In this study, 236 heavy-drinking college students completed measures of self-efficacy for limiting drinking, specific coping skills for limiting drinking, outcome expectancies associated both with expected effects of drinking and expected effects of limiting drinking, and retrospective drinking behavior. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to examine reliability and validity, as well as serving as a pre-requisite for structural equation modeling (SEM). Results were generally consistent with predictions and supported the distinction between self-efficacy and outcome expectancies. One notable exception was that positive expectancies for limiting drinking did not load heavily on the predicted expectancy construct. Three models predicting drinking were compared utilizing SEM. The first was a model in which all constructs predicted drinking with no indirect effects. The second was based upon the ideas of Kirsch (1995) and predicted that outcome expectancies influence self-efficacy judgments. The third was based upon Bandura's (1986) theory and predicted that self-efficacy judgments would instead influence outcome expectancies. Both the models based on Kirsch and Bandura appeared to better fit the data than the model with no indirect effects. Differences in model-fit between models based on Kirsch and Bandura were not large, but slightly supported the Kirsch model. Additional analyses also supported the importance of outcome expectancies in predicting drinking behavior. Implications for theory and future directions for research are discussed. / Ph. D.

Despite the growing popularity of goal orientation research, three questions remain largely unanswered: (1) are there 3 factors of goal orientation or only 2; (2) what predicts goal orientation; and (3) is goal orientation domain specific? To help answer these questions, 177 undergraduates were given a questionnaire assessing, in both the academic and athletic domains, (a) learning, prove, and avoid goals, (b) self-perceived ability, ability, and implicit theories, and (c) high-school grade point average, intrinsic motivation, internal motivation, self-efficacy, locus of control, need for achievement, desire to win, and fear of negative evaluation. The results suggest that learning, prove, and avoid goals can be empirically distinguished, that they are domain specific, but that they are not predicted well by ability, self-perceived ability, or implicit theories. Discussion centers on the need for a pattern approach to the prediction of goal orientation and stresses the importance of examining the interactions among learning, prove, and avoid goals. The overriding conclusion, however, is that goal orientation is not a useful construct. / Master of Science

AIM: Nutrient profiling can be defined as ‘the science of categorising foods according to their nutritional composition’ and can be used as a valuable tool in food labelling legislation. Validation is an absolute essential step in the implementation of a nutrient profiling model (NPM), it is important to verify whether or not the NPM has a good solid scientific basis and if it is at all suitable for South Africa. This mini-dissertation investigated the construct validity of a NPM for South Africa. OBJECTIVES: 1) To test construct validity for the nutrient profiling model by examining the relationship between the way the NPM categorises foods and the healthiness of diets in South Africa. 2) To assess if the quality of a diet will improve if ‘unhealthy’ foods are replaced by ‘healthy’ foods as defined by the NPM. STUDY DESIGN: Nested in the South African leg of the international PURE (Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology) study at baseline. METHOD: The PURE (Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology) baseline study conducted in the North-West province in 2005, was identified as a suitable dataset of food intake. For the first objective the proportion of respondent’s diets consisting of healthy or unhealthy food, as classified by the NPM, was calculated. The respondents were divided into four groups based on their dietary quality as characterised by the Diet Quality Index (DQI), the lower the DQI-score the better the diet quality. The proportion of healthy or unhealthy foods were compared to the DQI-scores using one-way ANOVA’s, p-values were calculated using the Tukey post-hoc test. For the second objective the diet quality of four different diets consisting of either YES foods (according to NPM), NO foods, a combination of YES and NO were calculated and compared. RESULTS: The model displayed good construct validity by showing a statistically significant positive relationship between the proportion of ‘healthy’ (p<0.0001) and ‘unhealthy’ (p<0.0001) foods, as classified by the NPM, and participants’ DQI-scores. The second objective was also confirmed and a diet consisting of ‘healthy’ foods or a diet where ‘unhealthy’ foods were substituted by ‘healthy’ foods, had a better DQI than diets consisting only of ‘unhealthy’ foods CONCLUSION: Construct validity was confirmed by proving that the better the diet quality of the respondents the bigger their proportion of foods categorised as ‘healthy’ by the NPM and vice versa. / MSc (Dietetics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

