Syftet med denna studie var att studera möjligheten att bedöma korrekthet i vittnens utsagor beroende av deltagarnas grupptillhörighet. I studien ingick 120 deltagare som antingen fick se en film med vittnesmål från fyra vittnen med enstaka centrala meningar eller läsa en text med samma meningar. De viktigaste mätningarna i denna studie gjordes efter signal detection theory (SDT). Resultaten visade att deltagarna inte skattade mycket över slumpnivå och ofta till och med under slumpnivå i sina bedömningar. I en hopslagning av betingelserna (text/film) visade analyserna att män generellt var signifikant sämre än kvinnorna på att bedöma vittnesmål, men att kvinnorna gör fler falska alarm än männen i bedömningen av textversionen.  De funna könsskillnaderna i hur vittnesmål bedöms diskuterades.

Clinical decision-making (CDM) research has focused on diagnostic reasoning, CDM models, factors influencing CDM and the development of expertise. The research approaches used, including phenomenology, have not addressed the question of how CDM is perceived and approached by nurses. This study describes perceptions of CDM in relation to patients in pain using a phenomenographic methodology. At semi-structured interviews, participants were asked to recall their responses to a situation involving a patient in pain. The responses fell into four categories: (1) the effect of the clinical environment; (2) the role of other health professionals; (3) the place of the patient; and (4) the role of experience. Examples of differences in perceptions that were likely to impact on the nurses� approach to CDM include: the ongoing effects of time and workload demands on CDM; nurses are initially dependent but were eventually able to make decisions autonomously; the patient who may be peripheral or central to CDM; and the nurses� move from the use of theoretical principles to experiential knowledge as reflection-on-practice is employed. Perceptions in all categories are strongly implicated in the nurses� sense of confidence and independence. Implications for nursing practice and nursing education suggested by the findings relate to the number of areas in which graduates work in the first year of practice, the size of new graduate workloads, graduate transition programs, the place of reflection-on-practice and undergraduate (UG) program clinical experience patterns. Among issues for further research arising from the study are: replication of the study; detailed examination of the development of CDM in the first year of nursing practice and during UG nursing education programs; the role of other health professionals in the development of CDM behaviour; the links between CDM and clinical knowledge development; and the type of clinical environments that foster confidence and independence. A conclusion of the study is that the way CDM is approached is influenced by the amount, quality, relevancy and recency of clinical experience. In this study, phenomenography was shown to be an appropriate approach to the description of nurses� perceptions of CDM in relation to patients in pain. In addition, nurses� changing perceptions over two years and the subsequent effect on CDM behaviour were described.

In this thesis I propose that emotions and rationality are integrated, and jointly constitute our moral agency. I argue against the influential ‘sentimentalist’ claim that emotions are the only constituents of the moral reasons for which we act, by showing that emotions are inextricably bound up with our sensory and conceptual capacities. In contrast, I propose we act for moral reasons when we act in light of the narratives we create and understand. Narrative understanding here is the capacity to inhabit a chain of events. It is embodied and action-­‐ orientated, and is co-­‐constituted through our emotional, conceptual and sensory capacities.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University

Party Season is about sex and speech and employs some of the conventions of the porn film. Apparently inconsequential 'filler' scenes and dialogue link the pay-off scenes of vividly depicted sex. Except that, in Party Season, this relationship is gradually reversed - the scenes of excessive behaviour becoming 'filler' scenes linking the pay-off moments, the latter often embedded in deliberately extended 'unrealistic' dialogue. A key component of this as a piece of inquiry-based practice is the exploration of this altering balance and of how action and dialogue can function to produce such a reversal of conventionality. The intention with the accompanying essay is to sustain a progressive interweaving of reflective commentary and analytical vignettes. There is also an intended symmetry here - an 'excessive' essay (long, without conventional subheadings, breaks, etc.) will sit alongside the 'excessive' screenplay as its twin of sorts, a different style of invention. The essay is to speech what the screenplay is to sex.

