Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-96). / In the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, and in particular in South Africa and Botswana, the Ombudsman institution was only established in 1995 and 1997 respectively. The institution is still at an infant stage and needs to be nurtured and protected. The study seeks to demonstrate and evaluate the extent to which this institution has been effective in delivering justice in the public service. The comparative evaluation of the institution in the two countries seeks to find out the impact of the institution in society and the challenges that the institution encounters and hence inf1uence strategic interventions for improved performance.

Among men living in the United States, prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death, and, excluding skin cancers, it is the cancer diagnosed most frequently. While incidence and mortality rates have been declining, the American Cancer Society estimated that there were 220,800 men diagnosed with prostate cancer and more than 27,500 prostate cancer deaths in 2015. Various patient-level and community-level factors have been shown to influence the differential patterns of diagnosis, care, and outcomes for men with prostate cancer. Detailed information regarding the utilization of health services by prostate cancer patients, particularly those with higher propensity for health services use, could be used to inform efforts intended to improve the coordination and delivery of care to work towards the elimination of disparities. The purpose of the study is to facilitate a better understanding of the determinants of health services utilization by older males with prostate cancer in the United States by examining the relative influence and interaction effects of factors characterizing individual patients and their county of residence. Andersen's behavioral model of health services utilization is used as a framework to guide this study. A cross-sectional design is used to analyze administrative claims data from the 2008 Medicare Provider Analysis Review (MEDPAR) file (n=5,754). County-level data from Area Health Resources File (ARHF) are merged to include the community and contextual characteristics. American Hospital Association (AHA) annual survey data are also used to examine the importance of hospital attributes in a subset analysis (n=555). A two-stage approach is used for analyzing the data. First, several social and demographic variables are included in automatic interaction detector (AID) analysis to identify relatively homogenous subgroups of patients with similar service utilization patterns for emergency room visits and hospital length of stay. Second, regression analysis is performed in the full dataset including all patients, and in each subgroup to determine the amount of variance explained by predictor variables categorized as predisposing, enabling, and need-for-care factors. Hierarchical logistic regression is performed to analyze the variability in emergency room use, and hierarchical multiple regression is performed to analyze the variability in hospital length of stay. The results show that the need-for-care factors are dominant predictors of service use. However, the relative importance of the predictor variables varies by subgroups of prostate cancer patients identified in the initial AID analysis. The findings lend some support of the use of an integrated approach to examine the personal and social determinants of health services utilization by prostate cancer patients enrolled in the U.S. Medicare program. The theoretical framework and analytic approach employed in this study make it possible to obtain an in-depth understanding of the influential factors associated with emergency room use and length of stay for all-cause hospitalizations, which can be used to inform future research and efforts aimed at developing targeted interventions to improve the coordinated care and to reduce health disparities among Medicare beneficiaries with prostate cancer.

