To ensure quality patient care hospitals invest in nursing intellectual capital by allocating financial, human and material resources for nurses to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to provide safe patient care. This study’s purpose was to test selected propositions of the middle-range theory of nursing intellectual capital which provides a conceptualization of the influence of nurses’ knowledge, skills and experience (nursing human capital) to patient and organizational outcomes. The theory was systematically developed after a critical review of the literature. It proposes that nursing human capital (registered nurses’ experience, and knowledge and skills acquired from continuing professional development including university courses, conferences, workshops, in-services, specialty certification) is related to variables within the work environment (nurse staffing, employer support for nurse continuing professional development), which in turn, is associated with the quality of patient care (adverse events) and the recruitment and retention of nurses. The theory also proposes that nursing structural capital, nursing knowledge available within practice guidelines, is associated with the quality of patient care. A cross-sectional design was used to test the proposed relationships. The study took place in 6 acute care hospitals in two provinces of Canada. Financial, human resource and risk management data were collected from hospital departmental databases and a survey of unit managers. Data from 91 inpatient units were used with structural equation modeling to test the theory’s propositions. The results indicated that nurses’ knowledge and skills represented by the proportion of RNs with degrees and proportion of RNs with specialty certification were directly associated with low hospital-acquired infection rates. Nurse experience, measured as mean years RN professional experience and RN unit tenure, was found to be significantly related to higher RN recruitment and retention. The proportion of RNs with degrees was found to partially mediate the influence of nurse staffing on hospital-acquired infections. The results provide preliminary evidence of the association of nursing intellectual capital with patient and organizational outcomes. The findings may assist administrators with fiscal and human resource decision-making related to the education of nurses within acute care hospitals, and professional organizations with policies governing nursing education and continuing professional development.

Despite our awareness of the fascination modern humans have with the Internet, little is known about how and why colleges and universities create and maintain Websites. At the most general level, in this case study, I hypothesize that university Websites serve as communication and marketing tools in attracting students. At the most specific level, I postulate that civil engineering programs with Web pages depicting images of women and minorities would be more successful in recruiting and retaining women and students of color than civil engineering programs with Web pages displaying fewer or no images of women and minorities. The primary goal of this case study was to examine the relationships between Website information content and the recruitment and retention of women and minority pre-civil engineering students. The second, but equally important, goal was to investigate the reason(s) why, despite efforts to recruit and retain individuals from disenfranchised populations into STEM majors, students from these groups not only remain underrepresented in engineering, but leave this discipline at a much higher rate than their non-minority male counterparts. This case study focused on two Florida state university civil engineering programs and drew on ethnographic research methods. I used interviews, focus groups, Web pages, demographic sheets, and observations to examine the relationships between Website content and access to undergraduate civil engineering programs for women and students of color. The study sample involved 40 respondents, including pre-civil engineering students, civil engineering professors, and university administrators. Research findings suggested that Internet marketing has become a key strategy used by civil engineering programs in recruiting and retaining students from underrepresented groups. Additionally, the study revealed that both prospective and pre-civil engineering students use departmental Websites for communication and enrollment purposes. Last, but certainly not least, the study found that online climate is a significant factor in the recruitment and retention of women and students of color in civil engineering programs.

The purpose of this study was to determine the factors associated with choosing mental health nursing as a career, and to explore the possible ways of improving recruitment and retention of mental health nurses in Kenya. Quantitative, explorative descriptive research was conducted. Data collection was done by using questionnaires and focus group discussions. Three groups participated in the study: practicing mental health nurses (n=10), post-basic mental health nursing students (n=10) and final year basic nursing students (n=184). The findings revealed that basic nursing students do not intend to pursue a career in mental health nursing, and that there is an aging population of mental health nurses. The barriers to the mental health field include stigma, a poor working environment and inadequate career guidance. Marketing, policy and regulatory reforms, as well as positive work environments have been identified as strategies for improving the recruitment and retention of mental health nurses in Kenya. / Health Studies / Thesis (M.A. (Health Studies))

