Policy-makers, funding bodies and treatment providers need current, comparable and accurate information on the activities and outcomes of alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment services to respond to the needs of the sector. If meaningful comparisons are to be made at the jurisdictional level, a standardised treatment outcome monitoring system must be developed and implemented, that takes into account differences in client characteristics, treatment settings and modes of service provision. A brief, multi-dimensional instrument, the Brief Treatment Outcome Measure (BTOM) has been developed for routine, ongoing treatment outcome monitoring with clients receiving opioid maintenance pharmacotherapy (OMP) services in New South Wales (NSW), and for use in treatment evaluation research. This is the first time in Australia that an attempt has been made to integrate outcome monitoring into routine clinical practice across an AOD treatment sector. The BTOM contains thirty-three items across the domains of dependence, blood-borne virus exposure risk, drug use, health/psychological functioning and social functioning. The internal reliability of the BTOM is satisfactory; retest reliabilities for the measures are good to excellent and concurrent validation of BTOM scales yielded acceptable agreement. Average completion times of the BTOM were 14.5 minutes when administered by researchers and 21 minutes by clinicians. A 30-month feasibility trial was conducted in selected NSW OMP treatment agencies to determine the practicability of implementing an OMS; to identify issues that would impact on the quality of the data; and identify administrative processes that could facilitate implementation whilst minimising the burden on agency staff. In addition, clinicians who had administered the BTOM were surveyed 18 months into the trial to ascertain their attitudes towards the clinical utility, acceptability of content and the level of support given to them to administer the BTOM as part of routine clinical practice. Results from the trial indicate that the BTOM measures are sensitive to change over time; that the change observed is consistent with that reported in the OMP treatment outcome literature; and that clinicians, whilst generally being positively predisposed towards using the instrument, express concerns relating to the burden of administering and the clinical utility of conducting outcome monitoring.

This thesis examines consumer behavior towards food risks in three different papers, focusing on two food concerns: genetically modified (GM) food and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The first paper investigates the roles of different measures of trust on consumers stated choices for functional GM/nonGM canola oil products. These analyses show that consumers choices for GM/nonGM canola oil are influenced by both generalized trust and trust in food institutions. In general, trusting people are less likely to be in the group of respondents that can be characterized as being anti-GM; trusting people also tend to place a lower discount on the presence of a GM attribute. The second paper focuses on the modeling of consumers choices of foods with potential health and risk attributes. The analysis extends the linear compensatory utility model by allowing for use of attribute cutoffs in decision making. We find evidence that attribute cutoffs are commonly used by decision makers. Further, incorporating attribute cutoffs into the modeling of consumers choices significantly improved the model fit. This paper also examines a potential problem of endogeneity that may be associated with respondents self-reported cutoffs. Model estimates based on self-reported cutoffs differ substantially from those based on predicted cutoffs (where these are based on respondents demographic characteristics); potential reasons include the possibility that self-reported cutoffs may be endogenous. The third paper reports the impacts of habit and trust on consumers responses to a series of three BSE incidents in Canada. We observe that households reactions to the first two BSE events followed a similar pattern: households reduced their beef expenditure shares following the BSE announcements, but these subsequently recovered. We find that habit persistence reduced some households initial negative reactions to the first BSE incident, but that these households modified their beef consumption habits following recurring BSE incidents. Assessing the impacts of trust on households reactions to these BSE incidents, we find that trust tended to offset the negative effects of recurring BSE cases. / Agricultural and Resource Economics

