Evidence exists today which indicates that our present motor carrier regulatory system, rather than "protect the public interest", might actually inhibit the efficient provision of transportation services to the economy. Accepting such a view of the regulated motor transport market as valid, this thesis could serve as a model from which legislators might begin to re-write our motor carrier act. It is assumed throughout this work that such an undertaking is well overdue. The possible use of this thesis for such a purpose is its primary justification for existence. In order to serve as a basis for such a legislative revision, the model and recommendations contained herein should be designed to maximize the potential benefits which might accrue to the industry and the shipping public. The philosophical bias flowing throughout this work is the conviction that this maximization of benefits could best be realized through increased competition among firms, coupled with the minimization, through reduced regulation, of any economic threats to the stability of the national transportation system. Thus, the attempt is made in the model to be presented to provide for an increased level of industry competition while retaining those essential elements of regulation upon which the national transportation policy was originally based. The approach taken in this work is one of review, description, analysis, model-building and commentary. The current regulatory issues of concern to the motor transportation industry are reviewed in chapter 2. The market structure is described in chapter 3, followed by an analysis of price and output determination in chapter 4. The framework for a new approach to price determination in this industry is developed in chapters 5 and 6. The model presented is intended to replace many of the regulatory procedures in use today. Chapter 7 contains comments on the relevance to the industry of the model constructed in chapters 5 and 6, to include a discussion of its probable impact upon several of the most perplexing problems facing regulators today. The appendix was added to enhance the reader' s und er-st.and.i.ng of the extent to which present-day regulated motor transport rate structures fail to represent rational and economically justifiable charges for services rendered. This thesis will not continue in the modern trend of regulatory literature--that is, resorting to emotionalism and allegations aimed at removing regulation from the transport industry (16). Nor is its purpose to justify the oontinued existence of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Rather, the admittedly ambitious goal of this work is to present what is felt to be a much-needed new format for regulation in this field--one based upon the ideals of economic theory, the tenets of national transportation policy, and the restraints of present-day market realities. With this goal in mind, every attempt will be made to announce assumptions, identify opinions and employ rigid economic analysis whenever possible.

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Job-related stress occurs as one of the most serious issues in modern era in developed nations. It has direct and negative effects on employees' productivity and it may have negative impacts on employees' health. One of the potential results of prolonged stressors at work place is burnout and this response may lead to physical, emotional, and psychological exhaustion that can occur at both individual and organizational levels. Burnout is a job related threat that provokes social stress and can directly affect an individual's health. Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is commonly used to measure an individual's overall/global health and quality of life. Another serious issue, mobbing, usually leads to some individual and organizational complications. It affects the organizational commitment, motivation and efficiency of staff, job satisfaction of employee, and may lead to potential burnout of the employees. The primary objective of this study is to determine whether stress and mobbing are directly related to burnout; and, whether burnout leads to an adverse effect on the HRQoL of Turkish territorial state representatives (TSRs). This study examines four specific research questions: 1) Whether and to what extent do the levels of perceived job related stress and mobbing affect the level of perceived burnout syndrome of TSRs? 2) Whether and to what extent is the level of perceived burnout syndrome associated with HRQoL of TSRs? 3) To what extent does the level of perceived burnout mediate the effects of job-related stress on HRQoL of TSRs? 4) What are the mediating factors between job burnout and HRQoL? This study is expected to offer valuable and insightful information about the role of job burnout factors influencing the variability in TSRs' HRQoL. The study utilized two statistical analyses, which were descriptive analysis and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) which allows for the assessment of the relationships specified in the hypotheses and the SEM was used to validate the theoretically driven model. The findings of the study supported the hypotheses of the study, which asserted that there were correlations between job-related stress and burnout, mobbing and burnout, and burnout and HRQoL. The CFA results established that job-related stress was positively and significantly associated with the burnout of TSRs, while perceived mobbing was positively and significantly related to the burnout of TSRs. Moreover, perceived HRQoL of TSRs was negatively associated with the burnout of TSRs. Further, the findings indicated that the relationship between job-related stress and burnout and the relationship between burnout and HRQoL of TSRs were statistically significant. Thus the variable had a positive effect on burnout and a negative effect on the HRQoL of TSRs. In summary, the findings of the study showed that results and propositions of the theoretical frameworks of the study and literature were consistent with one another.

