Historically, a great deal of water has been allocated to the agricultural sector in Alberta to support economic development and to contribute to food security. However, demand from other areas has increased in recent years, notably from the environment. Meeting new demands while still satisfying existing users has become a significant challenge. The combination of increased water use efficiency and productivity combined with reallocating water from agriculture to other sectors has emerged globally as a solution to this challenge. Thus, new policies regarding water reallocation need to be developed. Designing policies that are acceptable to the various stakeholders involved poses a considerable challenge. The values held by individuals determine how they will react to new public policies. Hence, to support effective policy making, a better understanding of how the non-irrigator population perceives water reallocation issues is necessary. Using mail-out surveys to collect data from the populations of Lethbridge, Alberta, and the surrounding smaller communities, this research aimed to identify the values regarding water allocation held by domestic, non-irrigator water users, and to determine how these values influence their acceptance of water allocation policies. Findings from the survey reveal how non-irrigators’ values influence their opinion of water transfers from the irrigation sector to the urban and environment sectors, and the conditions under which they should take place. A pro-environment value orientation was most prominent amongst the urban sample, while the rural sample was mainly moderate in their value orientation. The large moderate value cluster within the rural sample represented both pro-economic and pro-environment values depending on the focus of the survey item. Statements that would affect the community (irrigation sector) were met with pro-economic values while statements that involved making a personal sacrifice in order to protect the aquatic environment were strongly supported. Value orientation was found to greatly influence the respondents’ perception of water reallocation policy.

In December, 2002, the oil sands of Alberta, Canada – earlier seen as an obscure, obstacle-ridden scientific project – were for the first time included in the Oil & Gas Journal’s year-end review of worldwide oil reserves. To explain this decision, the editors of this prestigious international petroleum magazine cited the basic neoclassical economic theory of price-driven resource substitution. This thesis contends, however, that the neoclassical theory in fact explains very little of how it became possible to profitably extract petroleum from Alberta’s bitumen-saturated sands. Merging insights from resources geography on the politics of nature-based production with scholarship on calculation and classification in Science and Technology Studies, this thesis fleshes in much-needed detail and dimension to the neoclassical account by emphasizing the role of key actors and decision-makers, many within the state but also within the private sector, who have actively negotiated supply costs and pursued technological strategies for the oil sands. In doing so, it argues that market prices and supply costs are not independent objects, but are underpinned by a malleable, contingent, and profoundly political process. As evidence, this thesis draws on national and international petroleum statistics, industry publications and public relations campaigns, as well as over 80 years of archived and more contemporary government documents, in order to show that substitution between two materially different resources is rarely an independently propelled or inevitable response.

Subjects' views and conceptions of social intelligence were investigated by having 40 adults, male inmates in an Alberta correctional centre rate the importance of 20 behavioral characteristics representing the domain of social intelligence. Social intelligence was defined as a person's ability to understand others and to act wisely in social situations. The 20 characteristics, derived from an earlier study by Ford and Miura (1983), were rated for each of three common social contexts by having subjects think of the kind of person who would be a close personal friend, a teacher, or a person in a conflict. The following research questions were addressed in the study: a) How do adult, male inmates in an Alberta correctional centre view the construct of social intelligence? b) Do subjects' ratings of the 20 characteristics that describe social intelligence form factors that resemble the clusters identified by subjects rating the same 20 characteristics in a study by Ford and Miura (1983)? c) How do subjects' ratings of social intelligence differ among the three social contexts investigated? d) Is there a common core of social intelligence characteristics that subjects rate as important across all three social contexts? Descriptive statistics revealed that subjects generally rated the 20 characteristics as quite high in importance in all three social contexts. However, the characteristics were rated highest in importance in the context "A teacher", followed by "A close personal friend" and "A person in conflict". Factor analyses revealed that subjects' ratings in the present study shared some similarities in structure with the clusters or categories of characteristics identified by subjects in the earlier study by Ford and Miura (1983). Analyses of variance revealed several significant differences when sujects' ratings of importance of the 20 characteristics and four categories of social intelligence were compared across contexts. In the present study, a common core of four characteristics of social intelligence were ranked highly in importance across all three social contexts. Findings from the present study provide support for the existence of the categories "Prosocial skills" and "Social-instrumental skills" as identified in the study by Ford and Miura (1983). The importance of studying the construct of social intelligence in particular social contexts and particular populations was also demonstrated. Finally, the implications of the findings of the present study are discussed in relation to the planning and delivery of inmate education programs as well as the continuing study of the construct of social intelligence. / xii, 82 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.