Recent conceptualizations of procrastination suggest that procrastination is akin to self-regulatory failure wherein the effect of good intentions is attenuated for individuals who tend to procrastinate. Some researchers speculate that this effect is due to subtle neurological deficits that make it more difficult for procrastinators to follow through with completing tasks. The present work examines this claim while also investigating two factors that should theoretically weaken the effect of intentions for engaging unpleasant, but important, tasks – namely habitual avoidance and the executive function of inhibition. Study 1 investigated the question of whether chronic avoidance patterns may become so entrenched that they take on the qualities of a habit. This is important because habits are known to be less reliant on intentions because they are triggered in a relatively automatic fashion. Habit indices were created which assessed the degree to which the experience of avoiding particular tasks was automatic and self-descriptive in nature (Verplanken & Orbell, 2003). The results confirmed the expectation that more frequent avoidance patterns are experienced as occurring relatively automatically. Habit-like avoidance can be measured reliably and is related to other constructs in expected ways. For example, habit-level predicts reduced task quality and lower rates of task completion above-and-beyond motivational variables (e.g. intentions). Finally, habit-like avoidance patterns were more often associated with stable features identified by participants as being present in the environment. Using a prospective design, Study 2 assessed the degree to which existing habitual-avoidance patterns weakened the effect of good intentions to carry out unpleasant tasks over the course of a week. Several computer tasks at Time 1 were also used to assess inhibitory control or the degree to which participants could inhibit prepotent responses. In addition to personality traits which purportedly moderate the intention-behaviour relation (e.g. trait procrastination), the moderating effects of habitual avoidance and inhibitory control were also tested. Trait-level procrastination did not weaken the effect of one’s intentions to carry out unpleasant tasks. However, habitual avoidance and inhibitory control jointly moderated the effect of intentions on behaviour such that poor inhibitors had difficulty overcoming previous avoidance habits in order to complete unpleasant tasks during the week. In contrast, good inhibitors were able to behave according to their intentions irrespective of habit-like avoidance patterns. These findings point to the importance of recognizing the joint influence of avoidance patterns and regulatory capacities involved in self-control when understanding procrastination behaviour.

Mobile barcode e-invoicing (MBEI) is a novel system that not only reduces companies¡¦ cost on invoice delivery and storage but also enables the government to save money on printing the invoices. Although this is an important policy, no study has examined it from the general public¡¦s perspective. Therefore, this study surveyed a convenience sample of 250 people to investigate factors that may affect the public¡¦s willingness to use MBEI. Based on Rogers¡¦s (1995) diffusion of innovation theory, this study explored the impacts of relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, observability, and habits of using relevant technology on willingness to use MBEI. The results suggest that while relative advantage, compatibility, and complexity are associated with people¡¦s willingness, observability is not. As for the habits of using relevant technology, people with i-bon experience were more willing to use MBEI than those who had never heard about i-bon. But respondents¡¦ usage of membership cards for shopping, the carrying of these membership cards, and the habit of using touch-control mobile devices had no impact on their willingness to adopt MBEI. These results suggest that the government should not only promote its e-invoicing policy more aggressively, but also be alert to the problems that different age groups may encountered when trying to use MBEI.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

By paying attention to the habitual register of politics this dissertation has sought to contribute to the theoretical literature on democratic citizenship. More precisely, I offer a more complex account the moral psychology of political agency presumed by the turn to ethics within democratic theory. The central question of this dissertation is how do citizens come to feel empowered to act on their convictions in politics? Political theorists often celebrate civic action as spontaneity and willfulness, and at the same time lament the agency-foreclosing complexity and fragmentation of late-modern politics. Drawing out this tension in Michel Foucault’s analysis of docility and transgression I argue that a middle path between disembodied autonomy and docile passivity is articulated in the moral psychology found in William James’s account of habit. The study makes this case by looking at three episodes of the foreclosure and recovery of action in James’s thinking: his engagement with Darwinian science and his nervous breakdown in the 1870’s and 80’s; his critique of democratic docility and debate on strenuousness with Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American war; and the cynical adaptation of James’s psychology by the democratic realism of Walter Lippmann in the 1920’s. In each case I argue that James’s lively account of habit as a force of unruly spontaneity functions as a therapy of action against feelings of powerlessness, docility, and incompetence constrain democratic conviction. The result is at once a novel continuation of the American tradition of democratic individualism and a contribution to the contemporary debates on the democratic ethics of self-making.