This study examines the factors that facilitate and hinder the use of performance information by public administrators in local governments in Florida. Acknowledging the incompleteness of many theoretical and conceptual models in previous performance management studies and the absence of theory on the use of performance information; this study utilizes a grounded theory approach to develop and test a model analyzing the use of performance information. The research focuses on cities and counties, members of the Florida Benchmarking Consortium (FBC), and surveys public administrators whose tasks are related with the collection and/or reporting of performance information. The study examines three research questions: First, to what extent and in what capacity do local government administrators use performance information? Second, what are the predictors of the use of performance information among local government administrators? Finally, to what extent does the design adequacy of a performance measurement system (PMS), institutionalization of performance measurement (IPM), organizational support (OS), individual factors (IF) and external influences (EI) impact the use of performance information among local government administrators? To collect data on the above questions, an online survey was administrated to public administrators involved in the 2015-2016 FBC data collection cycle. The data were analyzed with structural equation modeling (SEM). The results of the study demonstrate that institutionalization of performance measurement has the strongest statistically significant positive association with the use of performance information followed by the influence of the design adequacy of the performance measurement system. Organizational support, through institutionalization of performance measurement, has an indirect influence on the use of performance information. Interestingly, in this study individual factors were not found to be significantly associated with the use of performance information.

Homelessness is a complex problem replete with profound social distress and suffering, but with few adequate solutions. The homeless are a marginalized population particularly vulnerable to structural forces and policy decisions, including lack of affordable housing, unemployment, systemic inequalities, and lack of adequate social safety net. Perspectives of homeless people are understudied in anthropological scholarship which tends to focus on service providers, with comparatively less attention on homeless people themselves who are commonly subjected to medicalizing and criminalizing discourses. Using ethnographic research methods, including participant-observation and interviews with homeless people who pursue food pantry services at Hope Helps NGO in Oviedo, Florida, this paper examines the experiences of homeless people in Florida, where the issue of homelessness has been acute and is often depoliticized in public discourses. Specifically , it focuses on coping strategies of homeless people in Oviedo, and ways in which they understand their life circumstances and secure necessary services. Findings demonstrate that the Florida homeless view reasons for their homelessness as primarily economic, but rarely critique policies behind low wages or unaffordable housing. The narratives also show that the homeless in this study obtain resources through networking, and despite use of assistance services, view themselves as independent, active agents. Results of this research have potential to improve the way social services for the homeless are structured, and to inform policy relevant to homeless in Florida. Furthermore, this research brings attention to a marginalized problem and population, and considers how particular discourses function to maintain a structurally inadequate system.

The cost of healthcare in the United States is on an upward trajectory towards an unsustainable level. In order to address this, Congress and the Obama Administration passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 to begin the process of controlling these costs. Within the ARRA is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) section which creates financial incentives to invest in Health Information Technology (HIT) and to develop a means to measure the Meaningful Use of specific functions of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). This research examines the widely used Joint Commission datasets to determine their suitability as a basis of meeting the government mandated measuring of Meaningful Use. The datasets used for this study consists of hospital level performance measures with a sample size of 370 hospital samples of HIT Use Intensity and Cardiovascular Performance attained from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). An Organizational Network Theoretical approach was applied to the data in a non-experimental, sample-resample design to data collected in 2007. A Structural Equation Model (SEM) was built to test for the strength of the correlation between HIT Use Intensity and Cardiovascular Performance and a Latent Growth Curve Model (LGM) was built to examine the effect of the trajectory of HIT Use Intensity on the trajectory of Cardiovascular Performance. The SEM found a weak (.18) correlation between HIT Use Intensity and Cardiovascular Performance and the model only captured 12 percent of the variance. The LGM found no convergence between the trajectories of HIT Use Intensity and Cardiovascular Performance. This may have been the result of the data being non-normally distributed and heavily skewed to the high end of the scale. The policy implications of this study indicate that while Joint vi Commission data capture only a small amount of the variance attributed to HIT Use it does show a weak but positive correlation between increases in HIT Use Intensity and Increases in Cardiovascular Performance at the hospital level. Future research into adjustments to Joint Commission data measures (or others) may prove to be valuable in measuring the Meaningful Use of HIT systems in order to help hospitals make educated decisions on which HIT systems to purchase and the potential benefits associated with them.

