Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1990.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-87). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-118). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental study was to explore a possible relationship between the number of students in grades 9-12 classified as chronically absent and the inclusion of the Chronically Out of School indicator in Tennessee’s accountability model for schools and school districts. Using publicly available data from the Tennessee Department of Education, the research study examined 6 years of data from the 2014-2015 to 2019-2020 school years. Data were divided into 3 years before and 3 years after implementation. Results of the study indicated that the mean number of chronically absent students in grades 9-12 were significantly lower during the 3 years after implementation of the Chronically Out of School indicator. Data was further disaggregated and analyzed based on the following subgroups: Black/Hispanic/Native American, Economically Disadvantaged, and Students with Disabilities. Results indicated a significant difference in the number of chronically absent Black/Hispanic/Native American subgroup after implementation, but there were no significant differences found in the Economically Disadvantaged and Students with Disabilities subgroups. In addition to a summary of the research findings, implications, and recommendations for future research and current practice are discussed.

published_or_final_version / Psychiatry / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

Dependency is defined as authentic or pathological and is seen as a component important to the treatment of patients with chronic illness. It is hypothesized that a significant portion of ecology patients will meet the criteria for pathological dependence and differ on psychological and physiological parameters from those who do not. This study strongly supports the first two hypotheses but does not find that the two groups differ physiologically. One hundred eleven variables are surveyed. Fifty-two show significant differences between the groups and 29 are significant at greater than the .0001 level. A discriminant analysis was used to determine the least number of orthogonal variables that best discriminate between the groups. These are MMPI Scales 8, 3, subscale Ma2, employment status, and early childhood illness.

Thesis advisor: Rebecca Lowenhaupt / Thesis advisor: Lauri Johnson / This single case study examines how stakeholders of a local education agency (LEA) understand and implement state turnaround policy for its chronically underperforming schools. While there is ample research on how to improve chronically underperforming schools, a research gap exists specifically around addressing implementation of mandated turnaround policy. This qualitative study uses the theory frame of policy sense-making to identify how implementers come to understand turnaround policy and to explore how that sense-making impacts their implementation decisions. This study seeks to understand the role of central office in turnaround policy sense-making by collecting data on superintendent and central office administrator sense-making and its impact on policy implementation. While recent research on school improvement has focused on school improvement actions and responsibilities of principals and teachers, this study seeks to address the research gap of the essential role of school district offices in school turnaround. In seeking to understand how district leaders make sense of turnaround policy implementation to support school turnaround, the findings revealed that the superintendent and central office administrators identified strong superintendent leadership, monitoring and supporting schools, strategic distribution of resources, and management of human capital as key implementer actions and areas of influence. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Online health communities (OHCs) have been increasingly popular among patients with chronic or life-threatening illnesses for the exchange of social support. Contemporary research of OHCs relies on methods and tools to handle analytics of massive user-generated content at scale to complement traditional qualitative analysis. In this thesis, we aim at advancing the area of research by providing computational tools and methods which facilitate automated content analysis, and by presenting applications of these tools to investigating member characteristics and behaviors. We first provide a framework of conceptualization to systematically describe problems, challenges, and existing solutions for OHCs from a social support standpoint, to bridge the knowledge gap between health psychology and informatics. With this framework in hand, we define the landscape of online social support, summarize current research progress of OHCs, and identify research questions to investigate for this thesis. We then build a series of computational tools for analyzing OHC content, relying on techniques of machine learning and natural language processing. Leveraging domain-specific features, our tools are tailored to handle content analysis tasks on OHC text effectively. Equipped with computational tools, we demonstrate how characteristics of OHC members can be identified at scale in an automated fashion. In particular, we build up multi-dimensional descriptions for patient members, consisting of what topics they focus on, what sentiment they express, and what treatments they discuss and adopt. Patterns of how these member characteristics change through time are also investigated longitudinally. Finally, relying on computational analytics, members' behaviors of engagement such as debate and dropping-out are identified and characterized. Studies presented in this thesis discover static and longitudinal patterns of member characteristics and engagement, which are potential research hypotheses to be explored by health psychologists and clinical researchers. The thesis also contributes to the informatics community by making computational tools, lexicons, and annotated corpora available to facilitate future research.