Research on North American and European students have reported moderate to severe levels of stress in more than 90% of students, which has been linked to negative health outcomes. However, there is a paucity of data on the stress of Caribbean students. Higher education in the Caribbean has undergone a transformation with wider access and higher enrollment; thus, it is important that the effects and characteristics of this transformation are researched and documented. Accordingly, the purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the experience of students in 2 year community colleges in the Caribbean. Using the theoretical foundation of Lazarus and Folkman's (1989) appraisal theory of stress, the research questions focused on the predictors of stress, socioeconomic differences in the levels of stress, and coping styles. The undergraduate stress questionnaire, the perceived stress scale, and the brief cope questionnaire assessed 150 students recruited through response to flyers posted on campuses. Data were analyzed using generalized linear model, ANOVA and MANOVA. Results indicated student status and marital status significantly predicted the stress level of students, but significant socioeconomic status differences in stress and coping styles did not. The research contributes to positive social change by helping to inform educators, administrators, and parents on the particular stressors students face, thus contributing to a better understanding of the phenomena of stress and coping among Caribbean students. It also broadens the body of research, extending it to populations outside of the North American and European contexts and providing valuable data for subsequent research.

Trio is a newly developed group-administered instrument designed to measure visual ability for application in cognitive styles research. This study investigated the validity of Trio as seen in its convergence or divergence with two established tests, one conceptually related and one conceptually unrelated. The correlation of Trio scores with scores on these other two tests was examined using a sample of undergraduate students. The analysis of the relationship between scores on Trio and on the conceptually related Learning Figures Test failed to provide evidence that these two tests are measuring the same construct. At the same time, Trio's correlation with the unrelated ACT English section was shown to be fairly low. This second finding supports the conclusion that Trio scores are not severely confounded by verbal ability level.

Learning style refers to the cognitive, physiological, emotional, environmental, sociological, and perceptual manner in which people learn. In order to provide students with an optimal learning environment, it is necessary to match instruction with students' learning style. To do this, student learning style must be assessed by a learning style instrument. Of the learning style instruments that are currently available, most do not have much evidence of reliability and validity. Additionally, evidence that does exist is weak. Therefore, more psychometric data are needed regarding these instruments. This study provided psychometric evidence for six popular learning styles instruments, including the Learning Style Inventory, the Productivity Environmental Preferences Survey, the Learning Styles Profile, the Grasha-Riechmann's Student Learning Style Scale, the Edmonds Learning Style Identification Exercise, and the Group Embedded Figures Test. Test-retest reliability was found to be good for the Group Embedded Figures Test and moderate for all other instruments. Internal structure validity of the instruments was good, indicating that the instruments do measure unique learning style constructs. However, convergent and discriminant validity evidence indicates that the instruments either do not measure the same constructs, or measure the learning style constructs in different ways.

This dissertation tackles the problem of entanglement in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The key insight is that disentanglement in GANs can be improved by differentiating between the content, and the operations performed on that content. For example, the identity of a generated face can be thought of as the content, while the lighting conditions can be thought of as the operations. We examine disentanglement in several kinds of deep networks. We examine image-to-image translation GANs, unconditional GANs, and sketch extraction networks. The task in image-to-image translation GANs is to translate images from one domain to another. It is immediately clear that disentanglement is necessary in this case. The network must maintain the core contents of the image while changing the stylistic appearance to match the target domain. We propose latent filter scaling to achieve multimodality and disentanglement. Previous methods require complicated network architectures to enforce that disentanglement. Our approach, on the other hand, maintains the traditional GAN loss with a minor change in architecture. Unlike image-to-image GANs, unconditional GANs are generally entangled. Unconditional GANs offer one method of changing the generated output which is changing the input noise code. Therefore, it is very difficult to resample only some parts of the generated images. We propose structured noise injection to achieve disentanglement in unconditional GANs. We propose using two input codes: one to specify spatially-variable details, and one to specify spatially-invariable details. In addition to the ability to change content and style independently, it also allows users to change the content only at certain locations. Combining our previous findings, we improve the performance of sketch-to-image translation networks. A crucial problem is how to correct input sketches before feeding them to the generator. By extracting sketches in an unsupervised way only from the spatially-variable branch of the image, we are able to produce sketches that show the content in many different styles. Those sketches can serve as a dataset to train a sketch-to-image translation GAN.

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Purpose – This study provides a theoretical framework that explores the personality traits that influence style adoption among the youth in South Africa. Five personality traits form part of the framework, namely fashion consciousness, the need for uniqueness, susceptibility to interpersonal influence, individualism/collectivism, and masculinity/femininity. Methodology – A quantitative approach was undertaken and the data were collected by means of self-administered questionnaires among 400 university students. Established multi-item scales were adapted for the study, and a pilot test was used to confirm the validity of the multi-item scales and the correctness of the data-gathering procedure. Following the data gathering and coding, validity and reliability tests were carried out on the entire sample. A regression analysis was used to test the relationships between the constructs. Findings – The findings suggest that the dominant factors influencing style adoption are susceptibility to interpersonal influence and masculinity/femininity. Fashion consciousness, the need for uniqueness, individualism/collectivism and masculinity/femininity, influence the knowledge acquired of style. One’s attitude towards style is influenced by the need for uniqueness and masculinity/femininity. Research Limitations - The results of this study may not be appropriate for generalizing across the majority of youth culture in South Africa, and in a global context. However, understanding one segment of the youth may be beneficial to practitioners in South Africa, and may encourage exploration into other youth segments through continuous resampling and reassessment of difference ages and gender populations. Implications - By examining the youth and their sense of style, the study facilitates the possibility of consumer-behaviour research that not only includes style in a broad sense, but also explores post-modern and classic style expressions, thus providing a better understanding of modern youth culture in a local context, and the influence of their personality traits on style adoption.

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