This thesis contributes to the knowledge of museology, anthropology and Native American studies. It is an analysis of the discourse that surrounded The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada's First Peoples, an exhibition prepared by the Glenbow in Calgary as the 'flagship' of the Olympic Arts Festival in 1988. After the Lubicon Indians of Northern Alberta called for a boycott of The Spirit Sings, in attempt to draw critical attention to their long outstanding lands claim, a large and heated debate ensued involving several disciplines, particularly anthropology and museology. Much of this debate took place in the print media, therefore a large body of material remains to be reviewed and studied. The intent of this thesis is to illustrate that the issue of museological representation of First Nations was one of the most central themes discussed in the discourse, but to argue that the major players dealt with this issue on only the most concrete level and therefore largely neglected to recognize that the issue of First Nation's representation was not just a concern over museum interpretation but more importantly an issue of the contested authenticity of national and cultural claims. / vi, 335 p. ; 29 cm.

Introduction The clinical community in Western society has long practised medicine as organized by "two dominant principles: 1) the principle of essentialism which states that there is a fixed "natural" border between disease and health, and 2) the principle of specific treatment which states that having revealed a disease, the doctor can, at least in principle, find the one, correct treatment. These principles have served as the legitimization of the traditional, hierarchical organization of health-care" (Jensen, 1987:19). A main feature of medical practices based on these principles has been to address specific kinds of problems impeding or decaying health. This research is centrally concerned with essentialism and the institutional fixation of problems as two important nodal points of Canada's biomedical value and belief system. More specifically, I hope to show in an organized way how these principles shape staff knowledge of client and culture in a community health centre (CHC) in Lethbridge, Alberta. My analysis is based on four guiding points: 1) that in our polyethnic society health care institutions are massively challenged with actual and perceived cultural diversity and cross cultural barriers to which their staff feel increasingly obliged to respond with their services; 2) while the client cultural diversity is "real", institutional responses depend primarily on how that diversity is imagined by staff -often as a threat to a health institution's sociocultural world; 3) that problem-specific, medicalized thinking is central in this community health centre, even though its mandate is health promotion and this problem orientation often combines with medical essentialism to reduce "culturally different" to a set of client labels, some of which are problematic; and 4) while a "lifestyle model" and other models for health promotion are at present widely advocated and are to be found centrally in this institution's (CHC) charter, they have led to little institutional accomodation to cultural diversity. In this thesis my aim is to present an ethnographic portrait of a community health centre, where emphasis is given to the distinctive formal and informal "formative processess" (Good 1994) of social construction of certain perceived common core challenges facing the Canadian biomedical community today - challenges concerning cultural difference and its incorporation into health care perception and practice. I am particularly interested in institutions subscribing to a "health promotion model" of health care, a term I have borrowed from Ewles and Simnett (1992). Ewles and Simnett descrive the meaning of "health promotion" as earlier defined by WHO (World Health Organization): this perspective is derived from a conception of "health" as the extent to which an individual or group is able, on the on hand, to realise aspirations and satisfy needs; and, on the other hand, to change or cope with the environment. Health is, therefore seen as a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living; it is a positive concept emphasising social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities (Ewles & Simnett, 1992:20) Health is therefore concerned with "a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity" (Ewles and Simnett, 1992:6), I am interested in determing how threats to this defintion prevail in a community health centre's ideology of preventive care, and how that ideology encodes dimensions of diversity. I, however, want to go much further than this by exploring everyday staff discourse and practice, to understand how client cultural diversity is formed and informed by what staff do and say. How, in short, do