This research focused on the motivational orientations of students attending community colleges in western North Carolina. The purpose of the study was to develop a profile of students with disabilities in degree, diploma, or certificate programs, to determine their motivations for enrolling, and compare the results to students without disabilities at the same colleges. Five community colleges were randomly selected from the colleges in the western counties of North Carolina. A stratified random sample of students, both with and without disabilities, was selected. Each student was mailed a copy of the Educational Participation Scale (EPS) modified to collect demographic data. A follow-up reminder was mailed at two-week and four-week intervals. Four hundred sixty-eight questionnaires were distributed. One hundred ninety-eight responses were received for an overall return rate of 42.3%. The results indicated that, among the group of students with disabilities, there was a higher proportion who were female. These students were older, yet less likely to have children in the home and work full-time, as compared to their nondisabled peers. Students with disabilities scored higher on four of the EPS factors; Social Contact, Educational Preparation, Social Stimulation, and Cognitive Interest. These students appear motivated to participate by the opportunity to meet new people and find social stimulation. They also were more likely than their non-disabled counterparts to seek a remedy for past educational deficiencies and satisfy their intellectual curiosities. These results suggest that the main reasons why students with disabilities enroll in community colleges are social and academic concerns. Community colleges need to be sensitive to the unique needs of students with disabilities and design programs and services that emphasize the continuing development of these students.

This project discusses the effectiveness of disciplinary interventions in school-based counseling. Participants were selected from elementary and middle school sites in a school district in Southern California. Qualitative interviews were conducted to give this researcher additional knowledge in the field of school-based counseling. The audio of the interviews that were conducted were recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed by this researcher. The knowledge of the participants and their unique experiences operating with a wide range of students in many years of experience allowed for a more comprehensive understanding of what intervention strategies are most beneficial to students and where schools and counselors can improve in providing counseling services to students. The results consisted of the following eight themes: Defining Discipline, Measuring Success in Interventions, Strategies in Interventions, Theoretical Orientations, Commonalities between Frequently Counseled Students, Communication within the School, Communication between Counselors, and Areas Where Schools are Lacking. Contributions to social work practice in a micro and macro sense are discussed. Findings were given to California State University, San Bernardino and were provided to the school sites and counselors utilized for this study.

Previous surveys of mental health professionals regarding theoretical orientation and the use of various treatment modalities provided valuable information concerning the nature of mental health delivery but primarily focused on professionals providing services to dominant-culture clientele. The present study focused on those degreed workers whose primary clientele were American Indian. Questionnaires were returned by 140 mental health workers who are American Psychological Association (APA) members of American Indian descent, members of the Society of Indian Psychologists (SIP), employees of the Indian Health Service (IHS), and graduate psychology students. Questionnaire responses were analyzed in terms of orientation and treatment modality for various subgroups of respondents. In addition, demographic data (e.g., age, sex, emphasis of graduate study, intervention level, work setting, and service delivery to primary age groups) were compared for Indian and non-Indian respondents. The results provide a unique assessment of current trends in therapeutic approaches used in mental health service delivery with American Indians.

This dissertation involves the study of epitaxial behavior of one-dimensional nanomaterials like single-walled carbon nanotubes and Indium Arsenide nanowires grown on metallic catalyst surfaces. It has been previously observed in our novel microplasma based CVD growth of SWCNTs on Ni-Fe bimetallic nanoparticles that changes in the metal catalyst composition was accompanied by variations in the average metal-metal bond lengths of the nanoparticle and that in turn, affected nanotube chirality distributions. In this dissertation, we have developed a very simplistic model of the metal catalyst in order to explain the nanotube growth of specific nanotube chiralities on various Ni-Fe catalyst surfaces. The metal catalyst model is a two-dimensional flat surface with varying metal-metal bond lengths and comprising of constituent metal atoms. The effect of the composition change was modeled as a change in the bond length of the model catalyst surface and density functional theory based calculations were used to study specific nanotube caps. Our results indicated that nanotube caps like (8,4) and (6,5) show enhanced binding with increased metal-metal bond lengths in the nanoparticle in excellent agreement with the experimental observations. Later, we used this epitaxial nucleation model and combined with a previously proposed chirality-dependent growth rate model to explore better catalysts that will preferentially grow an enhanced chirality distribution of metallic nanotubes. From our DFT calculations and other geometrical considerations for nanotube growth, we demonstrated that the pure Ni0.5Cu0.5 metal nanoparticles and its lattice-strained surfaces can serve as a promising catalyst for enhanced growth of metallic nanotubes. Finally, we extended this model of epitaxial growth to study the growth of,andoriented nanowires on gold metal nanoparticles where a faster growth rate ofnanowires was previously observed in experiments on shaped nanoparticles than that on spherical nanoparticles. The DFT calculations indicated an enhanced growth selectivity of theoriented nanowires on the Au(111) surfaces. However, the DFT results also show that theandNWs will preferentially grow on the Au(100) surface than on the Au(100) surface. The epitaxial model based DFT calculations of nanotube and nanowire growth on metal catalyst surfaces presented in this dissertation, provide a deep insight into their epitaxial growth mechansims and, can be easily exploited to layout better design principles of synthesizing catalysts that helps in growing these one-dimensional nanomaterials with desired material properties.

