Poor software quality leads to lost profits and even loss of life. U.S. organizations lose billions of dollars annually because of poor software quality. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies that quality assurance (QA) leaders in small software development organizations used for successful software quality assurance (SQA) processes. A case study provided the best research design to allow for the exploration of organizational and managerial processes. The target population group was the QA leaders of 3 small software development organizations who successfully implemented SQA processes, located in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. The conceptual framework that grounded this study was total quality management (TQM) established by Deming in 1980. Face-to-face semistructured interviews with 2 QA leaders from each organization and documentation including process and training materials provided all the data for analysis. NVivo software aided a qualitative analysis of all collected data using a process of disassembling the data into common codes, reassembling the data into themes, interpreting the meaning, and concluding the data. The resulting major themes were Agile practices, documentation, testing, and lost profits. The results were in contrast to the main themes discovered in the literature review, although there was some overlap. The implications for positive social change include the potential to provide QA leaders with the strategies to improve SQA processes, thereby allowing for improved profits, contributing to the organizations' longevity in business, and strengthening the local economy.

Becoming a new parent can cause both immense joy and immense stress that leads to increases and decreases in a new parent’s feeling of life satisfaction. In addition, working as a mental health clinician is a frequently challenging career. Given that many clinicians also become parents while working during the course of their careers, it is surprising that there is not more research on the experience of clinicians who become new parents. More research is needed to find out how people balance the stresses of new parenthood and their emotionally challenging jobs. There is some research on “stress-related growth” that suggests that people can experience stressful or traumatic events and emerge on the other side feeling like they have achieved positive personal growth. This study attempted to find out if this occurs when clinicians become parents. This was a narrative study aimed to add to the research literature on parent clinician’s (clinicians who were also parents) lives by presenting their stories of becoming new parents. Five parent clinicians were interviewed on two separate occasions and those interviews were transcribed; the transcriptions were edited into five individual stories that detail the parent clinician’s unique challenges, how they navigated their challenges, and how they reflected on their experiences and their personal growth. The five parent clinicians recounted many positive and negative experiences that new parenthood had on both their clinical work and personal lives. In addition, they described how their families and identities helped them to make meaning out of the challenges they faced. The parent clinicians all talked about how either the presence or absence of social support, or their personal and professional relationships, impacted their lives when they became new parents. Social support included institutional support such as their employers or graduate departments and personal support such as their co-parents, families, and friends. This support either helped or hindered the parent clinician’s ability to balance the demands of parenthood and work. Furthermore, the findings supported previous research on stress-related growth that suggest that cognitive processing (thinking about an event after it occurred) and social support predict the perception of positive personal growth. This was the first known narrative study on the impacts of new parenthood on mental health clinicians and the study adds to the research literature on clinician’s lived experiences. In addition, the findings from the study can help training directors, clinical supervisors, and agency directors to develop new policies that increase new parents’ social support which may help them weather the storms of becoming a new parent while working as a clinician.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This qualitative study explored the communication experiences of clinical educators who provide patient education on behalf of pharmaceutical company sponsors. It investigated how these educators navigate a medical encounter within the domain of three regulatory drivers—on-label compliance, fair-balance presentation, and adverse event reporting. The study used the ecological model of communication in medical encounters and the theory of Communication Privacy Management (CPM) as the lenses for interpreting the data. The main data were telephonic interviews with twenty-six clinical educators who delivered education services for pharmaceutical companies. Member checking, in the form of three post-interview focus groups, was also used. Seven themes emerged: (a) political/legal contexts factors greatly influenced clinical educators’ communication with patients; (b) the influence of factors within this contexts would frequently force educators to experience ethical dilemmas; (c) a new context, the disease and treatment context, emerged from the interviews as having significant influence in the conversation dynamics; (d) educators employed communication strategies to better navigate within the political/legal and disease and treatment context ecological factors; (e) educators believed they needed to establish and maintain trust throughout the engagement process for them to successfully solicit meaningful patient disclosures; (f) educators managed the information disclosed to them by patients using routinized rules as well as changing rules; and (g) educators managed multiple types of confidant roles with patients including stakeholder, deliberate, and reluctant. A main implication for this study is that educators feel ethically and morally bound to do whatever was necessary to avoid breaching the trust they established with patients. For some, this attitude prevailed over their obligation to deliver a compliant educational engagement. Hence, pharmaceutical companies need to recognize that for many of their clinical educators, the question of whether to be compliant is not a legal or policy matter. It is a moral and ethical issue. That being said, educators were also skilled at using communication strategies to navigate through the compliance and disease and treatment barriers that functioned as self-management barriers. Many of those skills often served to influence the way educators created privacy rules and managed privacy decisions related to their patient engagements.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Metaphors are used to conceptualize one thing in terms of another that is more familiar or concrete. The use of metaphors in patient-provider communication has helped providers generate empathy and explain concepts effectively, improving patient satisfaction and understanding of health-related concepts. With advances in technology, concepts related to health monitoring have become increasingly complex, making the potential for using metaphors in health communication at its highest relevancy. With the increase in health data there is a need to improve tools to help people understand complex information. Ethical considerations, such as possible misinterpretation of health data, as well as the potential to widen disparities because of factors such as health literacy, must be addressed. Metaphors are powerful tools that can make explanation of information accessible, accurate, and effective for people who are monitoring their data. The current research aims to contribute design recommendations for using metaphors in communication between clinicians and patients for monitoring biventricular (BiV) pacing, a complex device data element used in the monitoring of patients with heart failure (HF) who have cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) devices. The overarching goal is to understand this process such that it can be applied to broader communication needs in health informatics. The study addresses the following aims: Aim 1: Identify metaphors clinicians use to conceptualize BiV pacing for CRT devices using semi-structured interviews with clinician experts. Aim 2: Identify metaphors that help patients conceptualize BiV pacing for CRT devices using semi-structured interviews with patients, and exploring the metaphors identified in Aim 1. Aim 3: Develop design recommendations for health informatics interventions using an understanding of metaphors that help patients understand BiV pacing for CRT devices. Themes from analysis of Aims 1 and 2 contribute to recommendations for the use of metaphors in health informatics interventions. The purpose of this work is to contribute to an in-depth understanding of metaphors in a specific health informatics context. Importantly, this research applies methods and principles from the field of health communication to address a communication-related issue in health informatics. / 2022-12-28