The recent growth of Teach For America (TFA) has enabled it to substantially expand the teacher labour supply in many rural Southern communities, one of its largest and fastest-growing partnership subsets. Though it is generally accepted that these areas face more severe teacher shortages than most other regions in the country, there is little research as to how these staffing challenges arise or how they might be resolved; TFA’s potential to grow the rural Southern teacher supply thus signals a promising opportunity in need of further research. This work offers a case study of teacher labour outcomes in the Mississippi-Arkansas Delta, TFA’s oldest and largest rural Southern partnership site. In this region, local schools have experienced a 600 per-cent increase in corps member presence since 2008; consequently, TFA provided anywhere from a quarter to a half of the area’s new teacher labour supply each year from 2008 to 2010. A mixed-methods analysis illuminates both the causes of Delta teacher shortages and TFA’s potential to address these vacancies. Within the Delta, local schools face chronic teacher shortages because the communities they serve are overwhelmingly poor, geographically isolated, and racially segregated. TFA appears to have targeted the Delta communities where teacher labour policies have systematically fallen short, as it partners with districts bearing the greatest share of the region’s aggregate teacher vacancies. Additional statistical testing reveals that amongst these hard-to-staff districts, TFA has further focussed its resources into the schools that serve more rural, less educated, and/or predominantly African American populations. In this way, TFA funnels its corps members into the very districts where state reform efforts have struggled most, thus serving as a powerful resource for realigning ‘sticky’ outcomes in the most hard-to-staff Delta school districts. These findings notwithstanding, closer examination reveals significant drawbacks and limitations to current TFA outcomes in the rural Southern Delta. TFA does not saturate hard-to-staff school districts enough to produce statistically significant changes in local teacher vacancy rates. Instead, the programme appears to have established an unofficial threshold for the number of teachers placed per district; once this ceiling has been reached, additional corps members are funnelled into a new area regardless of the original district’s remaining need. Additionally, there is no long-term ‘exit strategy’ to help Delta districts employing TFA corps members to eventually cultivate their own high-quality teacher labour supply, thus leaving them perpetually dependent on TFA to staff their classrooms. Preliminary evidence suggests that state governments could address these shortcomings through 1) increased financial support for TFA to fully saturate vacancies in current partnership districts, as well as 2) the simultaneous development of grow-your-own teacher certification programmes in rural Delta districts. The evidence suggests that these two strategies would improve TFA as a targeted teacher recruitment strategy for hard-to-staff communities both in the Delta and across the programme’s nine other rural Southern partnership sites.

This interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study was implemented to explore and describe the initial and long-term motivations of community volunteers within a selected homeless shelter in central Indiana. The settlement house movement of human service delivery was the conceptual framework, which provided guidance and understanding concerning why and how community members provide human services through volunteerism. The research question examined the ways in which long-term volunteers thought about and made sense of their motivations to volunteer initially and over the long term at a homeless shelter. To answer the research question, the IPA methodology was implemented with 6 long-term community volunteers at a selected shelter. This design provided rich qualitative text that was analyzed to develop themes to explain and describe how the 6 study participants made sense of their individual motivations descriptively, emotionally, religiously, and socially. The overarching conclusion was that all 6 participants shared a common theme, which was Evangelical tradition, volunteerism, and social responsibility. This new finding provides a first look at the motivations of community volunteers, previously unknown in academic literature, and indicates a key subgroup of volunteers that may be the focus of future research on assisting community shelters with recruiting and retaining community members for the effort to eradicate homelessness in the United States.

The present knowledge of factors associated with older adults’ physical activity behaviour is limited. Therefore, this study trialled an innovative physical activity program for older adults, investigating effective recruitment and retention strategies, and exploring the adults’ perceptions of physical activity. A total of 573 subjects were recruited into the quasi-randomised controlled trial, located in 30 intervention and 30 control neighbourhoods in the Perth metropolitan area. The initial response rate was 74% (260/352) in the intervention group and 82% (313/382) in the control group. Self-reported questionnaires administered at three time points (baseline, 3-months, 6-months) measured physical activity levels, personal and demographic information, including perception of financial struggle, proximity to friends, and other psychosocial data. Descriptive statistics, repeated measure analysis of variance, logistic regression and generalised estimating equations were used in the analysis. Qualitative data on the participants’ perceptions of physical activity were collected through one-on-one interviews (n=16). The results showed that: 1. This cost-effective recruitment procedure facilitated the selection of a reasonably representative sample of 65 to 74 year olds from the Perth metropolitan area. Names of 7378 older adults were obtained from the Federal Electoral Roll, then 6401 potential subjects were matched to telephone numbers and phoned with subjects meeting the screening criteria invited to join the program (n = 4209). From this sample, 573 subjects were recruited. More females (63%) than males (37%) were recruited. / The study attracted a greater proportion of ‘obese’ older adults (27%) relative to state averages. 2. Over the intervention period there was a significant increase in participants’ total physical activity of 2.25 hours per week (p >.001). The General Estimating Equation analysis confirmed significant increase in physical activity from baseline to midpoint (p=.002) and to post intervention (p=.0031). Perceptions of financial struggle (p=.020) were positively correlated with physical activity time spent by participants, whereas having friends or acquaintances living nearby (p=.037) had a significant negative correlation with physical activity time. 3. At the end of the intervention, 32% of the intervention group and 25% of the control group had dropped out, resulting in an overall drop out rate of 28%. Most of the attrition occurred in the first 3 months (77%). Characteristics of individuals lost to attrition (n=86, 35%) were compared with program completers (n=162, 65%). Logistic regression analysis showed that those lost to attrition came from areas of lower socio-economic status, were overweight, were less physically active, and had a lower walking self-efficacy score and a higher loneliness score. The results suggest that to improve retention and to avoid potential bias, early assessment of these characteristics should be undertaken to identify individuals at risk of attrition. 4. Based on the finding of this research, future intervention studies should consider: the role of tertiary students as a skilled resource; the use of volunteers to contain costs; the importance of a tailored program; the appropriateness of walking as a form of physical activity for this age group; the enjoyment associated with a walking group; and the usefulness of social support. / This practical program is potentially effective and sustainable for mobilizing physically inactive older people. 5. Qualitative research highlighted the need for older adults to receive more specific information on: the benefits of physical activity; the role of pain management in physical activity; and the concept that involvement in physical activity in younger years leads to involvement when older. The older adults also expressed a desire to engage in less age appropriate activities. These results suggest that the intervention was successful in recruiting older adults into and retaining them in the intervention, documenting a need for early identification of individuals at risk of attrition. The program significantly increased the participants’ weekly mean time for physical activity and identified factors that affect their commitment to physical activity programs. This program was practical and could be used as a model for physical activity programs aimed at older adults.