Many view tourism as a tool for community development. Especially in the rural areas experiencing economic hardships, tourism often is considered an instrument for revitalization of a local economy helping to improve quality of life and protect natural and cultural resources. However, many researchers have raised concerns about an overly optimistic view by asserting that tourism development inevitably affects the corresponding community. Empirical studies suggest that development of tourism brings environmental, sociocultural, and economic changes to the community where it is developed. Thus, it is important that planners look at the attitudes of local people towards tourism development in their community before an actual development takes place. The conceptual basis of this study is development and change theory and empirical findings of tourism impact research. This study provides information to assist in understanding questions related to the rural communities’ tourism planning process in a development context, and residents’ perceptions of the impact of tourism and its further development. A self-administered mail-back survey was administered to see how the residents of Brewster County, Texas perceive tourism development in the region. Considering the 43% of the Hispanic population in the area, both English and Spanish versions of the questionnaires were sent to the possible respondents. The overall response rate was 37% after two rounds of survey administered during January and February of 2006. The structural model confirmed that people’s value orientation regarding nature was an important variable that explained residents’ community attachment, which influenced their attitudes toward tourism through attitudes toward local participation. The results indicated that residents’ values were oriented toward nature and that they were highly attached to their communities. In addition, their tourism attitudes were varied based on the types of tourism impacts they were expecting. Although they were supportive of tourism related development, they felt that certain types of tourism development were more appropriate for their community. Specifically, “medium impact” tourism development were perceived to be desirable for the northern part of the region, whereas low impact development options were perceived to be more acceptable for the southern part of the region by their residents.

The issue of customer loyalty is a main concern for grocery retailers. Retailers need to know how loyal customers are to their grocery stores; if some customers are more loyal than others; and, why that would be so. Is customer loyalty due only to how well a store manages to satisfy its customers, or are consumers inherently loyal to a greater or lesser degree? At the root of this issue is the basic question of what "store loyalty" implies. Although the concept "loyalty" is widely used within marketing, there is no consistent interpretation of the term. Rather, "loyalty" is used for describing related, but different, phenomena, and thus a choice has to be made of which of these phenomena to cover in a specific study. In grocery shopping, households have been shown to use several stores; hence a question of great consequence for retailers is to understand how and why households divide their purchases across stores. To contribute to the understanding of this phenomenon, this thesis focuses on the degree of behavioral loyalty and its causes. The thesis is based on an empirical study of household grocery shopping that uses a purchase diary, a questionnaire, and in-depth interviews as data collection methods. One of the main findings of the research is that the degree of behavioral loyalty is affected by shoppers' evaluations of stores, that is, a factor a store manager can influence, but also by shopper characteristics such as the degree of price orientation and interest in personal contact with store personnel. An extension of the findings from the quantitative part of the study is provided by the in-depth interviews that explore how households manage the entire task of grocery shopping. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 1999