AIM: Nutrient profiling can be defined as ‘the science of categorising foods according to their nutritional composition’ and can be used as a valuable tool in food labelling legislation. Validation is an absolute essential step in the implementation of a nutrient profiling model (NPM), it is important to verify whether or not the NPM has a good solid scientific basis and if it is at all suitable for South Africa. This mini-dissertation investigated the construct validity of a NPM for South Africa. OBJECTIVES: 1) To test construct validity for the nutrient profiling model by examining the relationship between the way the NPM categorises foods and the healthiness of diets in South Africa. 2) To assess if the quality of a diet will improve if ‘unhealthy’ foods are replaced by ‘healthy’ foods as defined by the NPM. STUDY DESIGN: Nested in the South African leg of the international PURE (Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology) study at baseline. METHOD: The PURE (Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology) baseline study conducted in the North-West province in 2005, was identified as a suitable dataset of food intake. For the first objective the proportion of respondent’s diets consisting of healthy or unhealthy food, as classified by the NPM, was calculated. The respondents were divided into four groups based on their dietary quality as characterised by the Diet Quality Index (DQI), the lower the DQI-score the better the diet quality. The proportion of healthy or unhealthy foods were compared to the DQI-scores using one-way ANOVA’s, p-values were calculated using the Tukey post-hoc test. For the second objective the diet quality of four different diets consisting of either YES foods (according to NPM), NO foods, a combination of YES and NO were calculated and compared. RESULTS: The model displayed good construct validity by showing a statistically significant positive relationship between the proportion of ‘healthy’ (p<0.0001) and ‘unhealthy’ (p<0.0001) foods, as classified by the NPM, and participants’ DQI-scores. The second objective was also confirmed and a diet consisting of ‘healthy’ foods or a diet where ‘unhealthy’ foods were substituted by ‘healthy’ foods, had a better DQI than diets consisting only of ‘unhealthy’ foods CONCLUSION: Construct validity was confirmed by proving that the better the diet quality of the respondents the bigger their proportion of foods categorised as ‘healthy’ by the NPM and vice versa. / MSc (Dietetics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

This dissertation research was designed as two independent research studies. The first study, qualitative, and non-experimental, aimed to examine residents’, family members’, and staff members’ (stakeholders’) satisfaction with, and attitudes toward Green House living one month prior to moving and again at one and three months after moving. Focus groups were the primary method of data collection. Thirty residents and 40 staff members transitioned to one of three Green House homes beginning January, 2013. Data collected began in December, 2012. Following each focus group, tape recordings were transcribed, and coded. Using grounded theory and the constant comparative method of analysis, themes emerged. Pre-move focus group themes revealed that stakeholders were concerned about (a) the quality of care in a system using fewer staff members and (b) the challenges associated with adjusting to a new environment. Post-move focus group themes revealed that (a) stakeholders remained concerned about staffing levels; (b) residents’ had improvements in appetite, socializing, and ambulation; and (c) staff members struggled with autonomous work teams, but preferred the Green House model of care to that of a traditional nursing home. The final model reflects a synthesis of themes from which self-efficacy beliefs were hypothesized. Themes were also linked to existing gerontological theories: Person-Environment Fit, Place-Space, Thriving, and Personhood. The second study, designed to explore the construct validity of the Person-Centered Care Attitude Tool (Per-CCat), consisted of 42 Likert-type questions divided into four sections that align with person-centered care principles. Eighty-six employees of Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community completed the survey; only 70 were analyzed due to missing data. Principal Components Analysis was the analytic approached used for these data. Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity (X2 = 2006.56, p = 0.000) and Keiser-Myers-Olkins measure of sampling adequacy (0.746) indicated that the data were factorable. The final four-factor 34-item solution aligned with the following person-centered care principals: resident autonomy, social interaction and community, work culture, and feelings toward work. Further validations studies of the Per-CCat are necessary. Given the trend in long-term care toward person-centered care, a validated survey will be useful for hiring and educating caregivers and other nursing home personnel.

