Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the single largest killer of American males and females in the United States. According to the American Heart Association, (2005) approximately 41% of Americans that experience a coronary attack in a given year will die from it (AHA, 2005). To combat this growing problem, strategies need to be evaluated to assess how the identification of actual and potential CHD risks are made. This study utilized the Social Judgment Theory to gain insight into nurse practitioner's decision-making strategies. Sixty family or adult specialty nurse practitioners affiliated with the University of South Florida (USF) College of Nursing volunteered to take part in a pretest-posttest experimental design. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. Condition 1 and 2 received educational interventions and Condition 3 served as the control group, which received no education. This design was used to assess the effects of educational feedback on improving judgment accuracy, achievement, and insight. The findings indicated nurse practitioners agreement with the Framingham prediction model of CHD risk did improve significantly for the two intervention groups from Time 1 to Time 2 (p <.05). the participants also showed a relatively high degree of cognitive control when judging and performing the policy-capturing task (average Rs = .88) as compared to Framingham (Re = .96). Significant amount of unconditional bias (F(2, 57) = 9.85, p < .01) and conditional bias (F(2, 57). 5.42), p < .05) was present in this sample. Nurse practitioners overall performed well when compared with the Framingham Heart Study risk equation, however, nurse practitioners showed little insight into their judgment process. The results of this study may provide the opportunity for nurse practitioners to offer patients more appropriate medicinal and diagnostic treatments. Future cardiac events may be avoided through evidenced-based CHD education for nurse practitioners.

Master of Science / Department of Journalism and Mass Communications / Xiaochen A. Zhang / Most of the models in Chinese fashion magazine advertisements are Caucasian women today. White skin, as one of their Caucasian characteristics, is particularly emphasized. Millions of Chinese women are bombarded with the advertising’s message of “having white skin is beautiful” every day. My research suggests that this kind of adverting depicts white skin as a beauty ideal; the prevalence of Caucasian models in whitening products’ magazine advertisements constructs body-esteem, self-esteem, and purchase decision-making of Chinese women. The Social Judgment Theory is employed in this research as a theoretical framework. It is a way to explain when persuasive messages are most likely to succeed and how people make judgments about them. Understanding this phenomenon will ultimately provide insight into addressing the effects of the promotion of fashion magazine advertisements on Chinese women. It is further anticipated that future researchers will expand and improve the knowledge of the Chinese advertising market.

The credibility of the American news media is increasingly under fire. Despite an exponential expansion of information available in the digital media era, increased political news coverage and commentary has brought growing apprehension over how much of today’s news can be trusted and believed. 24-hour cable news channels are among the media most often subject to this criticism. At the same time, the media operates under First Amendment freedom of press protection, a constitutional guarantee granted with the understanding that democracy can only succeed when its citizens are well informed. In the great experiment of our republic, a freely functioning news media fills this critical role, but only to the extent that it can be trusted to portray the truth. This research questioned the media’s ability to inform the public due to the proliferation of political news and commentary. Utilizing social judgment theory, this study offered two hypotheses: that news consumers will find more credibility in political news when presented by media outlets they favor due to political preferences, and that they will also find more credibility in non-political news when presented by media they favor due to political preferences. The study examined if there is a bleed over effect on the credibility of non-political news due to political news coverage. An experiment was conducted in which two politically diverse populations, Republicans and Democrats, where asked to rate the credibility of six stories. Three of the stories were political, three non-political. While the content of those stories remained constant for all study participants, the media brands associated with the stories alternated between Fox News and CNN to determine if the media source alone influences perceptions of credibility. Results from members of both political parties provided support for each hypothesis. Republicans assigned greater credibility to both political and non-political news stories when presented by their network of preference, Fox News. By comparison, Democrats demonstrated greater trust when those same stories where branded by their preferred network, CNN.