individuals based in a health promotion organization socially construct their clients as objects of institutional concern? We need, as Young (1982) suggest, "to examine the social condition of knowledge production" in an institutionalized health care service provision subculture. There are, I believe, also practical reasons for conducting this research. Over the past ten years the Canadian health care system increasingly has had to focus on two potentially contradictory goals: reducing costs, and lessening persistent inequalities in health status among key groups and categories of persons in the Canadian population. Many now argue that one of the most central dimensions of the latter - of perisistent health inequalities in Canada - is ethnocultural. Few would seriously argue, for example, that Canadian First Nation health statistics are anything but appalling. Moreover, radical changes in immigration patterns over the past three decades have greatly increased urban Canadian cultural diversity. Caring "at home" now assumes international dimensions (McAdoo, 1993; Butrin, 1992; Buchignani, 1991; Indra, 1991, 1987; Galanti, 1991; Dobson, 1991; Waxler-Morrison, 1990; Quereshi, 1989). A growing voiced desire to provide more pluralistic health care and health care promotion has become persistently heard throughout the clinical community in Canada (Krepps and Kunimoto, 1994; Masi, 1993). Even so, for many health professionals cultural difference evidently remians either irrelevant or a threat to the established order of things. Applied research on health care institutions undertaken to investigate how better to meet these challenges nevrtheless remains very incomplete and highly concentrated in two broad areas. One of these is structural factors within the institution that limit cross-cultural access (Herzfeld, 1992; Hanson, 1980). Some of these studies have shown the prevalence of a strictly conservative institutional culture that frequently makes frontline agency workers gate-keeprs, who actively (if unconsciously) maintain client-institution stratification (Ervin, 1993; Demain, 1989; Ng, 1987; Murphy, 1987; Foster-Carter, 1987; de Voe 1981). In addition, extensive research has been conducted on disempowered minority groups. This research has examined the frequency, effectiveness and manner with which ethnic and Native groups make use of medical services. Some institutional research on cross-cultral issues shows that under appropriate conditions health professional like nurses have responded effectively to client needs by establishing culturally sensitive hiring and training policies and by restructuring their health care organizations (Terman, 1993; Henderson, 1992; Davis, 1992; Henkle, 1990; Burner, 1990). Though promising, this research remains radically insufficient for learning purposes. In particular, little work has been done on how such institutions come to "think" (Douglas, 1986) about cultural difference, form mandates in response to pressure to better address culturally different populations and work them into the institution's extant sub-cultral ideas and practice (Habarad, 1987; Leininger, 1978), or on how helping instiutions categorize key populations such as "Indians" or "Vietnamese" as being culturally different, or assign to each a suite of institutionally meaningful cultural attributes (as what becomes the institution's working sense of what is, say, "Vietnamese culture"). This is so despite the existence of a long and fruitful ethnographic institutional research tradition, grounded initially in theories of status and role (Frankel, 1988; Taylor, 1970; Parson, 1951), symbolic ineractionism (Goffman, 1967, 1963, 1961), ethnomethodology (Garfinkle, 1975), and organizational subcultures (Douglas, 1992, 1986, 1982; Abegglen & Stalk, 1985; Ohnuki-Tierney, 1984; Teski, 1981; Blumers, 1969). More recent work on anthropological social exchange theory (Barth, 1981), on institutional and societal discipline (Herzfeld, 1992; Foucault, 1984, 1977), on the institution-client interface (Shield, 1988; Schwartzman, 1987, Ashworth, 1977, 1976, 1975), and on framing the client (Hazan, 1994; Denzin, 1992; Howard, 1991; Goffman, 1974). I also hope that this study makes a contribution to the study of health care and diversity in southern Alberta. Small city ethnic relations in Canada have been almost systematically ignored by researchers, and similar research has not been conducted in this part of Alberta. Local diversity is significant: three very large Indian reserves are nearby, and the city itself has a diverse ethnic, linguistic and ethno-religious population. Also, significant province wide restructuring of health care delivery was and is ongoing, offering both the pitfalls and potentials of quick institutional change. Perhaps some of the findings can contribute to making the future system more responsive to diversity than the present one. / 202 p. ; 29 cm.