The focus of this dissertation is a group of individuals applying for psychotherapy. They have attended an office that offers psychodynamic psychotherapy, based on a Christian outlook on mankind. My research questions dealt with why they did apply for psychotherapy and what their goals were. I had planned the study and selected my data collection methods considering three domains of hypothetical reasons for their decisions to apply for psychotherapy. These grounds were their object relations, existential/religious orientations, and psychological problems and goals for the treatment. The first part of the dissertation is a survey of concepts, theories and former studies in the mentioned domains. Concerning the object-relations I make use of psychoanalytical thinking on the importance of early experiences in relation to parents and other persons but also its application to a “religious relation”, namely to the relation of the individual to her/his socalled God-representation. Concerning the existential/religious orientations I make use of existential-analytical thinking on satisfaction and meaning of life and death as an existential problem. I also make use of research from the psychology of religion on different dimensions of religiosity and its correlations to mental health. In the second part of the dissertation there is an account of my development of methods to be used in data collection. In this part of the book one can also find data from a reference group of people not applying for psychotherapy. The main part of the dissertation is the third part, describing the data of eight persons applying for psychotherapy. The information, from interviews, projective methods and scales, from each of the study subjects is put together, analysed and interpreted as intensive case studies. Questions in the interview covered religious and existential matters, relations to important persons during childhood and later, the persons’ descriptions of themselves, and the reasons for applying for psychotherapy and their goals for the treatment. Their answers were analysed using a hermeneutic method. The projective methods covered a picture and unfinished sentences. The psychological scales covered religious beliefs and satisfaction and meaning of life and a semantic differential the symbolic meaning of the words Mother, Father and GOD. According to the results the influence of the object-relations on the decision to apply for psychotherapy was sometimes direct. But on the whole the most obvious reason was the persons’ experiences and descriptions of themselves as filled with conflicting feelings and lack of or difficulties in controlling them. The influence of existential themes was not so obvious and the effects of the religious orientations were sometimes direct and sometimes only indirect. Peoples’ mental problems and goals of the psychotherapy influenced directly their decisions to apply. Most individuals had been in therapy before. There was some difference in the description of goals between those individuals who finished recently and those applying for the first time or long time after an earlier therapy. The latter having more well-defined goals. Theoretically it is possible to classify goals into treatment and life goals, but in real life they often stick together. One important conclusion was that, when the persons experience themselves as filled with contradictory feelings or conflicting strivings and having lack of feelings or difficulties in controlling them, they also experience themselves as responsible to this and as a consequence they also apply for psychotherapy.

<p>The purpose of this research is to refine the notion of Supply Chain Orientation (SCO) as originally posited by Mentzer et al. (2001) and Min and Mentzer (2004). Supply chain orientation is defined to be “the extent to which there is a predisposition among chain members toward viewing the supply chain as an integrated entity and on satisfying chain needs in an integrated way” (Hult et al., 2008, p. 527). This orientation (management philosophy), when implemented, manifests as Supply Chain Management (SCM) within and across organizations.</p> <p>The process of ‘refining’ supply chain orientation involved three stages: determining additional SCO factors / indicators beyond those already in existence, refining the total set of factors / indicators through factor analysis techniques, and associating the SCO concept to other SCM-related concepts. Determining additional SCO factors and the vetting of the existing SCO model was done through a qualitative method (structured interviews with industry experts). Analysis of the interview data resulted into two new SCO factors—SCM Capability and Measurement Propensity—being identified. The high accuracy / low generalizability nature of the interview process required an industrywide survey in order to gather su cient quantitative data for a meaningful analysis. The new SCO factors were developed into survey questionnaire measurement items.</p> <p>An invitation to participate in a web-based, quantitative survey was e-mailed to executive at roughly a third of the manufacturing companies in Canada. The results of that data gathering exercise were analyzed in a multi-stage process. First, after removing ‘motherhood statements’ from the indicator set, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to determine the underlying structure of SCO. Three factors—Benevolence (Trust), Internal SCM Focus, and Partner Reliability—emerged through this process. This “refined” SCO construct was then subject to a rigourous confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) process. </p> <p>The CFA process found the SCO factors to be reliable. A dependent variable, Supply Chain Operational Performance (SCOP) was found to be positively influenced by changes in SCO. SCO was found to be a unique strategic orientation through the literature review process and validated as its own construct through a discriminant validity process. SCO was determined to be a second-order reflective latent variable, and top management support was found to be an antecedent to SCO.</p> <p>Of interest to SCM practitioners and academics, SCO was found to be statistically invariable between respondents who were or were not members of a SCM industry association. As well, SCO did not vary outside statistical bounds across the supply chain from ultimate supplier (Earth) to ultimate customer. However, SCO was found to be stronger in companies that employed an “e cient” supply chain strategy (using the taxonomy of Lee (2002)) versus other generic strategies (like “agile” supply chain strategy).</p> <p>The contributions of this research to academics include a parsimonious definition of SCO which meets the criteria of Wacker (1998), an operationalization of the Lee (2002) model, and additional evidence of the power of Parallel Analysis (PA) of Thompson (2004) in determining factors in an EFA. Supply chain orientation is an important theoretical ‘building block’ from which SCM theory can be built and through the refinement process, SCO was tied into the dynamic capabilities area of the larger resource-based view (RBV) theoretical framework.</p> <p>Supply chain orientation was found to positively influence SCOP. The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals reported that business logistics (SCM) costs in the United States alone in 2009 were 1.3 trillion dollars. Hence, improving upon the understanding of the mechanisms of supply chain management and its components can have substantial economic consequences.</p>