In the face of the global trend of administrative reform, to cope with changing times and enhance the competitiveness, Taiwan restructures the administrative division into five Metropolitan Cities. To improve the administrative efficiency of the Government and responding to people's need, Central and local government implement reconstruction, rebuilding the organizational culture and the core values. After the Reform, among the five new Metropolitan Cities, Kaohsiung City has the biggest transformation in size of the city and organizational changes, also in geography, culture, industry, transportation, community, and more. It becomes more challenging for the local government to face the new problems. The Household Registration Office is the front-line of customer services and their core value is ¡§to better serve people¡¨. During the general public¡¦s visit to the Household Registration Office, people can feel the changes of better customer services and efficiency. This will change public¡¦s view of the government operation. Therefore, the Kaohsiung Household Registration Office has to set a very clear organizational mission and vision. Furthermore, with the limited resources, managers must worry about how to build the public value and vision, which will be recognized and implemented by the members of the Office. At the same time, these values and vision should be also recognized by the general public. The purpose of this study is to explore public value differences among different parties within the Kaohsiung Household Registration Office. Through Public Affairs Management and literature analysis, I outline the characteristics of regional governance in Kaohsiung City. With in-depth interview of the policy-setting officials of the Kaohsiung Household Registration Office, I also focus on the public values of the Household Registration Office. This study corresponds to four structure (Organization internal process, and financial, and customer, and learning and growth) of Balanced Score Card, and to establish a goal to evaluate the organizational performance. The Social Judgment Theory questionnaires are also based on this. Test target are the entry-level Household Registration Officers of previous known as Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County. At the same time, I asked the general public to answer the same Balanced Score Card questionnaires. This will help the manager to understand the variation of public value differences among different parties. This will also help the managers to solve the problem in-time, change the content of public value and to achieve the goal set by the Local Government. This result of the study, for the Household Registration Office, there are no big discrepancy before and after the Reform. The main reason is that Household Registration Office utilizes the nationwide Standardized Computer Operation System. And the regulation is base on Household Registration Act. Both Computer System and regulation are put in place by the Central Government. However, from this study, after the merger of city and County, I did find that the Kaohsiung Household Registration Office need to do an overall adjustment in the allocation of financial resources and staffing, local application of the separate regulations and organizational cultural.

In a plural democratic society, the macro phenomena and policies are formed by individual cognition and choices. Thus the field of decision-making and judgment analysis based on individual cognitions has become the major analytical method in the public affairs management. The citizenship view of the republicanism requires citizens to reach consensus. The group decision-making method is so helpful for reaching consensus and overcoming the limits of individual cognition that it¡¦s necessary in forming public policies. By reviewing various group decision-making methods, the study found that there are at least Program Planning Method (PPM; Delbecq & Van de Ven, 1971), Policy Delphi (Turoff, 1970), Interactive Management(IM; Warfield & C&#x00E1;rdenas, 1994), and Social Judgment Theory(SJT; Hammond, 1965, 1996; Hammond et al., 1975, 1977, 1980) can be used to reach consensus in a plural society. Among them, the IM results have been proven effective for solving complicated problems and compliant with citizen participation spirit of a plural society ( Wang Min-shen & Chang Ning, 2002; Warfield & C&#x00E1;rdenas, 1994) . However, the accuracy of IM results can not be proven by the method and the weight between factors can not be identified, either. SJT can be used to analyze the assumption between decision criteria of different hierarchies and obtain the weights between different factors out of the same result so that SJT can examine the annotated graphics of IM. Besides, since SJT emphasizes cognitive feedback, it can facilitate reaching consensus by comparing various stakeholders¡¦ judgment principles dissolving the cognitive conflicts. Thus the study applied theoretical SJT to examine the validity of IM results. I discussed SJT procedure in a collective, hierarchic and large-scaled way. The study also adopted classic experimental design to compare the cognitive changes of participants before and after the SJT procedure to explore the performance of SJT results of group decision-making in public affairs cases in terms of consistency, individual learning effect and satisfaction. The results of this study show that SJT procedure can be operated in a large-scaled way while consensus with high satisfaction will be reached. In addition, the theoretical validity of IM results on psychological cognition provides the reason why participants accepted the results. Talking about the changes of the participants¡¦ cognition through SJT procedure, the participants using SJT have not improved their consistency, while the learning effect changes significantly towards group conclusion. In the subjective evaluations such as satisfaction, learning effect and caring degree, the participants who use SJT are better than those who don¡¦t, but not better than those who use IM procedure. In terms of policy significance, though the covert consistency between the participants who use SJT has not been improved, their overt satisfaction towards the group conclusion is better than those who don¡¦t. It shows that the conflict between participants has not disappeared yet, while they accept the consensus. Therefore, the way to wipe away the conflicts in a plural society is not to build up a single exclusive value, but to design a procedure allowing the stakeholders accept consensus.

