Parental involvement is considered important to a child’s education, whether it is working closely with the teacher to aid student learning or volunteering for participation in after school activities. This grounded theory study focuses on stakeholders’ perceptions of requisite parental involvement in a magnet middle school. The three tenets of grounded theory include: the emergent theory from the categories of data; the premise that participants’ behavior has an underlying pattern that will emerge; and assurance that the participants, not the researcher, are the focus of the study. Data was collected from document analysis, interviews with administrators, teachers, a staff member, a community volunteer, and parents; as well as data collected from surveys of parents and teachers from the school. The survey data is both quantitative and qualitative. The data set for this research was comprehensive: 301 pages of correspondence, 48 pages of transcribed interviews, and 18 surveys. The surveys were submitted by both parents and teachers. The 6 teacher surveys submitted represent a return rate of 33.3%; the 12 parent surveys yielded a return rate of 5%. The five concepts that emerged from the data are: Regard, Team, Volunteer Opportunities, Propinquity, and Needs. The results indicate that social and economic capital informs requisite parental involvement in a magnet middle school, and its perceived impact upon student achievement and school climate.

Thesis (Ph.D. (English)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

In this study, classic grounded theory is used to explore and explain the relationship between street-involved youth and the streets. The main concern of the youth in this study is negotiating duality, and at the heart of this negotiation process is seeking safety on the streets while struggling to emerge into mainstream society. Data was collected in a mid-sized urban Canadian city through semi-structured interviews, observation, conversations and photography with 52 current street-involved youth, 6 former street-involved youth, and 8 adults who work with this population. The study led to the development of a substantive theory of negotiating duality, the core construct which emerged as the means by which street-involved youth handle their need to both survive in the day-to-day context of the streets while simultaneously working their way off the streets and back to mainstream society. Four domains of duality emerged as significant: dual logic, dual space and place, dual identity, and dual normality. Additionally, three interrelated concepts (social processes) emerged from the data: seeking safety, struggling to emerge, and living outside normal. These processes were characterized by five bifocal strategies: escaping, provisioning, anchoring, routing, and using (in)visibility. This theory is a model of person-place interaction, explaining the dynamic relationship street-involved youth have with and between the street and mainstream society. The findings of this study enhance understanding about street-involved youth and their interaction with the streets and mainstream society and provide a framework that can be utilized to inform youth homelessness services, policy development, and future research. / Graduate

This dissertation describes a series of studies conducted to explore why people use information visualizations during their non-work time (casual InfoVis) and which factors are critical for visualization adoption and long duration use. I also model typical casual InfoVis usage patterns and provide a framework for future hypothesis testing. Each study explored a different facet of casual InfoVis research and each built on lessons from the previous studies. The first study explored the development and evaluation of a casual InfoVis system, PartyVote, and how visualizations can be used to aid informal group social interactions. Results from the evaluation indicate that the system successfully helped give people a more equal share in choosing music during social gatherings and people could strategically choose music, but social pressures did not constrain behaviors or reduce cheating as much as expected. The complexity of factors affecting PartyVote use led to a pseudo-experiment evaluating the appeal of motion based data encoding. Study results indicated that participants formed distinct opinion-based groups and motion data encoding was only considered appealing to less than half of the participants. Utility was a critical factor for half the participants, but a sizable group still preferred motion use, despite knowing that it reduced system utility. My final study examined how people encountered and used visual representations of data (artifacts) during their non-work time. The artifact study led me to develop the Promoter / Inhibitor Motivation Model (PIMM) of casual visualization interaction. PIMM subsequently helps explain results encountered during the first two studies. The model provides a framework for future casual InfoVis investigations and identifies potential shortfalls and areas of concern when conducting casual InfoVis research. PIMM should also help guide future casual InfoVis system designs. / Graduate

