published_or_final_version / Corporate Environmental Governance / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Nan Jing is famous for its long history and rich culture and nowadays it is facing a serious problem of character lost in company with fast modernization and construction. In south area along Qin Huai River which is the source of most non-material cultural heritages, lots of old districts are under the process of demolishing which contains the most valuable element for the area is the existing urban texture of old Nan Jing city. On the other hand, people in old south area are facing problems of over density , chaos environment and shabby houses for decades of years. How to improve people’s living standard become an important issue for local government. The purpose of the thesis is to find ways to preserve the valuable urban texture, at the same time, expand open spaces for new requirements of residential and public use. The traditional small scale and the requirement of big open space is the main conflict through out the whole design. The design is proposed to create big spaces first and use different ways to separate them into small spaces with the maintenance of the function. There are two steps in the design process. The first step is to reorganize the existing buildings and the second step is to generate landscape design. The landscape design should keep the same language with the buildings and interpret different ways to keep the original scale of the space at the same time meet the requirement of new space functions. / published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Landscape Architecture

The purpose of this research study is to explore first graders’ understanding of parental involvement in a rural high school, to investigate students’ feeling and attitude towards their parents’ participation in high school education, to understand rural students’ expectation of parent-teacher collaboration, and further to examine potential differences caused by gender, degree of parental involvement, and level of academic performance. Qualitative data was collected by means of individual interviews and questionnaires among first-grade students in a rural high school in Heilongjiang Province. The research involves 12 interview participants and 115 students for questionnaires. After transcribing verbally all the individual interviews, both line-by-line coding and software N-Vivo were utilized to analyze transcriptions in order to generate main codes and themes to describe students’ understanding and perception and further explore differences across individual interview participants. Questionnaire data was entered into Excel program to create figures supporting findings of interviews. Findings show that rural high school students understand parental involvement as interactions involving parents, teachers and students in four aspects- material, supportive, communicative and environmental. Effective communication, initiation of providing supports, good relationship, and comfortable environment were highlighted in students’ expectations. Secondly, the feelings of confident, proud, warm, happy, relax, pressure, and distrust were related by students to their parents’ various practices of involvement in high school education. Moreover, students identified three different attitudes towards parental involvement: positive, negative, and dependent. It was found that students’ attitude towards the communicative parental involvement was highly depended on the content and the frequency. Besides, students tend to express their neutral attitude towards activities that were not implemented in the high school such as participation in school decision making and parent-teacher association. Thirdly, academic scores and motivation of study were discovered to be affected by parents’ involvement. Parent involvement with positive feeling and positive attitude were more likely to be related to positive effects on academic outcomes by students. The research suggests a three-way communication among parents, teachers and students at school and in the community. Findings imply that it is necessary for rural high schools and rural parents to work together with students in the establishment of home-school cooperation. Students’ reaction and expectation provide valuable implications for practices of parental involvement in rural high school. Individual differences are also recommended to be taken into considerations in the practices. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Landscape Architecture

Traumatic events such as natural disasters and violence are still happening around the world. While most of the studies on traumatic events focus more on the pathological end of the continuum, research related to their impact on more generic aspects, such as the psychological well-being of individuals, is comparatively less. Furthermore, flexibility has been posited to play a crucial role in the development of psychological well-being in adolescents but its significance has seldom been examined in the context of traumatic events. In addition, the construct and characteristics of flexibility have never been discussed before and no self-report measurement of emotional flexibility exists. Therefore, this thesis attempts to fill these gaps and extend our understanding of both the knowledge of flexibility and its role in the psychological well-being of Chinese adolescents. The nature of study 1 represents the ground work of this research, with the purpose of developing and validating a qualified self-report measurement of emotional flexibility in order to lay the foundation for answering the main research question of this study. A panel meeting was used at the very beginning to generate an item pool consisting of an inventory of emotional flexibility subscales: Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were employed to test the subscale structures as well as for the total scale of emotional flexibility. A three-factor model for match, the subscale of emotional flexibility and the total model comprising one higher-order factor of emotional flexibility derived from the 5 first-order factors, with 10 and 30 items respectively, have all been confirmed. The purpose of study 2 is to clarify the construct of flexibility by investigating the relationships connected to flexibility in cognitive, behavioral and emotional aspects, as well as the relation between flexibility in these three aspects and coping flexibility. The participants in study 2 were 941 adolescents recruited from three middle schools with different levels of earthquake exposure in Sichuan. The results show that cognitive flexibility mediates the relationship between emotional flexibility and behavioral flexibility. Moreover, coping flexibility was found to be related to flexibility in three aspects in different manners. Study 3 has been designed to answer the main research question of this study: what role does flexibility play in the psychological well-being of adolescents with earthquake experiences. A cross-sectional survey was performed to test the effect of flexibility in cognitive, behavioral and emotional aspects on the relationship between earthquake exposure and psychological well-being. The data in this study was the same as for those in study two. The results show that emotional flexibility and cognitive flexibility had moderating effects between earthquake exposure and psychological well-being. The thesis has developed a measurement tool, clarified the construct and summarized the characteristics of flexibility as well as explored the role of flexibility in the psychological well-being of adolescents. The implications and limitations as well as future directions are proposed as well. / published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The introduction of environmental and social