According to the Bruntland Commission, sustainable development requires consumers in industrialized nations to reduce significantly their consumption of resources. This research brings a new perspective to the reduction of discretionary consumption, using both theoretical and empirical approaches. Demarketing programs have often been unable to achieve sustained reductions in consumption. It is argued here that they have incorrectly treated demand reduction as a variation on the usual marketing problem of building demand, when it is (1) more complex than typical marketing problems, and (2) essentially similar to clinical habit change problems. The dissertation reviews the literature on habits and automated processes, introduces the concept of “habit-like” behavior, and argues that reducing discretionary consumption can often be framed as a habit-change problem. The Prochaska and DiClemente (1984) Revolving Door Model of Behavior Change (RDM) describes how people change habitual behaviors in clinical situations. Study 1, an energy conservation (cold water laundry washing) survey (n=340), using a decisional balance framework, indicated that the RDM generalizes to demarketing situations and that it is consumers’ perceptions of the importance of disadvantages, not advantages, that influence consumption reductions. The research develops new theory to explain habit-like behavior changes. Based on previous theory and findings on automated processes, it is proposed that changing habit-like behavior proceeds in three steps: de-automation, volitional behavior change, and consolidation. Study 2 was a laboratory experiment (n= 117) in which two demarketing approaches (the traditional approach and the habit-change approach) competed in two situations (when the consumption behavior targeted for change was under volitional control, and when it was habit-like). Contrary to expectations, a persuasive message supplemented by limited practice of the new behavior was more effective when the old behavior was volitional than when it was habit-like, suggesting that the disadvantages of changing are more evident to people whose behavior is habit-like. There are two important practical implications: that (1) segmentation based on the RDM stages of change may be more powerful than other approaches; and (2) it is more important to address disadvantages of reducing consumption than to emphasize advantages.

Recent conceptualizations of procrastination suggest that procrastination is akin to self-regulatory failure wherein the effect of good intentions is attenuated for individuals who tend to procrastinate. Some researchers speculate that this effect is due to subtle neurological deficits that make it more difficult for procrastinators to follow through with completing tasks. The present work examines this claim while also investigating two factors that should theoretically weaken the effect of intentions for engaging unpleasant, but important, tasks – namely habitual avoidance and the executive function of inhibition. Study 1 investigated the question of whether chronic avoidance patterns may become so entrenched that they take on the qualities of a habit. This is important because habits are known to be less reliant on intentions because they are triggered in a relatively automatic fashion. Habit indices were created which assessed the degree to which the experience of avoiding particular tasks was automatic and self-descriptive in nature (Verplanken & Orbell, 2003). The results confirmed the expectation that more frequent avoidance patterns are experienced as occurring relatively automatically. Habit-like avoidance can be measured reliably and is related to other constructs in expected ways. For example, habit-level predicts reduced task quality and lower rates of task completion above-and-beyond motivational variables (e.g. intentions). Finally, habit-like avoidance patterns were more often associated with stable features identified by participants as being present in the environment. Using a prospective design, Study 2 assessed the degree to which existing habitual-avoidance patterns weakened the effect of good intentions to carry out unpleasant tasks over the course of a week. Several computer tasks at Time 1 were also used to assess inhibitory control or the degree to which participants could inhibit prepotent responses. In addition to personality traits which purportedly moderate the intention-behaviour relation (e.g. trait procrastination), the moderating effects of habitual avoidance and inhibitory control were also tested. Trait-level procrastination did not weaken the effect of one’s intentions to carry out unpleasant tasks. However, habitual avoidance and inhibitory control jointly moderated the effect of intentions on behaviour such that poor inhibitors had difficulty overcoming previous avoidance habits in order to complete unpleasant tasks during the week. In contrast, good inhibitors were able to behave according to their intentions irrespective of habit-like avoidance patterns. These findings point to the importance of recognizing the joint influence of avoidance patterns and regulatory capacities involved in self-control when understanding procrastination behaviour.

No description available.

No description available.