Background: Computerization and the automation of nursing practice have evolved discretely and concurrently in this local health authority. During the early years when computers were first introduced into the clinical areas, computer technology was deployed with lilLIe or no consideration of the relationship between nurses and their requirements for access to information. With limited education and training, computer adoption rates among nurses have varied and havc not yct achieved the desired level of uptake to optimize the use ofcomputer technology in nursing practice. Aim: The purposc of this grounded theory research study was to gain a theoretical understanding about how nurses' understand and manage computer integration in their clinical practice. Method: Grounded Theory methods were used to examine the data acquired through semistructured interviews of 12 RN participants, currently practicing in two acute care, tertiary hospitals. Using the constant-comparative method of analysis, all data wcre collected and analyzed concurrently. Memo-writing was used extensively throughout the data collection and analysis process to further analyze and engage with the data. Findings: The findings demonstrate that nurses experience the integration of computers in their practice with varying spccds and degrees of adoption. They all engaged in the social process identified in this thesis as "Developing a Relationship with the Computer in Nursing Practice". Conditions and contingencies such as Prior Experiences contribute 10 the nurses' ability to Synthesize Values in their practice. Synthesizing Values is a process that requires nurses to identify and acknowledge their practice values in relation to the integration of computer technology in the context of patient care. The extent to which the nurse is able to synthesize values, detcnnincs herlhis ability to realize the benefits of integrating computer technology and subsequently manage the barriers. The extent to which nurses realize benefits and manage the barriers further defines whether they, "adopt", "adapt" or "ignore" the computer technology. This process is continuous and dynamic. As the nurses engage in new experiences associated with computerization, their acknowledgment of and ability to synthesize values and thus to realize benefits and/or manage the barriers becomes that much more infonned. Ln the end, the nurse may transition from a stale of"ignoring" to a stale of ,'adopting" depending on the outcome of her or his ability 10 realize benefits and manage the barriers. Conclusions: The participants in this study illuminated the importance of the organization attending to a diverse nursing community whcn introducing computer technology in their respective practice environments. Consideration of nurses' prior experiences particularly in the areas of computer experiences, bio-medical technology experiences, leaming, organizational discourses and professional discourses, will better inform future computerization initiatives requiring computer adoption and the inclusion of related clinical information systems. The participants in this study reveal the basic social process of DEVELOPING A RELATIONSHJP WITH THE COMPUTER IN NURSING PRACTICE when confronted with computerization in their practice. / Graduate

As suicide is a leading cause of death for young people, child and youth care professionals are likely to encounter adolescents who are contemplating ending their lives. Recognizing and responding to the needs of a suicidal adolescent is challenging for the professional as they attempt to balance their relationship with the young person while simultaneously following customary rules of engaging in situations involving suicide. The need for theory to deepen understanding of child and youth care professionals’ mental health literacy practices with suicidal adolescents led to this grounded theory study. Derived from interviews with 19 participants including child and youth care professionals, supervisors at youth-serving agencies, educators in schools of child and youth care, and textual analysis of policies, assessment tools, and curricula, the Balancing Perimeter and Proximity process was identified as the core category in the analysis. The Balancing process suggests professionals’ mental health literacy practices fluctuate between circling care and circling defensively. Circling defensively refers to the professional taking up literacy practices that establish a perimeter of protection; whereas literacy practices within circling care position the professional in relational proximity where they connect and attend to the adolescent holistically. The theory extends current conceptualizations of mental health literacy, and contextualizes professionals’ practice in identifying the conditions influencing the Balancing process, thereby providing an understanding for how existing structures (e.g., suicide education, agency policies) influence child and youth care professionals’ mental health literacy practices with suicidal adolescents. / Graduate

This study used an interpretive and critical case study methodology to explore the delivery of environmental education (EE) to an elementary school during a residential outdoor education centre (OEC) experience in Haliburton, ON. The Ontario Ministry of Education has chosen to infuse EE into all aspects of the education system. An important aspect of EE is experiential learning in natural settings. Many students attend OECs, which are often situated in natural settings. A mixed methods design used focus group interviews, peripheral membership observation and grounded theory to collect and analyse the data. The study found that while EE is being delivered to some degree, its success is potentially limited at the OEC staff level, teacher level and school system level. These limitations are mostly derived from the OEC staffs' and teachers' limited knowledge of EE, and the lack of integration of EE delivered at the OEC into the school context.