The Community Policing should not take only the policing viewpoint into consideration, but be carried out by taking the community as the core network functioning conformity. Strategic formulation of Community Policing cannot be self-lauded as police professionalism, but be understood in the context of solving policing problems connected with other topics that depend on widespread opinion consultation, research questionnaires and public verification. Community Policing is precisely what police and people share in mutual governance; it is a witnessing of public affairs participation that carries out democracy at the grassroots level. However, its foundation is established on effective communication, mutual understanding and confidence between the police and citizens. It also depends on environmental social capital to develop gradually. Therefore, it is the key to learn how to respect and yet contain different societies and individuals with cognition of their roles in such societies. Accordingly, we can try to seek collective mutual recognition. This research puts emphasis on the operation pattern of the ¡§partnership spirit¡¨ and the ¡§network governance¡¨ from the ¡§acts as circumstances permit¡¨ characteristic of Community Policing. In addition, it discusses the problem of lack of people-participation in Community Policing in the Penghu area by literature discussion (including area background material analysis), expert interview, interactive management (IM), questionnaire survey of society judgment theory (SJT), cross-territory analysis and so on. Through question analysis and interactive conference, 12 items of the first plan and enhancement drawings are obtained. It belongs to the fourth level according to the IM success rank, i.e. it can discover a suitable plan that promotes the participation of the populace, and thus can be recommended to the policing governance and relevant administration agencies. This research takes Penghu as the background and the IM as the interface. The community populace and the performers of Community Policing network (including government institution, private enterprise and Non-governmental organizations) are the main participants. Then, the collective consensus containing multi-dimensional individual cognition was delivered. Furthermore, the endorsement of the local policing decision-making group was investigated through the V-C-S strategic triangle analysis and the SJT questionnaire. Overall, the twelve plans of top priority can be categorized into three essential strategies: ¡§strengthen the policing management to respond to the populace¡¨, ¡§enhance community empowerment to form a policing network¡¨ and ¡§specialization community policing¡¨, separately presenting the viewpoint of three main participants: the experts, the populace, and the basic unit police. Moreover, ¡§specialization of Community Policing¡¨ was considered to be the top priority. However, taking the above essential strategies as the judgment cues to perform the SJT questionnaire to the local policing decision-making group demonstrates that the policing decision-making commanding officer most take seriously the notion of ¡§strengthen the policing management to respond to the populace¡¨, but the ground-roots staff most take seriously the ¡§enhance community empowerment to form policing network¡¨ strategy. Through the investigation, the IM model is proven to be effective in enhancing public participation in Community Policing affairs and reaching a consensus; through SJT questionnaires, the local policing decision-making group gave high approval to the key strategies from interactive deliberation. The result of the survey also shows that people in different positions could have various considerations and judgments. Thus, this research suggests that enforcement authorities can actualize their policies by adopting IM and reach consensus through public participation and mutual understanding.