This is a single case study of the socialization of a woman in the public school superintendency at the end of the 20th century. It is a description of the forces that come to bear on her behavior as the chief executive of a school system. Socialization is a continuous process of adaptation to and personalization of one's environment. Further, it is believed to be a process that occurs throughout one's professional career and life and not a fixed, end state; therefore, one's career is embedded within one's socialization for life. A model is proposed which represents female socialization as dynamic role creation through the responses of accommodation and role personalization as they are affected by the interaction of organizational, community, and personal forces. These forces are communicated through the transmittal processes of formal policies, networking, and mentoring. The unique experiences of this superintendent are explored to see if these forces of influence appear in this situation. Data collected through interviews and document reviews were coded and then analyzed with a matrix. Seven categories of subjects were interviewed, so this study not only provides the perspectives of the superintendent but also those of her spouse, secretary, current and former colleagues in the central office, a building-level administrator, current and former members of the school board, and community residents. Documents from the news media, records of school board meetings, and division publications provided information about the total experiences of this superintendent. / Ed. D.

Thesis advisor: Michael G. Pratt / Evidence is mounting that recognition from others may play a critical role in shaping an individual’s experience of meaningful work; so how do workers find meaningfulness when their work is “invisible”? I examine this tension through a qualitative, inductive study of the occupation of linemen—the women and men who construct and repair power lines. By examining this invisible occupation, my research explains the conditions that foster the “recognition gap”—a disparity between the recognition linemen believe they deserve and the recognition they actually receive. This recognition gap ultimately produces meaningfulness insecurity—feelings of uncertainty or doubt about the meaningfulness of their work. Moreover, this research also explains how linemen overcome this meaningfulness insecurity through intuitive feelings of pride in beautiful completed work. Through a process motivated by a desire to avoid criticism for ugly work, linemen develop “expert schemas” that allow for intuitive—rapid, nonconscious, and affectively charged—reactions to the appearance of a completed job. When positive, these intuitive judgements foster experiences of meaningfulness. By explaining these processes, this dissertation re-casts meaningfulness from an individual accomplishment to one that is deeply dependent on social cues; and from a process requiring thoughtful reflection to one driven by intuitive judgements. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Management and Organization.