There is a growing evidence-base in the epidemiological literature that demonstrates significant associations between people’s living circumstances – including their place of residence – and their health-related practices and outcomes (Leslie, 2005; Karpati, Bassett, & McCord, 2006; Monden, Van Lenthe, & Mackenbach, 2006; Parkes & Kearns, 2006; Cummins, Curtis, Diez-Roux, & Macintyre, 2007; Turrell, Kavanagh, Draper, & Subramanian, 2007). However, these findings raise questions about the ways in which living places, such as households and neighbourhoods, figure in the pathways connecting people and health (Frolich, Potvin, Chabot, & Corin, 2002; Giles-Corti, 2006; Brown et al, 2006; Diez Roux, 2007). This thesis addressed these questions via a mixed methods investigation of the patterns and processes connecting people, place, and their propensity to be physically active. Specifically, the research in this thesis examines a group of lower-socioeconomic residents who had recently relocated from poorer suburbs to a new urban village with a range of health-related resources. Importantly, the study contrasts their historical relationship with physical activity with their reactions to, and everyday practices in, a new urban setting designed to encourage pedestrian mobility and autonomy. The study applies a phenomenological approach to understanding living contexts based on Berger and Luckman’s (1966) conceptual framework in The Social Construction of Reality. This framework enables a questioning of the concept of context itself, and a treatment of it beyond environmental factors to the processes via which experiences and interactions are made meaningful. This approach makes reference to people’s histories, habituations, and dispositions in an exploration between social contexts and human behaviour. This framework for thinking about context is used to generate an empirical focus on the ways in which this residential group interacts with various living contexts over time to create a particular construction of physical activity in their lives. A methodological approach suited to this thinking was found in Charmaz’s (1996; 2001; 2006) adoption of a social constructionist approach to grounded theory. This approach enabled a focus on people’s own constructions and versions of their experiences through a rigorous inductive method, which provided a systematic strategy for identifying patterns in the data. The findings of the study point to factors such as ‘childhood abuse and neglect’, ‘early homelessness’, ‘fear and mistrust’, ‘staying indoors and keeping to yourself’, ‘conflict and violence’, and ‘feeling fat and ugly’ as contributors to an ongoing core category of ‘identity management’, which mediates the relationship between participants’ living contexts and their physical activity levels. It identifies barriers at the individual, neighbourhood, and broader ecological levels that prevent this residential group from being more physically active, and which contribute to the ways in which they think about, or conceptualise, this health-related behaviour in relationship to their identity and sense of place – both geographic and societal. The challenges of living well and staying active in poorer neighbourhoods and in places where poverty is concentrated were highlighted in detail by participants. Participants’ reactions to the new urban neighbourhood, and the depth of their engagement with the resources present, are revealed in the context of their previous life-experiences with both living places and physical activity. Moreover, an understanding of context as participants’ psychological constructions of various social and living situations based on prior experience, attitudes, and beliefs was formulated with implications for how the relationship between socioeconomic contextual effects on health are studied in the future. More detailed findings are presented in three published papers with implications for health promotion, urban design, and health inequalities research. This thesis makes a substantive, conceptual, and methodological contribution to future research efforts interested in how physical activity is conceptualised and constructed within lower socioeconomic living contexts, and why this is. The data that was collected and analysed for this PhD generates knowledge about the psychosocial processes and mechanisms behind the patterns observed in epidemiological research regarding socioeconomic health inequalities. Further, it highlights the ways in which lower socioeconomic living contexts tend to shape dispositions, attitudes, and lifestyles, ultimately resulting in worse health and life chances for those who occupy them.