issues into the boardroom is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The threat of climate change adds urgency to the challenge, with the costs of inaction on climate change estimated at between 5 to 20% of global GDP, leading to a global recession. In terms of managing environmental and social concerns, the tourism industry, and the hotel and resort industry, has lagged behind other industries such as utilities, chemicals and banking and investment. Globally an estimated 5% of all CO2 emissions can be attributed to tourism. Energy use in hotels is disproportionately high, thanks to energy intensive facilities such as spas, laundries and swimming pools. The global hotel and resort industry can thus make significant contribution to reduce human impact on the global climate. This research develops a tool which helps the hotel and resort industry identify and manage non-financial risks such as environmental and social issues, and improve sustainable development of individual businesses and the sector as a whole. The research focuses on Guangdong Province, China, the richest province in China in terms of hotel stock, hotel revenues and hotel employees. China herself will be the world’s biggest tourism market by 2020 and given its future growth forecasts is an important venue to study sustainable development. Recognising the difficulty in precisely measuring aspects of social science such as non-financial risk and attitudes towards non-financial risk, the conceptual framework for the study uses the idea of a working non-financial risk management approach towards the production of a set of working propositions useful for business. The study first identifies stakeholders; develops a non-financial risk management methodology to identify, measure, examine and prioritise risks, and then presents the conclusions as working propositions for corporations to use. Recommendations for industry are developed and presented. To achieve the development of the non-financial risk management tool, the research draws a fresh link between risk management, corporate environmental management, sustainability and non-financial risk management. Second, through three research studies, a detailed investigation into the use and practice of sustainability and non-financial risk management is undertaken across 15 hotels in Guangdong Province. The first study is a comprehensive set of detailed in-depth interviews with 79 industry-specific stakeholders. The interviews are coded and the results used to develop the second study, a questionnaire survey of 351 hotel guests and 70 industry-specific stakeholders. A third study executes in-depth case-studies and non-financial risk benchmarking across 15 hotel and resort facilities. The results of all three studies are triangulated for better accuracy and understanding. The study presents a number of working propositions for corporations to adopt as starting points for their own non-financial risk management strategies. It is found that there is generally low awareness and application of non-financial risk management in the hotel and resort industry in Guangdong. The industry-specific stakeholders and guests have very different priorities in terms of non-financial risk management, while resource conservation does emerge as the leading issue amongst industry-specific stakeholders and hotel guests. Cost savings are found to be the main driver for implementing non-financial risk management, while cost of implementation is the main barrier. Through a factor analysis, it becomes clear that two distinct factors are at play in the guest domain: guests’ own well-being and self-need; and wider social or environmental concerns. The study recommends a multi-stakeholder partnership as a value-added framework for public policy, and recommends further research into stakeholder theory in China’s hotel and resort industry. / published_or_final_version / Kadoorie Institute / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Longmen Shan Mountain Belt is a prominent orogeny along the eastern margin of the Tibetan plateau. Its current deformation has significant implications for the Cenozoic tectonics of the Tibetan plateau. The M=8 Wenchuan earthquake substantially ruptured the Longmen Shan mountain in 2008. Numerous tectonics and rheological implications are concluded by this event on crustal dynamics along the eastern margin of the Tibetan plateau. Several high-resolution gravity surveys were conducted before and after the event to investigate the regional isostasy and crustal dynamics. From 2008 to 2011, four gravimetric surveys were carried out along two profiles across southern and northern Longmen Shan from the Sichuan Basin to the Songpan-Graze Terrane. The Bouguer gravity anomalies drop from -162 mGal to -431 mGal in the Aba Basin with a steep gradient of 0.84 mGal/km. There is a significant increase of crustal thickness from 40 km in the Sichuan to more than 60 km in the Tibetan plateau. Negative isostatic anomaly of -30 mGal over 150 km of the Songpan-Graze Terrane infers an over-compensation of excess crustal thickness up to 20 km. Hence, upward isostatic rebound is resulted and coupled with on-going crustal movement. Gravity values change significantly before and after the Wenchuan earthquake, ranging from -1.2 mGal to 0.7 mGal near the epicentral area. Significant thrust slip of 7.5m and normal slip of 4.5 m were simulated along the Beichuan fault and Wenchuan fault by an elastic dislocation theory. The co-existence of thrusting and normal faulting implies both compressional and extensional settings along Longmen Shan. The normal slip corroborates a large-scale crustal extension, lending support to a model with the inflation of lower crustal flow. The two-year post-seismic gravity variations were more than 0.1 mGal near the epicentral area. About 25% of them could be attributed to viscoelastic mantle relaxation. The dynamics topography along the eastern margin of the plateau is proposed to be a consequence of lower crustal flow squeezed by isostatic rebound and topographic load. The strong Yangtze Block is thought to obstruct the crustal flow horizontally and direct it to flow upward beneath Longmen Shan. The steep topography and seismicity along Longmen Shan are then resulted probably from the vertical stress induced in this upward flow. / published_or_final_version / Earth Sciences / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Late Quaternary is an important period for paleoclimate study due to the boom of human civilization and thus its influence on climate conditions of the present interglacial period. In this study, a 52 m long borehole was drilled in a coastal embayment of Fujian, China, within which a thick marine layer from 16.05 to 32.60 m is found. Bulk organic geochemical analyses, containing total organic carbon content (TOC), carbon isotope ratio (δ13C), alkenones and n-alkanes, were analyzed for the whole core. Organic carbon isotope ratios (δ13C) of the sediment layers vary between -22.1‰ and -32.9‰, with higher values in the two marine sequences and lower in the two aquatic sequences. In the thick marine sequence, the δ13C is relatively stable, and it becomes gradually enriched from the base upwards and depleted rapidly at the top, indicating a full cycle of marine transgression and regression. The n-alkanes exhibit a similar trend, with several indexes, i.e., maximum concentration (Cmax), carbon preference index (CPI), average chain length (ACL), terrestrial-aquatic ratio (TAR), Paq and C31/(C29+C31). These results suggest the control of EAM and sea-level change in the sedimentary processes. Analysis on alkenones shows sea surface temperature (SST) variations as well as sea-level oscillations in the study site. / published_or_final_version / Earth Sciences / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education