This dissertation investigated the reason nurses (RNs, LPNs) stayed at one job for 20 years or longer and compared their responses to nurses (RNs, CMAs) who changed jobs more than four times in 20 years. The study divided their responses into two categories, hygiene factors or motivation factors, based on Herzberg’s two factor theory. The dissertation topic was chosen to determine if increased pay has a significant impact on the long-term employment of nurses, although quantitative research in the field heavily promoted pay as a solution to turnover. Healthcare companies incur costly consequences of turnover and this qualitative study adds information to the field on potential interventions to address and decrease turnover. This dissertation examined the real reasons these participants stayed at their jobs long-term and why these short-term employees left jobs frequently, with the results showing that pay would not decrease turnover of short-term employees. The long-term people stayed for motivation factors and the short-term people left to seek hygiene factors. The quantitative research in the field, focused on interventions to decrease turnover, was not supported in this research.

The Boko Haram terror group has utilized more women as suicide bombers than any other group in history. While prior research has examined why this phenomenon is occurring, and what makes Boko Haram a unique terror group, the present study examines how these attacks are being perpetrated, or enacted, by the female bombers. Utilizing the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which is the largest terrorism incident database available, the study examined the incidents of female suicide bombings perpetrated by Boko Haram. The open-sourced citations provided by the GTD were compiled and turned into a complementary qualitative dataset. Overall, there were 151 incidents of female suicide bombings by Boko Haram between 2014 and 2017, of which 102 were included in the final sample for the study. Results of content analysis indicate that there are similarities between the perpetration of suicide bombings by females and other acts of crime, violence, and terrorist acts committed by other women, but there are also distinct differences. The cultural and social constructs of the region create a unique situation for Boko Haram compared to other terrorist groups that have deployed the female suicide bombing tactic; however, these features also make it difficult to flesh out the overarching issues of coercion, victimization, and kidnapping that the group heavily relies on. Though the ways in which the suicide attacks are enacted can be examined, at this point, it is still unclear whether the young women and girls perpetrating the attacks are acting out of their own volition, high levels of coercion, or a blend of the two.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the role of studentaculty interaction in retaining nontraditional community college students. There are a large and growing number of nontraditional students, especially at the community college level. Being labeled as nontraditional typically implies that there are multiple competitors for the time and resources of these students. Often, nontraditional students are less connected to their institutions, and exploring the relationships between faculty and student is a way to meet them where they are: in the classroom. As a result of the label nontraditional being difficult to define, the researcher used seven characteristics to provide a variety of contexts for the interviews. The study included 10 students age 24 or older who had completed 12-36 hours and attended a community college in the southeastern United States. They were asked to participate in 30-minute, one-on-one interviews regarding their interactions with faculty and the role of these interactions on their decisions to persist. Findings suggest that continuity decisions are largely based internally. However, 20% of the participants attributed their decisions to continue to interactions with their instructors. Attributes that contributed to making the instructors more approachable were openness, being oneself, and speaking to students as peers, rather than subordinates. Throughout the interviews, the participants admitted to seeing themselves differently than traditional students, but they did not feel like their instructors treated them differently. They assumed the responsibility of initiating contact, but they also appreciated initiation and acknowledgement by the instructors. Formal interaction did not appear to be as important as casual interaction. Even students who appear to be doing well can benefit from interaction, leading the researcher to conclude that interaction can be beneficial as both a preventative and a prescriptive measure. Educating both faculty and nontraditional students on the seemingly untapped value of interaction can help increase the retention rates at the community college level.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a disability characterized by social communication deficits, repetitive and restrictive behaviors, and language and communication deficits. Its prevalence among the general population has led to increased efforts to intervene effectively during childhood and adolescence. Prior quantitative and qualitative research suggests that camps are an effective setting to deliver social skills intervention for children with ASD; however, there are gaps in research that need to be addressed, such as a lack of empirical qualitative evidence, difficulty with language and communication issues inherent to ASD, and limited reliable studies involving the photovoice methodologies. The research questions designed to address such gaps asked what a camp for adolescents with ASD might mean to participants and whether such a camp might produce a change in belonging, self-confidence, and independence among its campers. As such, this study employed the photovoice qualitative methodology to interview 8 adolescent males about their experiences at Camp Jigsaw, a social skills camp in the southeastern United States of America. Results of phenomenological qualitative analysis suggest that the most dominant themes expressed by campers were Positive Emotions, Socialization, Unique Experiences, Collective Identity, and Self-Improvement. The interplay and linkages between these themes revealed that the security of belonging with a group of like-minded peers resulted in increased independent experiences and self-confidence among participants of Camp Jigsaw.