Alignment of information systems (IS) with business activities has been an important problem for practitioners for many years even though there has been considerable research in the area. A criticism of some past research into IS/business alignment is that it has ignored organisational complexity and context. This is partly due to the dominant paradigm in use within IS research. One result of this paradigm is that there are numerous prescriptions provided in the literature for improving alignment but little in the way of theory development that explains the behaviour of practitioners when confronted with the task of attaining alignment. To address these criticisms a grounded theory approach was adopted using a coding family that encouraged the discovery of systems of interaction between variables rather than assuming linear causality. Data was collected via three unstructured focus groups that limited the effect of prior reading of the literature, an important consideration when conducting a grounded theory study. These were followed by semi-structured individual interviews. The instruments for the latter were developed after the focus group interviews were analysed, so reducing the impact of a prior reading. Analysis of the focus group interviews found that the major concern of practitioners was aligning IS strategies to either business strategies documented in business plans or the business strategies in use. This is a similar result to earlier alignment research. As a result of analysis of the focus group interviews the research question stabilised. This research investigated how factors within an organisational setting impact the ability of senior IT managers to identify, then act upon, the business strategies in use. It confirmed many of the enablers and inhibitors to alignment identified in earlier research. However, it also identified two variables that are rarely given prominence in the literature: the mental models held by managers; and the motivation and measurement schemes applied to managers. It is believed that both these variables have a significant impact on the alignment of IS and business strategies. The theory developed here demonstrates that a system of variables will tend to encourage IT managers to either collaborate with their business peers, or retreat from the business and concentrate on providing a low cost reliable technical IT solution. In the former situation alignment of IT managers’ actions to those of their business peers is encouraged. In the latter situation there will be little alignment between business and IS strategies nor between the actions of business and IT managers. A feedback loop of actions by actors within the system tends to reinforce the situation making a change in response extremely problematic. This, then, helps explain the intractable nature of alignment that has been observed for many years.

This thesis constructs and verifies a methodological practice of conversation groups and grounded theory for examining and changing the dominant discourse that situates Indigenous Australian tertiary students in mainstream education. Within this research, not only was a rich shared discourse development on a conceptual level valuable and necessary in the telling of our stories but it offered us as co-researchers—Indigenous students and a non-Indigenous researcher—a means of revealing and working through understandings and mis-understandings. Using such a methodological approach also suggested future possibilities for effective Indigenous/non-Indigenous stakeholders’ working relationships in research, and possibly policy-making in Australian institutions generally. As a methodological and communicative tool for opening up a dialogic space, the use of conversation groups for developing effective communicative relationships held promise for highlighting the experiences of Indigenous students who themselves, then negotiated the position for theoretically and pragmatically directing individual and collective decisions and actions. Inviting Indigenous students into this space provided an environment for the development of an Indigenous standpoint, which is not merely an Indigenous opinion but requires an engagement with the questions and issues affecting Indigenous students as interdependent individuals. Such a standpoint does not happen automatically and needs opportunities to grow and mature. I found that conversation groups involving the Indigenous students and me working together as co-researchers provided this opportunity. With Indigenous students’ narratives of success chosen as the research topic, productively communicating views became a verification of the research methodology used and an enactment of their right to be heard, both highlighting voice and representation issues. The research methodology we used and the ensuing discourse development became an entwined interplay, where each served to reinforce the other. The Indigenous students and I were practising the research approach of conversation groups while developing a conceptualised discourse on being successful. This transdisciplinary approach in co-research, encompassing Indigenous and Western research approaches, allowed for experiential and theoretical engagement with questions of cultural authority, representation, power and agency by Indigenous students and me as a non-Indigenous researcher. Central to the Indigenous students’ stories were notions of “place” as created, negotiated and manipulated by successful Indigenous students as they move between and within fluid subjectivities or stances in relationships, time and space. A broader view was taken of how intersections, layers and parallels are negotiated by the Indigenous students within and between multitudes of places in the blurring of living in two worlds: Black and White.