The theory selected as the potential framework for better explaining teenage pregnancy, among a cohort of health-insured sexually active teens, was Social Bond Theory. With this theoretical framework in mind, eight research questions were generated, with the primary focus of interest in determining the correlation between ten social bond scale scores to outcome status (deliver, abort and contracept). A 50-item survey instrument was developed for purposes of this research utilizing original and existing demographic and social bond questions. The questionnaire was adapted for use with a CATI system of telephone interviewing, pretested and finally administered to a total of 213 teenage respondents. Results from the stepwise multiple regression analysis showed that among the respondents who sustained a pregnancy, significant differences existed between the deliver and abort groups. The deliver group was more highly religious (p =.001) and more likely to have come from a family of lower socioeconomic status (p =.001) than were the respondents from the abort group. When comparing the abort and contracept respondents, the only significant difference was that the abort group was less connected with family than were the contraceptors (p =.02). For all demographic measures and all remaining social bond measures, these two groups of respondents were not significantly different. Lastly, it was determined that the young women most likely to be teenage mothers among the study respondents were those who were less hopeful about the future (p =.005), were less involved in school-related activities (p =.018), were more religious (p =.023) and were more likely to be of non-white racial/ethnic status (p =.015) than those who successfully contracepted.

Experience, buttressed by a school survey, attested to the presence of homeless children in our schools. These children evince special needs which demand attention, or we may suffer their loss from the school systems, and pay a staggering social cost, later. The problem is that their special needs cannot be met if these children are not identified as homeless, and rarely do they self-identify. The dissertation develops a screening test for the identification of the homeless children in our schools in order to treat their special needs. After a pre-test survey, the test was piloted at an inner-city school, refined, and administered as circumstances suggested. The results confirmed the existence of homeless children with special needs in the schools. An increased ability to identify these children, coupled with enhanced teacher training and curriculum development, can help retain and treat these children within the educational process--and, it is hoped, avoid the social cost.

The focus of this study was to explore the reentry of children who were discharged from foster care to their biological families and to examine differences between them and the children who remained home following discharge. An exploratory ex post facto descriptive study with a comparative approach was conducted at the New Britain Department of Children and Youth Services in Connecticut from January 1990 through January 1991. The study sample comprised two groups of 50 children from one month to 12 years of age who had at least one admission into foster care, the "Readmission" group and the "At Home" group. All children fitting the sample criteria were included. Data were collected by structured interview with the twenty social workers who had responsibility for each child. The interview questionnaire was designed to identify variables which have an effect on a child's chances for repeat admissions into foster care. Discriminant analysis and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Children readmitted to care tended to be placed and readmitted for reasons which indicated the existence of chronic problems in their families. The children's discharge from foster care was more often initiated by the parent's request than as a direct result of any improvement in the reasons which led to their placement. Parents of children readmitted to care had less contact with their children during placement. The study's main contribution was in the isolation and identification of five variables which proved to differentiate the two groups. The sum of parent-child interaction problems, the frequency of parent-child telephone contact during placement, worker initiated discharge, preparation time for discharge and the frequency of worker visits following discharge emerged as strong predictors of readmission. Although these variables are highly correlated with readmission, further studies are needed to determine if these variables are causally related. The findings stress the need for a thorough assessment throughout the agency's involvement. This would enable workers to locate children at risk for readmission and their families.

Between 1965 and 1980, Taiwan's labor-intensive, export-oriented economy grew rapidly and yet retained relative income equality. This situation is contradictory to both modernization and dependency theories of the link between economic growth and income distribution. The hypothesis of this research is that low disarticulation is a key reason for Taiwan's income equality. Disarticulation refers to the juxtaposition of economic sectors with different levels of development and productivity. In many peripheral countries, the most advanced economic sectors are controlled by multinationals and aimed at an export market. Thus, production and consumption of the leading sectors are often not for the domestic market. This is one reason peripheral governments tend to be inactive in stimulating social consumption and also relatively weak in their control over economic growth policies. The Taiwan case partly fits this model of peripheral development, in the sense that they are highly active economically, but inactive in shaping social policy. Taiwan's political economy was shaped by historical factors (Japanese colonialism, U.S. aid, the external regime, etc.), and also by the state's active intervention in economic activities. However, welfare policies were ignored by the government. The government implicitly permitted employers to exploit labor in the interest of export income. As a result, individual families rather than the state or employers had the responsibility of providing protection for their members. People living on low wages had to adopt several strategies to afford a family. The relative income equality which developed was the result of both self-exploitation within a family and mutual exploitation among low-income families. Recent signs of a shift towards greater income inequality in the 1980s may be attributed to two factors. First, the previous mechanism of creating income equality through a combination of agricultural and industrial income for most families has largely ceased. Second, financial liberalization has promoted a process of redistribution of power, wealth, and income. In this process, capital has tended to become more concentrated, while financial regulations are poorly established, generating a growing problem of income inequality. On the other hand, as domestic consumption becomes of greater importance, welfare policies have started to improve as well.