Underpinned by the Behavioural Approach System (BAS) dysregulation theory of bipolar disorder (BD), five studies were conducted in non-clinical samples to; refine the measurement of state Approach Motivation (AM); measure minor increases in AM; and then finally, to investigate how this relates to attentional biases for emotional stimuli. Study 1 attempted to clarify the phenomenology of state AM and revealed four separable factors that emerged from pooled AM questionnaire items. These structures loosely mapped on hypothesized components of the BAS (Depue & Iacono, 1989) that pertain to; cognitive elements of approach motivation (feeling determined and inspired); an energized, activated state; an affective structure relating to positive mood and outlook; and finally to feelings of excitement. Studies 2 and 3 investigated the validity of the four derived factors and their parent scales against a reward-oriented laboratory induction, a psychophysiological marker of AM, and a test of the discriminative power. The validity results suggested that the most well-established of the scales, the PANAS-PA, slightly outperformed the other measures by showing the greatest response to an AM induction. A second aim was to explore the substructure of a valid measure of mania risk - the hypomanic personality scale (HPS: Eckblad & Chapman, 1986) – in relation to AM responsivity. Unexpectedly, individuals who endorsed unpredictable and changeable moods (mood volatility) displayed elevated sympathetic arousal in response to control task. On this basis, and with a view to exploring the role selective attentional processes as a mediator of AM dysregulation that is relevant to bipolar disorder, study 4 and 5 utilised PANAS-PA to replicate a bi-directional congruency-effect found in the literature between elevations in AM and attentional information-processing biases to reward-related stimuli. Results in general did not support a causal influence of AM on attentional biases, nor did the attempted manipulation of attentional biases affect downstream AM. However, there was evidence that within a stratified sample of participants who reliably responded to the AM and control conditions, those at greater risk to mania exhibited an attentional bias for both positive and negative stimuli, relative those at lower risk to mania.

As work environments become more complex and demanding, organizations are becoming more interested in measuring the impact of their human resource development programs and initiatives. With this increased attention on data and measurement, human resource professionals have been encouraged to utilize data collection and data analysis techniques to make more objective and rationale human capital decisions and to verify business impact. As a result, the human resource profession has seen a significant increase in the use of surveys to measure anything from training effectiveness to the efficacy of recruitment procedures. The increase in the use of survey instruments requires that more focused attention is placed on the reliability and validity of data from any instrument used to make important human resource and business decisions. One instrument that is currently being used to measure career plateaus and job fit is the Work Perceptions Profile. The purpose of this research study was to conduct a construct validity analysis of the Work Perceptions Profile data and to determine the factor structure of data from its items. The data in this analysis supported a two-factor model structure with the first factor measuring Work Characteristics and a second factor measuring Performance. The results of this analysis will be helpful in exploring further how employees perceive their work place, their careers and their relationships with others within the organization.

A relatively recent measure, the Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scales (PKBS), has been developed to measure both problem behavior and social competence in young children. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the construct validity of the PKBS through the application of several validation procedures. Results of the study support construct validity of the PKBS. In a discriminant analysis, the PKBS classified correctly 89.36% of the 94 subjects. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine social-emotional behavior differences between kindergarten students who were divided into different behavioral status groups based on a teacher nomination procedure: a behaviorally at-risk group comprised of both internalizing and externalizing students and a comparison group of behaviorally typical students. Statistically significant differences were found between groups on most variables.