It has been postulated that occupational therapists when choosing an appropriate intervention method, use theoretical and practical knowledge (factors), based upon identifying client's goals to guide their clinical reasoning. The overall aim of this study was to identify factors and their relative contributions to the decisions occupational therapists make in the management of upper limb (UL) hypertonicity of children and adolescents with cerebral palsy (CP). Studies about general factors which influence occupational therapists' decision making have been addressed widely in the literature. However, studying influential factors in specific areas such as in the management of UL hypertonicity of clients with CP is limited. The information obtained from studies of decision making with other client groups can not readily be generalised as it has been demonstrated that specific task characteristics induce different types of cognitive thinking. For example, working with clients with orthopaedic problems may induce logical thinking, while practicing with clients with neurological problems promotes intuitive thinking. The management of UL hypertonicity of clients with CP was chosen as the focus of this study for two main reasons. First, the incidence of CP is high, manifesting in between 1.4 and 2.4 of 1000 live births. Second, people with CP are one of the major client groups referred to occupational therapy (OT) clinics as outpatients. The literature reviewed highlighted a lack of evidence about what therapists attend to when making decisions about the management of UL hypertonicity for clients with CP. To identify and evaluate these factors, the current research employed Social Judgment Theory (SJT). This methodology was selected because it had the capacity to access intuitive thought or tacit knowledge that is very difficult for experienced therapists to explain. Furthermore, SJT is most relevant in situations where there is no optimal decision. The current study proceeded in five phases. Phases One to Three were conducted to identify the most relevant factors to be used in the case vignettes necessary for the application of SJT. This process involved a review of the literature, consultation with clinical experts and then involved twelve experienced therapists in a process of identifying, refining, and ranking the relevant factors in order of priority. As a result of the processes in Phases One to Three 37 factors and their ranked importance were identified. The identified factors were reduced from 37 to 12 on the basis of ranking, cluster analysis and consultation with experts and appropriate scales identified for their measurement. These factors formed the basis of Phase Four of this study. In Phase Four 10 sample case vignettes as well as an administration manual were developed and four therapists were asked to make decisions for these cases. On the basis of therapists' comments, some changes were made in case vignettes and administration manual. Finally, 110 case vignettes were generated randomly (20 were repeated to examine consistency) for Phase Five of the study. In Phase Five, eighteen occupational therapists (16 females and 2 males), mean age of 36.7 years (SD = 7.6 years) who had worked with people with CP for a mean of 10.4 years (SD = 6.0 years) made decisions for the generated case vignettes. The findings of Phase Five revealed that therapists used three factors mainly in their decisions including severity of spasticity, wrist and finger posture, and client and family background. They had poor insight into their decision making (r = 0.36) and demonstrated only moderate consistency (r = 0.46). When therapists were divided into two groups based on their level of performance in respect to therapists' consistency and their ability to discriminate between cases, both groups used severity of spasticity and wrist and finger posture in their decision making. However, the higher performing group used limitation in passive range of movement and previous intervention in their decision making, and the low performing group used client and family background.

Understanding organizational behavior (OB) has profoundly influenced organizational performance and how people behave in organizations. Researchers have suggested various micro and macro organizational behaviors to be the impetus for high-performing organizations. Through a policy capturing approach this study builds on these findings by specifically examining the perceptions of micro and macro organizational behaviors in an organizational setting. The participants (n =181) completed a Micro and Macro Organizational Behavior Perceptions Questionnaire. Results showed perception differences exist between subordinates and supervisors. Additionally, participants perceived job satisfaction to be the most important micro organizational behavior, whereas organizational design was perceived to be the most important macro organizational behavior. However when comparing hierarchal positions in the organization, supervisors weighted leadership as the most important and subordinates weighted job satisfaction as the most important organizational behavior. While these findings only scratch the surface as to how organizational behavior is perceived, the implications challenge leaders to close the OB perception gap. Correspondingly, organizational behavior thinking may result in improving individual and organizational performance.

Decision making study has been the multi-disciplinary research involving operations researchers, management scientists, statisticians, mathematical psychologists and economists as well as others. This study aims to investigate the theory and methodology of decision making research and apply them to different contexts in real cases. The study has reviewed the literature of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach, Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) movement, Social Judgment Theory (SJT), and Adaptive Toolbox (AT) program. On the basis of these literatures, two methods, Evidence-based Trade-Off (EBTO) and Judgment Analysis with Heuristic Modelling (JA-HM), have been proposed and developed to accomplish decision making problems under different conditions. In the EBTO method, we propose a novel framework to aid people s decision making under uncertainty and imprecise goal. Under the framework, the imprecise goal is objectively modelled through an analytical structure, and is independent of the task requirement; the task requirement is specified by the trade-off strategy among criteria of the analytical structure through an importance weighting process, and is subject to the requirement change of a particular decision making task; the evidence available, that could contribute to the evaluation of general performance of the decision alternatives, are formulated with belief structures which are capable of capturing various format of uncertainties that arise from the absence of data, incomplete information and subjective judgments. The EBTO method was further applied in a case study of Soldier system decision making. The application has demonstrated that EBTO, as a tool, is able to provide a holistic analysis regarding the requirements of Soldier missions, the physical conditions of Soldiers, and the capability of their equipment and weapon systems, which is critical in domain. By drawing the cross-disciplinary literature from NDM and AT, the JA-HM extended the traditional Judgment Analysis (JA) method, through a number of novel methodological procedures, to account for the unique features of decision making tasks under extreme time pressure and dynamic shifting situations. These novel methodological procedures include, the notion of decision point to deconstruct the dynamic shifting situations in a way that decision problem could be identified and formulated; the classification of routine and non-routine problems, and associated data alignment process to enable meaningful decision data analysis across different decision makers (DMs); the notion of composite cue to account for the DMs iterative process of information perception and comprehension in dynamic task environment; the application of computational models of heuristics to account for the time constraints and process dynamics of DMs decision making process; and the application of cross-validation process to enable the methodological principle of competitive testing of decision models. The JA-HM was further applied in a case study of fire emergency decision making. The application has been the first behavioural test of the validity of the computational models of heuristics, in predicting the DMs decision making during fire emergency response. It has also been the first behavioural test of the validity of the non-compensatory heuristics in predicting the DMs decisions on ranking task. The findings identified extend the literature of AT and NDM, and have implications for the fire emergency decision making.