In the northwestern prairies, the cottonwoods Populus deltoides Batr., P. balsamifera L., P. angustifolia James, and inerspecific hybrids, form the foundation of the riparian forest ecosystem. The present project characterized the phenotype and 391henology of each tree in a mature cottonwood grove (N=391) for the purposes of clone-delineation. In order of their utility, tree sex, general leaf-shape, six leaf dimensions, and phenology of flowering, leaf-flushing, senescence,and leaf-abscission were utilized. The population's 391 trunks represented only 115 individuals, 67 of which were clones which ranged from 2 to 58 trunks each. Thus, 88% of all trunks belonged to clones which ranged from 2 to 58 trunks each. Thus, 88% of all trunks belonged to clones, and this high clonal content reflects the senior age of the population. Clone structure explained the population's apparent spatial-clumping, female-skewed sex ratio, differential spatial distributions of the sexes and species, and complexity in trunk-size classes. Trends suggest that P. balsamifera and P. angustifolia are more strongly clonal than P. deltoides, partially explaining their differences in environmental preferences. The observed extent of asexual regeneration has implications for riparian resource management and analyses of cottonwood reproductive ecology. / xv, 201 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how students in Grade Five and Six generate explanation for scientific phenomena and how they evaluate the quality of these explanations. In part, this was done by analyzing the in-class explanations that the students gave in response to questions stemming from two topics in the 1996 Alberta program of studies for Grade Five Science. In addition, the students shared their own perceptions of the sources of their questions and ideas and the methods by which they evaluated them. Analysis of in-class discussions and activities occurred on an ongoing basis between January and June 1998. In addition, five students who vary in their ability to generate and evaluate scientific ideas were selected for more in-depth interviewing outside of class time. These students were interviewed once during each of the main units of study. Their interviews focused on the manner in which their thoughts and ideas had progressed during previous class discusiions and activities, how they evaluated these ideas, the manner in which they were able to generate new ideas, and their continued evaluation of these ideas. This involved reflection stimulate by requests to summarize their findings as well as on-the-spot reflection as the students continued to evaluate and develop their ideas. Attention was paid to possible effects that the metacognitive activity encouraged during class discussions and during the interviews may have had on methods that the students used to construct meaning. Each of the students who participated in individual interviews pertaining to specific content areas also participated in a narrative interview that focused on their general interests and habits. The individual interviews and class discussions were fully transcribed, analyzed and compared to generate broad themes which were then able to guide further analysis of student work. / xiii, 539 leaves ; 29 cm.

Administrators often refer to "intuitiveness" in teacher evaluations. What is meant by intuitiveness? What is an "intuitive" teacher? Are the principals' perceptions consistent among themselves and with thte literature? Can they identify an intuitive teacher? This study undertook to define intuition and an intuitive teacher based on the literature, then to determine whether administrators could describe and select an intuitive teacher. The measure used was the Knowledge Accessing Modes Inventory (1988). The results call in to question the use of the word "intuitive" to describe teachers. Behaviour and personal characteristics are confused with intuition as a thinking style. Therefore, "intuitiveness" should not be used in teacher evaluations. The study also challenges tests that include personality traits and observable behaviours as indicators of thinking style. / vii, 137 leaves ; 29 cm.

E. coli 0157:H7 were isolated from 0.86% (n=1520) water samples and Salmonella species from 6.04% (n=1456) samples collected within the Oldman River watershed in southern Alberta. Peak prevalence of E. coli0157:H7 in July 2000 was 6.3% (n=48). Peak prevalence of Salmonella was 16.2% (n=11) in August 1999 and 33.% (n=42) in July 2000. Prevalence was greater in water from some sampling locations than from others. In non-filtered surface water E. coli0157:H7 and S. typhimurium numbers decreased significantly faster at 20 degrees celsius than at 10 degrees celsius (P=0.000); however this difference did not exist when the same water was filtered (P=0.439). Pathogen survival in one water sample was greater when it was filtered (0.2um pore) than when it was not filtered even though there were no autochthonous bacteria in the water prior to filtration. / xi, 268 leaves ; 28 cm.

Aboriginal educations is an ambiguous field of study that presents many challenging dilemmas for educators today. A major part of this ambiguity stems from the tendency to emphasize traditional cultural values, Aboriginal identity, and experiences as distinct and unique, and therefore essentially different from mainstream approaches to education. By drawing upon the memories and narrative of my own Metis family as well as the history and memories of the people of the Kainai community from the Blood Reserve in Alberta, I confront some of these dilemmas in both personal and collective ways. Following Eduoard Glissant, Francoise Lionnet, and Mark Zuss, I explore the character of the Kainai community as a tetissage of texts and genres which overlap, interact, juxtapose, and mix the textual contributions of an elder, a student, and a teacher (myself) to create a more complicated portrait of the Kainai community that stretches beyond the 'us versus them' binary. These texts are then interpreted using a (post)colonial framework largely based upon the works of Frantz Fanon, Gerald Vizenor, Homi Bhabha, and Neal McLeod. / vi, 206 leaves ; 29 cm.