Thesis advisor: Liane Young / Thesis advisor: Hiram Brownell / When (moral) psychologists make a claim (e.g., “Participants judged X as morally worse than Y”), how many participants are represented? Such claims are often based exclusively on group-level analyses; here, psychologists often fail to report, or perhaps even investigate, how many participants judged X as morally worse than Y. More troubling, group-level analyses do not necessarily generalize to the person-level. This dissertation first investigates a moral cognition hypothesis about the relation between perceptions of relationship obligations and moral evaluations of helping behavior. It is found that people, on average, judge agents who help strangers as more morally good than agents who help family members, but people also judge agents who help strangers instead of family members as less morally good than agents who help family members instead of strangers. Second, methodological issues with these studies are assessed, fixed, and thus the original psychological effect is retested with better experimental designs, measures, and analyses. Third, it is discovered that the moral cognition hypothesis consistently describes the psychology of only a minority of participants. Moreover, it is discovered that most psychologists misinterpret typical group-level analyses as revealing how prevalent a psychological phenomenon is. Finally, a set of simple and flexible methodological and statistical options are offered to better align typical psychological hypotheses with appropriate analyses, enabling researchers to confront this “group-to-person generalizability” problem in their own work. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

Learning motivation plays a principal role in predicting desirable outcomes such as academic success and engagement in school (Elliot & Dweck, 2005; Spence & Helmreich, 1983). Among several relevant motivational variables, the achievement goal construct currently has received the most research attention in the area of competence-relevant motivation. Theorists are interested in studying achievement goals because goal orientation can influence cognitive processes through key motivational processes and eventually lead to improvement in learning achievement and attitudes (e.g., Ames, 1984; Elliot, 2005). Little is known, however, about regulations in achievement goals over time. In the present study, I want to address this oversight, focusing primarily on the foundational question of how students' achievement goals are changed and the relations between individual goals and perceptions of classroom structures. Based on previous literature, the current quasi-experimental study focused on the research hypothesis that instructional components of a course which are focused on competence (e.g., exam, in-class quiz, writing a paper, in-class activities) influence differentially the adoption or regulation of students' achievement goals in a real classroom. A total of 173 college students from an introductory educational psychology course participated in this study. I adopted five statistical approaches to investigate changes and stability in achievement goals and used multiple regression analyses to verify the relations between achievement goals and perceptions of class goals. Overall, the results of the current study provide clear and consistent evidence for the presence of both stability and change. All achievement goals had high stability for each instructional task through differential and ipsative continuity. Mean-level change analyses showed a considerable decline in the tendency in each individual goal pursuit. Interestingly, students' mastery goals toward an exam increased significantly whereas performance-avoidance goals decreased. Finally, cluster analysis suggested changes in cluster memberships between the pre- and post-measure of achievement goals toward each instructional task and participants' perceptions of classroom goals. The results and findings of the current study provide important implications for both research methodology used to investigate achievement goals and instructional design in the classroom. Limitations of the current investigation and suggestions for future studies are discussed. / text

In this thesis, a microsimulation model was developed using methods which were intended to overcome the main criticism of earlier models developed in Australia - that their estimation of the distribution of health benefits1 across income groups was not accurate. To determine whether the new model � called the Person Level Model of Pharmaceutical Benefits (PLM-PB) � was more accurate, two typical means-based models were also built to replicate the most commonly used methods in Australia. A comparison of the results of the three models revealed that while they produced comparable results at the aggregate when compared with administrative data, the PLM-PB was much more accurate in capturing distributional differences by beneficiary and medication type. The PLM-PB also indicated that, as anticipated, PBS benefits were more pro-poor than earlier means-based models had suggested. The PLM-PB had another important advantage in that the method also captured the variation in the use of medication and thus the subsidy received within sub-populations. As the PLM-PB was found to be more accurate than the means-based model, a multivariate analysis of the distribution of PBS subsidy across a number of socio-economic groups was undertaken as an example application of the model. It was found that health status (defined by number of recent illnesses) and concession card type were most important in explaining the amount of PBS subsidy received. This indicates that the distribution of PBS expenditure meets the policy objectives of assisting those most in need, whether need is defined as poor health or low income. 1 Benefits refer to expenditure as transfers from government to individuals rather than the general health benefits of using medication.