The purpose of this study was to examine the construct validation of an instrument based on students university choice and their perceptions of professor effectiveness and academic reputation at the University of Los Andes (ULA). Moreover, a comparative analysis was carried out to determine how the selected factors that influence the students decisions and perceptions differ according to student demographic factors such as: gender and university campus. This instrument was developed with items based on the three domains formulated: university choice process, professor effectiveness, and university academic reputation. To determine the instruments appropriateness to measure the students decisions in university choice process and their perceptions about professor effectiveness and university academic reputation at the ULA, this research examined the reliability of scores by domains and factors across domains. The participants were undergraduate students who were registered in the second semester of 2002 and enrolled in the different courses by college within the ULAs main campus, which consists of ten colleges throughout the city of Merida, and within the other two university branch campuses in Tachira and Trujillo. For purposes of this research, a stratified probability sample was used to select the participants. The data show that the instrument designed has adequate internal consistency reliability estimates (all the domains exceeded .70). The confirmatory factor analysis shows that the overall fit indices revealed values at or close to the acceptable range .90, even when the model has statistically significant chi-square and demonstrates significant problems with some of the standardized residuals, which indicates that the fit of the model could possibly be significantly improved. The modified model revealed a relatively small improvement in the overall goodness of fit. These results provide supportive evidence of construct validity. Finally, the multivariate analyses of variance using gender and university campus as the predictor variables revealed a nonsignificant gender effect and a significant university campus effect, respectively. The Tukey multiple comparison test used to determine university campus differences across the domains showed approximately similar results, although they are separate and distinguishable. ULA-Merida established the highest mean scores when they are compared on the factors that influence their decisions in university choice process and their perceptions about professor effectiveness and university academic reputation, and the campus 1 (NURR-Trujillo) show the smaller mean scores.

<p>The overall address of the present thesis is the relationship between being ‘on fire’ and burning out. More specifically, the thesis focused largely on two representations of involvement in work (work engagement and Type A behavior) and their respective relationships to burnout. Another pervasive theme was construct validity in assessing burnout and work engagement. These themes were addressed in four empirical studies, conducted in a sample of health-care workers (Study I) and a sample of information communication technology consultants (Studies II, III, and IV). Study I aimed to extend the previously preliminary support for the construct validity of the Swedish version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). The objective of Study II was the discriminant validity of the Utrecht Work engagement Scale (UWES) against the theoretically adjacent constructs job involvement and organizational commitment. Another objective was the translation and evaluation of a Swedish version of the UWES. In Study III, the aim was to investigate (cross-sectional) association between Type A behavior, work engagement and burnout. Study III had two foci: 1) whether Type A behavior interacts with job factors to affect burnout and work engagement, and 2) the associations between the main components of Type A behavior (achievement-striving and irritability/impatience) and burnout as well as work engagement. Study IV concerned the longitudinal relationships between Type A behavior and burnout, and between work engagement and burnout. The results presented in this dissertation supported the construct validity of Swedish versions of the MBI and the UWES. It was further indicated that emotional exhaustion and depersonalization (or cynicism) constitute the core aspects of burnout, and that work engagement was more prominently associated with lack of health complaints than job involvement and organizational commitment. Type A behavior was found to be associated with burnout and work engagement in cross-sectional data, however different aspects of Type A behavior appeared to have somewhat different association with burnout and work engagement respectively. The achievement-striving aspect of Type A behavior was related primarily to work engagement, whereas irritability was associated with less engagement and more burnout complaints. No indications of an interaction between Type A behavior and job stress were found. The most important finding of Study IV was that change in Type A behavior was unrelated to change in burnout across time (one-year interval). Furthermore, Study IV supported the notion that work engagement and burnout are bipolar opposites and constitute a work well-being continuum. To conclude, the present thesis suggests that burnout should be viewed as an erosion of intrinsic, affective engagement in work occurring when intrinsic motivation is frustrated by job stress. To avoid conceptual confusion, burnout should be distinguished form exhaustion syndrome however it should be acknowledged that burnout may have negative impact on health. The present study indicated that Type A behavior is unrelated to the specific burnout reaction, a finding that needs to be replicated before generalizability can be assumed. However, it was assumed that Type A behavior represents an instrumental approach to work, further corroborating that burnout is a specific construct referring to the draining of a specific energetic and affective state. This does not imply that Type A behavior is unrelated to health deterioration – most plausibly, Type A behavior generates exhaustion and fatigue from over-exertion of energy. Both research and practice would benefit from exploring how work engagement may best be enhanced using job redesign.</p>