Sammanfattning Syftet med studien var att studera skillnader i vilka mål bordtennisspelare använder sig av beroende på målinriktning. I studien deltog 103 bordtennisspelare (60 män och 43 kvinnor) tävlandes i division ett till tre. Metoden som användes i studien var en kvantitativ undersökning och bestod av enkäterna Collegiate Goal Setting in Sport Questionnaire (Weinberg, Burton, Yukelson, Weigand, 1993) och Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire (Duda &amp; Nicholls, 1992; ref i Duda, 1998). Resultatet i studien visade flera signifikanta skillnader mellan bordtennisspelarna med högre resultatinriktning och bordtennisspelare med en lägre resultatinriktning när det gäller uppfattning om målsättning. Resultatet visade exempelvis att bordtennisspelarna med högre resultatinriktning oftare satte resultatmål och prestationsmål jämfört med bordtennisspelare med en lägre resultatinriktning. Vidare visade resultatet också att bordtennisspelarna med en lägre resultatinriktning anser att det är viktigare med gemenskap för att delta i än bordtennisspelare med en högre resultatinriktning. Resultatet diskuterats i relation till tidigare forskning. / Abstract The purpose of this study was to examine the differences in goal preferences of table tennis players, depending on goal orientation. The participants were 103 (60 male and 43 female) table tennis players competing in division one to three. The method used in the study was a quantitative study consisted of questionnaires Collegiate Goal Setting in Sport Questionnaire CGSSQ (Weinberg, Burton, Yukelson, Weigand, 1993) and Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire TEOSQ (Duda &amp; Nicholls, 1992; ref in Duda, 1998). The results showed several significant results between table tennis players with a high ego orientation and table tennis players with a lower ego orientation in goal setting. For example the result showed that table tennis players with a high ego orientation used more often outcome goals and performance goals than table tennis players with a lower ego orientation. The result also showed that a table tennis player with a lower ego orientation means that it is more important with fellowship than tennis players with a high ego orientation. The results have been analyzed and discussed in relation to previous research.

The first result of this thesis is a generation theorem for bricks. A brick is a 3-connected graph such that the graph obtained from it by deleting any two distinct vertices has a perfect matching. The importance of bricks stems from the fact that they are building blocks of a decomposition procedure of Kotzig, and Lovasz and Plummer. We prove that every brick except for the Petersen graph can be generated from K_4 or the prism by repeatedly applying certain operations in such a way that all the intermediate graphs are bricks. We use this theorem to prove an exact upper bound on the number of edges in a minimal brick with given number of vertices and to prove that every minimal brick has at least three vertices of degree three. The second half of the thesis is devoted to an investigation of graphs that admit Pfaffian orientations. We prove that a graph admits a Pfaffian orientation if and only if it can be drawn in the plane in such a way that every perfect matching crosses itself even number of times. Using similar techniques, we give a new proof of a theorem of Kleitman on the parity of crossings and develop a new approach to Turan's problem of estimating crossing number of complete bipartite graphs. We further extend our methods to study k-Pfaffian graphs and generalize a theorem by Gallucio, Loebl and Tessler. Finally, we relate Pfaffian orientations and signs of edge-colorings and prove a conjecture of Goddyn that every k-edge-colorable k-regular Pfaffian graph is k-list-edge-colorable. This generalizes a theorem of Ellingham and Goddyn for planar graphs.