The subject of enquiry is the variation seen in the results of a specific set of studies about methods for training people’s judgment. This review attempts to synthesise the studies’ findings, and tests hypotheses about the causes of the variation. Research questions ask if variation is attributable to differences in participant characteristics, different aspects of judgment having been targeted, different tasks having been performed or different training strategies having been used. Relevant literature was reviewed, and studies that reported a method for training an aspect of judgment were selected for further quantitative analysis if at least two groups had been randomly selected from a larger set of human adults, one of which received training that another did not, and where, during the test phase, members of no group had access to tools or resources, performed tasks, or received feedback which members of another group did not. A meta-analysis of statistical data from 39 published studies was conducted. The findings are interpreted as indicating variation in the effect of training is attributable to differences in task type and differences in training strategy. The effect of training is greatest in the studies that have diagnostic tasks (p<0.05). The studies that trained participants with examples have, on average, greater effect sizes than studies that did not (p<0.05). Implications, limitations, and avenues for further research are discussed. It is concluded that the findings indicate that different tasks and different training strategies account for a significant proportion of the variation in training effect seen between the selected studies.

It is shown that a limitation of the various collation methods for paired comparison data currently available is their lack of validity when used in cases where the experiment is incomplete and particularly when the judgements are not replicated. Presented in this thesis is a reasonably thorough background to the method of paired comparisons and an overview of the existing methods for collating paired comparison data into a final ranking. As a result of the extensive review of existing collation methods, the thesis progresses logically to a new collation method that utilises all the available information from a set of pairwise preferences. The performance of the new collation method is extensively tested against existing methods by way of a simulation exercise which highlights the performance of the collation methods under different scenarios in terms of experiment size, experiment completeness and judgement consistency, as well as by considering the number of direct comparisons and the strength of competition. The new collation method and the existing collation method of Allen (1992) are applied to a set of real world data and the outcomes of the two methods are compared. The usefulness of paired comparisons in understanding the way judges use information to construct their own criteria when instructed to make preference decisions at a broad level is also considered and a real world application of this approach is performed. The main findings of this thesis are: „FƒnThe new methodology generally provides an improved performance when there are more than 10 objects to be ranked; „FƒnReplication of each pairwise judgement certainly improves the accuracy of the overall ranking, regardless of the level of judgement inconsistency; „FƒnIn the case of non-replication, the accuracy of the final ranking greatly improves as judgement consistency improves. In other words, if it is not possible to replicate individual pairwise judgements then high judgement consistency is important for a reasonable result; In the case of replication, the accuracy of the returned ranking improves with judgement consistency only in the case of the new method. For the existing methods, the accuracy actually decreases marginally with the improvement of judgement consistency, particularly if there is a low level of experiment completeness; In terms of experiment completeness, for non-replicated experiments, there is an increase in the accuracy of the returned ranking as the proportion of possible pairwise preferences completed increases, but not to the same extent as an increase in judgement consistency. That is, judgement consistency is actually more important than experiment completeness. This suggests that control over the design of the experiment (the extent of completeness and which pairwise preferences are completed) is less important than judgement consistency and replication ¡V certainly a finding not found reported in the literature; The new method outperforms the existing methods when there is perfect or very high judgement consistency.

This thesis considers the status of Deleuze as a Kantian, and as such committed both to the critical destiny of philosophy, and the contestation of the sense of this destiny. The focus of Deleuze�s reading of Kant is an active conception of thought: the fundamental elements of thought are will and value rather than being or the concept. In the development of this idea we can note a progressive 'tapering' of the foundational instance of thought, in three stages: from the speculative field of being to the practical field of reason; from the intellectual category of the concept to the problematic category of the Idea; from the teleological notion of the organism to the aesthetic notion of the singular. Within each stage we can perceive a polemic between the two terms: it is in each case a question of the 'sufficient reason' of thought, its conditions of the actuality beyond its possibility. The highest expression of our reason, for Kant, is neither theoretical nor utilitarian, but moral: the realisation of our lawful freedom. For Deleuze, on the other hand, the ultimate secret of our freedom and thus all of our thought is to be found rather in the realm of the aesthetic.