Social media tools, as the advanced technology, have penetrated into nonprofit management field prevalently. Nonprofit organizations adopt social media tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest for attracting potential supporters, raising advocacy, and running fundraising campaigns. Social media tools break the limitation of time and space through the Internet. They change the way of how people communicate and interact with each other. The philanthropy industry hopes that social media tools could bring them the new opportunities to engage with their stakeholders, such as donors, volunteers, and customers. However, since this technology is still developing, the studies of using social media in nonprofit field are still at the infant stage. Many nonprofit practitioners are confused and questioning the effectiveness of adopting social media for civic engagement. The dissertation aims to examine how to adopt social media advantageously for helping nonprofit organizations to engage with their stakeholders. Therefore, this study uses a mix of methodology to examine how social media tools could help nonprofit organizations to gain a stronger relationship with their stakeholders. Also, the study explores in more details about the content that nonprofit organizations have sent on their social media platforms. To develop the theoretical framework, this study used social capital and social exchange theory as the guidance. To observe and examine the strategy of using social media in nonprofit organizations, the study is inspired and adopts the social media typology from Lovejoy and Saxton's (2012) research and the communication models from Lewis, Hamel, and Richardson's work (2001). The study proposed that to gain a stronger relationship with the stakeholders, nonprofit organizations should apply a well-designed comprehensive strategy with multiple goals on their social media platforms. This strategy should consider more about the stakeholders' desires and needs and allows the organizations to communicate with the stakeholders effectively. Also, the study also argues that the content that an organization presents on its social media would impact on the stakeholders' interaction greatly. The study targeted on the art/culture/humanities nonprofit organizations in the United States (n = 195). Data was collected directly from the targeted organization's social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter). The regression analysis was conducted to investigate what strategy that nonprofit organization used could gain a high engagement from their stakeholders. A content analysis was also conducted to explore what posts and tweets could influence how stakeholders react. The results indicate that most nonprofit organizations realize the importance of adopting social media, but a few of them still have not embraced the benefits of the technology essentially. Comparing with the activities on Twitter, both nonprofit organizations and their stakeholders were more active on Facebook. On social media, the primary goal for most nonprofit organizations was to disseminate the information. But sending out the information can be an effective strategy. If a nonprofit organization could combine their values/missions/programs with the hot spot on social media, it can promote the stakeholders' engagement greatly. Building a dialogic content on the organization's social media is still overlooked. But no evidence in this study shown that initiating a dialog would receive a high engagement from the stakeholders. The results of this study also show that a nonprofit organization delivered the posts or tweets more frequently does not necessarily mean it would receive a higher interactivity from its stakeholders. The organization's size (the annual budget) does not influence how nonprofit organizations used their social media tools to interact with their online stakeholders. Overall, the study explored how art/culture/humanities nonprofit organizations used their Facebook and Twitter to interact with their online stakeholders. The study helps both the researchers and the practitioners to understand the strategies of using social media tools in nonprofit organizations. It also reveals several practical examples to illustrate what kind of social media content could attract or discourage the online stakeholders' engagement. The study is also a good benchmark report for nonprofit practitioners to evaluate their social media usage.

This dissertation argues that there are three basic types of health care systems used in industrial nations: free market (private insurance and provision), universal (public insurance and private provision), and socialized (public insurance and provision). It examines the role of market forces (supply and demand) within the health care systems and their effects on health outcomes by constructing an integrative model of health care markets and policies that is lacking within the scientific and academic literature. The results show that, free market systems have decreased access to care, good quality of care, and are economically inefficient resulting in 2.7 years of life expectancy lost and wasted expenditures (expenditures that do not increase life expectancy) of $3474 per capita ($1.12 trillion per year in the U.S.). Socialized systems are the most economically efficient systems but have decreased access to care compared to universal systems, increased access to care compared to free market systems and have the lowest quality of care of all three systems resulting in 3 months of life expectancy lost per capita and a saving of $335 per capita. Universal systems perform better than either of the other 2 systems based on quality and access to care. The models show that health insurance is a Giffen Good; a good that defies the law of demand. This study is the first fully demonstrated case of a Giffen good. This investigation shows how the theoretically informed integrative model behaves as predicted and influences health outcomes contingent upon the system type. To test and substantiate this integrative model, regression analysis, Time-Series-Cross-Section analysis, and structural equation modeling were performed using longitudinal data provided and standardized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The results demonstrate that universal health care systems are superior to the other two systems.

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Abstract   The purpose of this study is to examine if the Swedish policy of foreign affairs has been changed due to the Swedish enter as members in the European Union. The research method used for this essay has been a comparative case study between the Swedish and Norwegian declared policy of foreign affairs and it strives to answer the research question, which is if the Swedish declared policy of foreign affairs has been changed in character due to the Europeanization. The theoretical framework of this study consists of Europeanization as a comprehensive theoretical perspective. I order to answer the research question a classification schedule has been elaborated to examine the objectives of the Swedish and Norwegian declared policy of foreign affairs. The analytical method of this part has been a quantitative and qualitative approach. The conclusion of the study points out that the character of the declared policy of foreign affairs has been changed over time in both Sweden and Norway which makes it difficult to use Europeanization as key explanation to this change in character.                                                                                                                                    Keywords: Policy of foreign affairs, Objectives of foreign affairs, European Union, Europeanization   Nyckelord: Utrikespolitik, Utrikespolitiska mål, Europeiska Unionen, Europeisering

