration occurs. Network traffic prediction can serve as a practical approach to evaluate the state of the OpenFlow-based switch and consequently detect SDN node failures in advance. As far as prediction solution is concerned, most researchers investigate either statistical modeling approaches, such as Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA), or Artificial Neural Network (ANN) methods, like Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Neural Network. Nonetheless, few of them study the model merging these two mechanisms regarding multi-step prediction. This thesis proposes a novel system associated with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technique to enhance the resilience of SDN network. A hybrid prediction model based on the combination of SARIMA and LSTM is introduced as part of the detection module of this system, where the potential node breakdown can be readily determined so that it can implement smart prevention and fast recovery without human interaction. The results show the proposed scheme improves the performance concerning time complexity compared with that of previous work, reaching up to 95% accuracy while shortening the detection and recovery time by the new combined prediction model.

The problem of this study was to investigate the resilient effects of selected string tensions in various types of tennis rackets. The rackets selected were the Wilson T-2000, Head Professional, Head Master, Dunlop Fort, Dunlop Austral, and Yamaha Composite. Each racket was randomly strung and tested at 45, 52.5, and 60 pounds of string tension. The testing involved dropping a tennis ball 100 inches onto the racket face, which was stationary, and measuring the height of the ball bounce. The data collected from the rackets and string tensions were analyzed by the analysis of variance and the .05 level of confidence was used to determine significance. A significant difference occurred between the Head Professional and Wilson T-2000 and the Head Professional and Yamaha Composite. Significant differences occurred between all three string tensions.

This project examined the extent to which psychosocial or personal variables moderated the relationship between exposure to violence and use of violence in adolescents. The relationship between exposure to violence and use of violence was examined within a sample of adolescents, ages 13 -18. The major goals of this study were to examine some possible correlates of violence use and to determine the extent to which certain personal variables (i.e., locus of control, social skills, feelings of despair, and certainty of being alive at age 25) operate as protective or vulnerability factors for those adolescents at risk for violence. The conceptualization of this study was based on the framework of the compensatory and protective vs. vulnerability models. As hypothesized, a strong relationship between exposure to community violence and use of violence was found in this study. In addition, level of despair was also correlated with use of violence. No relationship was found between use of violence and the following variables: exposure to domestic violence, certainty of being alive at age 25, social skills, or locus of control. Further, none of the psychosocial variables tested in this study were found to moderate the relationship between use of violence and exposure to domestic and community violence combined. However, when exposure to community and domestic violence were analyzed separately, two interaction effects were found. Social skills did appear to have a slight moderating effect on the relationship between exposure to domestic violence and use of violence. Also, certainty of being alive at age 25 was found to interact with exposure to community violence to influence use of violence. Specifically, the belief that one would not live to be age 25 operated as a vulnerability mechanism. The findings of this study best supported the compensatory model as one conceptualization of use of violence. / Master of Science