Teacher recruitment and retention challenges facing urban school contexts provided the impetus for this study. High percentages of historically marginalized students, plagued by high poverty rates and low academic performance, as well as substandard facilities and inadequate material resources, serve as causative factors inhibiting recruitment and retention of credentialed teachers in urban schools (Education Commission of the States [ECS], 1999; Guarino et al., 2006; Horng, 2009; USDOE, 2003; 2004; Wirt et al, 2004). Schools and districts attempt to meet chronic teacher shortages in hard-to-staff urban schools by creating innovative teacher preparation schemes, such as the Urban Teaching Academy (UTA). This study focuses on teacher identity formation and prospective efficacy beliefs among a group of students enrolled in UTA. The research questions were examined using interpretive phenomenological inquiry (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) through case study methodology (Yin, 2009). Findings show that the precollegiate student teachers in this study made meaning primarily from a student perspective, thus adhering to prototypical images of teaching characterized by identity markers. Salient components of definitions of teacher identity for precollegiate student teachers are Self and Care. Less relevant components for precollegiate student teachers were Emotion and Context. These components appear most influenced by the temporal distance between the precollegiate Urban Teaching Academy and actual teaching experiences during internship/practicum and subsequent teaching in a professional capacity, suggesting a need to determine whether it is possible for precollegiate student teachers to meet the emotional and contextual demands of teaching at such an early stage. Additionally, this study proposes to extend on the teacher efficacy construct by offering a model for prospective efficacy as it pertains to individuals in teacher preparation at the precollegiate and preservice levels. This model contends that beginning with the self as influenced by personal, social, cultural, historical and political knowledge sources, precollegiate student teachers begin to develop an epistemological stance towards teaching. Over time, precollegiate student teachers build identity capital grounded in the skills, knowledge and dispositions gained through access to varied knowledge sources, which develop as precollegiate student teachers learn theoretical principals of teaching, obtain and learn from performance information, and combine the theory and practice into an epistemological framework that provides impetus for ongoing synergy between theoretical and practical experiences. The broader the base of identity capital from which the precollegiate student teacher draws, the greater the likelihood that she will develop prospective efficacy, or the belief that she will be capable of fulfilling teaching roles and responsibilities in the future. This study informs the literature on precollegiate and preservice teacher identity and extends the literature on teacher efficacy.