¡§Individual¡¨is the basic analytic unit in a pluralistic society. Especially, phenomenon of public affairs is essence of the problem and is based on individual cognition, hidden in group behavior. The individual cognition forms group judgment and interpersonal influence in the group. This interpersonal influence process may simplify as the power relations between group members, the communication network and the interaction form in the group, and the opinion relations within the group (French, 1956). The conflict is the essential situation of interpersonal influence and also is one kind of relational form and phenomenon for group judgment. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the interpersonal influence and conduct interpersonal mutual cooperation in the public affairs area. The group decision-making (or judgment) can be explored based on observable individual preference and group decision-making. That can infer unobservable interpersonal influence. This interpersonal influence process transforms the individual judgment into the group decision-making. There are two stages in interpersonal influence process, including opinion formation for individual members, and compromise among group members. Namely, the individual might revise his or her preference voluntarily. The group integrates the revised members¡¦ judgments into group decision-making. That is, the group process resembles the process which individual integrates multi-cues like information integration theory (IIT) (Friedkin, 2005; Sniezek et al., 1989). The average cognitive algebra pattern in IIT may measure the interpersonal influence effectively. The theories of group decision-making are still insufficient. For example, social power theory and social comparison theory explain the concept of choice shift, but not positivism. Social decision scheme (SDS) employs decision scheme to predict the group decision-making, but it is insufficient for explaining the group decision-making process. Although social dilemma explores both individual level and group level, it cannot provide the weighting method. Cognitive conflict paradigm (CCP) discusses judgment policy shift, but preference shift is still not mentioned. Although CCP focuses on interpersonal learning, it does not propose how to weight interpersonal influence. The functional measurement theory in IIT may supplement insufficiencies in these theories.. The research utilizes the concept and the method of IIT, which prodivides experimental validity for explaining the complex interpersonal influence process by using social weight. This research uses budget allocation as discussion cases. Interpersonal conflicts are divided by the cognitive conflict and the interest conflict. By using social judgment theory (SJT), this research can analyze cognitive difference in the case of cognitive conflict. Besides, using quasi-experimental procedure in IIT, the findings of this research include: 1. In the group process, group members¡¦ judgments are integrated to group decision-making based on unequal-weight rule mostly. Members¡¦ social weights are different and depend on the level of members¡¦ preferences. 2. The members in different groups have the same preferences initially. Although social weights of these members are not significant difference in statistic, these members still appear the differences between individuals. 3. In cognitive conflict case, the group consensus is not consistently accompanied by cognitive consensus. 4. The group influence results from normative social influence, rather than from informational social influence. 5. It shows that there is negative correlation between social weight and normative effect. Besides, social weight and comprise degree also show negative.correlation 6. The cognitive feedback and the outcome feedback don¡¦t affect decision-making result. 7. The relationship between social weight and the degree of satisfaction is not supported. The social weight and the fairness of decision-making process show significant correlation 8. The subjects¡¦ decision-making performances in the study don¡¦t show significant difference