After almost two semesters as a graduate student at the University of Vermont, I decided that I wanted to do more in my second year of graduate school. It was through conversations with my colleagues that I determined that stepping out of my comfort zone of student affairs and looking into academic affairs would help develop me as not only a student affairs professional but as an educator as well. During the fall semester of 2016, I participated in an independent study where I served as a Teaching Assistant for a university diversity requirement course titled “The Political Economy of Race”. For this course I worked directly with a faculty member in the Department of Economics to cultivate a holistic classroom experience for the students in the course. Throughout the course of the semester, I was able to witness many different dynamics that were helpful to not only the students but to the professionals in the room as well. Upon completing the semester, I determined that I wanted to do more research and explore the benefits of collaborative partnerships between faculty and staff on college campuses; my focus for this research was to be around partnerships between professionals in student affairs and academic affairs. Although there has not been a lot of research around this particular topic in Higher Education, it is beginning to be studied as colleges and universities are expected to produce more valuable experiences for students. Through both research and experiential learning, I have found that there are benefits to collaborative partnerships between academic and student affairs in Higher Education as well as drawbacks to these partnerships. I have also made recommendations for future collaborative projects between faculty and staff as well as recommendations for future research in this area. Overall, there is value in the collaboration of student and academic affairs; however, it is the duty of Higher Education professionals to understand that value and work more collaboratively to ensure that students are served holistically.

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p> </p><p>The purpose of this study is to examine if the Swedish policy of foreign affairs has been changed due to the Swedish enter as members in the European Union. The research method used for this essay has been a comparative case study between the Swedish and Norwegian declared policy of foreign affairs and it strives to answer the research question, which is if the Swedish declared policy of foreign affairs has been changed in character due to the Europeanization. The theoretical framework of this study consists of Europeanization as a comprehensive theoretical perspective. I order to answer the research question a classification schedule has been elaborated to examine the objectives of the Swedish and Norwegian declared policy of foreign affairs. The analytical method of this part has been a quantitative and qualitative approach. The conclusion of the study points out that the character of the declared policy of foreign affairs has been changed over time in both Sweden and Norway which makes it difficult to use Europeanization as key explanation to this change in character.</p><p>                                                                                                                                  </p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Policy of foreign affairs, Objectives of foreign affairs, European Union, Europeanization</p><p> </p><p><strong>Nyckelord</strong>: Utrikespolitik, Utrikespolitiska mål, Europeiska Unionen, Europeisering</p>

This thesis examines records created through diplomatic activities and considers approaches to their archival description, using those created by the Canadian Department of External Affairs in the 1920s as a case study. The objective of the thesis is to explore the history of this record genre with a focus on how archivists can provide users with access to more authentic and meaningful diplomatic records. Chapter One will provide a broad overview history of the diplomatic genre as well as the place of such contextual knowledge about the creation and characteristics of these records. Chapter Two will introduce a key strategy that archives can implement to more effectively relay contextual knowledge to archival users through the function of description. Chapter Three will then introduce a case study, building upon the approach identified in Chapter Two, and based on Canada’s Department of External Affairs in the 1920s.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the experiences graduate students in student affairs administration programs had that inspired them to begin a Masters degree program in student affairs administration as well as what they did as undergraduates to prepare themselves for graduate work. A portion of the study focused on the role mentors played for student affairs administration graduate students as they explored the field.One hundred and one student affairs administration graduate students from four midwestern institutions completed a sixty item on-line survey. It was found the students had experiences as undergraduates which directly related to their graduate assistantship and mentors played an important role in multiple ways as the students' explored of the field of student affairs administration. Recommendations for assisting undergraduates interested in pursuing a student affairs administration were presented. / Department of Educational Leadership