本研究係探究中央研究院執行科技部補助獎勵特殊優秀人才獎勵金之情形，研究主軸有三，分別是(一)瞭解個案研究機構執行該獎勵計劃之方式、(二)檢視研究人員對於任職單位執行該獎勵計劃的分配公平及程序公平知覺，(三)探究研究人員對於獎勵計劃實施成效之看法。透過問卷調查法及深度訪談法進行，回收問卷有效樣本201份，深度訪談9位人員。 研究結果發現，多數單位透過行政人員主動將申請科技部獎勵計畫之資訊，超過七成以上受試者對任職單位採用審查方式有所瞭解。評核標準方面認同以學術研究研究成果為主要考量因素，多採取密件或口頭通知獲獎人員，且獲得獎勵金者在接收獎勵申請訊息較充足。在分配公平及程序公平認知方面，多數認同獲獎者按照個人研究的績效差異，獲得不同的獎勵分配，普遍不認同獎金採平均分配；高達九成以上受試者認同審核成員或委員會決定獎勵名單，避免對任何人有偏見，且多數認同應秉持「公正性」、「客觀性」做出「正確性」的獎勵名單。實施成效上認同應有充分穩定的經費來源，且獎勵金達到單位內留才功能大於外部攬才之功能。 在現行待遇制度無法調整下，運用彈性薪資方式，額外給與特殊優秀的研究人才非法定的獎勵金，對人才延攬及留任方式有所助益，本研究建議行政院其他給與項目法制化作業的過程應採取積極開放的態度；組織內部管理面，建議邀集同仁參與討論，訂定符合公平及公正之獎勵執行規定，採取委員會方式審查獎勵名單並公布受獎名單，並可思考規劃訂定明確的實質分配法則，使各獲獎人員間之獎勵額度應有差異性，且研究績效良好程度與獎勵額度成正比關係，以有效地激勵員工。 / This study focuses on the execution of fellowships provided by Ministry of Science and Technology for for outstanding talents. The purposes of this study are: 1. How the fellowships are distributed; 2. The perceptions of distributive and procedural justice of research fellows from different institutes; 3. Opinions of research fellows for the effectiveness of the fellowships. The study is conducted through questionnaires with 201 effective samples, and interviews with 9 fellows. This study indicates that most of the institutes actively notify their fellows about the fellowships. More than 70 percents of experimental subjects know the way of distribution, while senior fellows know more well. The examinees recognize using research achievement as a major measure for distribution. Most of the fellows receiving fellowships are notified by classified or oral notices, and more informed about the fellowships. In perceptions of distributive and procedural justice, most examinees prefer distributing fellowships by research achievement of each individual rather than uniformly, and also agree with establishing a distribution committee to avoid prejudices. In addition, many of experimental subjects suggest that the fellowships should be stable and long-term, while thinking the money contributes more to staying instead of recruiting elites. Under current statutory and fixed salary structure, additional and flexible bonus contributes to staying and recruiting talents. We suggest that Administrative Yuan should be more open and aggressive when regulating and adjusting salary structure. For Academia Sinica, the fellowships should be always distributed by corresponding committees in a fair and differentiated manner which are fully and publicly discussed. The amount of fellowship should also be proportional to individual's research achievement to effectively drive employees.

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction / Margaret G. Shroyer / The goal of this research study was to identify the factors that influence community college students’ educational attainment as future teachers. In this naturalistic case study, three forms of data collection were used to answer the research question: 1) documents and reports; 2) student surveys; and 3) student interviews. The case for this study was the teacher preparation program at a mid-sized community college, Butler Community College (Butler), in El Dorado, Kansas. The population of the study included 83 elementary education majors enrolled in the teacher preparation program at the community college. Document and report analysis provided a detailed description of the teacher preparation program at Butler Community College, to include Butler’s role in teacher education. Survey analysis provided a demographic profile of the research population, as well as the barrier and support factors that influenced the educational attainment of these elementary education students. Interviews were conducted with a select group from the population (22 students) who had completed all of the education courses at Butler Community College and were ready to transfer to a four-year teacher education program. Interview analysis provided a detailed demographic profile of participants, as well as a more detailed description of the specific barriers and supports elementary education students experienced while attending Butler. The barriers and support factors were categorized as: 1) institutional barriers or supports; 2) instructional barriers or supports; and 3) personal barriers or supports. The greatest barriers students experienced were personal barriers, such as time management and financial issues. The major institutional barrier was lack of staff support, primarily advising support. Instructional barriers, such as the irrelevance of general education curriculum or problems with a specific course curriculum, were only minor barriers for students. The greatest overall support students experienced at the community college was in the form of instructional support, both faculty support and practical education coursework with accompanying field experiences. The major institutional support was staff support, namely, advising. Family support was cited as the major personal support.

Magister Commercii - MCom / The purpose of this research study is to explore the variables that contribute to improving the process of recruiting and retaining rural doctors within the South African context. The aim is to explore rural doctors’ perceptions of the role which the rural community can and ought to play in respect of the latter process. A basic recognition is that the emphasis on the Mainstream Approach (which elevates health workforce planning and management as well as market-related interventions and solutions) cannot exclusively achieve the desired result of effective and efficient recruitment and retention of rural doctors. The ‘active’ role which communities can and ought to play in the recruitment/ retention process, is an overlooked and neglected aspect within the South African research and healthcare service-delivery context. Even though the notion of collaborative management and governance of human resources within the health sector is generally mandated from a policy and legislative perspective, the practical manifestation and implementation thereof remain limited or at best piece-meal. An alternative governance model with reference to the humanresources- in-health system outlines the Partnership Approach advocating the need for the establishment of practical working relationships, amongst an identified range of multiple-stakeholders. This study examines the notions of ‘passive’ vis-à-vis ‘active’ community participation equated to the Utilitarian and Community Empowerment/ Development Perspectives continuum. The study introduces the ‘Principle of Balancing Model’ as well as the notion of a ‘hybrid perspective’ as key underpinnings of an efficacious rural-doctor recruitment and retention process.