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The media has responded toward unethical behavior in rainforests during the ‘80’s, triggering the still upcoming trend of investigation of ethical considerations, as described by Macfarlane (1995). Many researchers are constantly improving the ethical theories and showing continued change in the perception of ethics (Svensson & Wood, 2007) The purpose of this research is to identify the effect of ethics on the proactive or reactive behavior of companies, with a downward tendency provided in the value chain. The theoretical framework consists out of a set of theories supporting the goal of identifying ethics within a company, applying a new business ethics model and measuring the pro-active and re-active behavior of the stakeholder in the value chain. Finally, all the theories used, are combined in an integrated theoretical model used to justify the collection of empirical data and to give structure to the analysis. The empirical data has been gathered through non structured and semi-structured interviews with customers, employees within the case company, and a supplier to the case company. These findings are complemented with secondary data gathered through websites, annual reports, codes of conduct, media articles and others sources. The findings of the study showed that the (in the theoretical framework) assumption of a downward effect in perception and change in ethical considerations is not as obvious as previously thought. Within this case study, the ethical influences come from the case company, situated in the middle of the value chain, influencing both the consumer and the supplier, in ethical considerations.

Denna single case studie, med multipel baslinjemätning över beteenden, utvärderade huruvida frekvensen traumarelaterade undvikandebeteenden minskade vid 12 sessioners behandling under 6 veckor med Seeking Safety (en behandlingsmanual med copingstrategier för PTSD och samtidigt missbruk), hos patienter med PTSD som inte bedömts lämpliga/redo att direkt börja traumafokuserad KBT. Därutöver utvärderades huruvida behandling med Seeking Safety, kunde öka villigheten att genomgå traumafokuserad KBT. 4 patienter deltog i studien varav 3 fullföljde behandlingen. Resultaten visade en svag tendens i riktning med hypoteserna, men studiens resultat i sin helhet ger ej stöd för behandlingens effekt hos patientgruppen. Av denna studie går ej att utläsa huruvida behandling med Seeking Safety kan leda till minskning av traumarelaterade undvikande-beteenden.

The value creating mechanism of business networks has been acknowledged in research (Casson & Della Giusta, 2007, p. 221; Granovetter, 1973; Jones, Hesterly & Borgatti, 1997, p. 912). Within small business research, focus has been on network structure (Jack, Moult, Anderson & Dodd. 2010, p. 317; Shaw, 2006, p. 5; Curran et al., 1993, p. 13), disregarding dynamic factors such as network content, strength and processes. Network studies within start-up businesses have received attention (Witt, 2004, p 392); hence limited research exists concerning more well-established small businesses’ networks. These research gaps will here be addressed from the perspective of a smaller business, a micro business, at a stage of firm maturity. Small business research suffers from methodological fragmentation and underdevelopments, favoring positivistic and quantitative methods (Blackburn & Kovalainen, 2009, p. 128-129). To address this, this research seeks to explore qualitative alternatives, which can be increasingly fruitful for the small business field when studying networks (Jack et al., 2010, p. 317). Recognizing the social and contextual embeddedness of the micro business and its sensitivity to external changes (Curran & Blackburn, 2001, p. 7), this research opts for a qualitative in-depth case study to explore these contextual mechanisms. This research adopts a critical realist stance using ethnographic and process research methods of grounded theory, taking the sequence of events into account in the analysis. This present research combines strands of research of core disciplines (sociology) to newer disciplines (entrepreneurship) to produce a conceptual mapping. This deductive conceptual mapping is used as basis for the data collection and as a tool for analysis in this by nature inductive study. This study finds that network tie content and strength deepen the understanding of networks and their maintenance, beyond the static mapping of structure. Network tie content and strength does influence structure and is in turn influenced by context. This provides answer to why the network appears as it does. The appearance of the mature micro business’ network indicates that growth ambitions can be inhibited by contextual factors such as limited access to new opportunities. This present study finds and agrees with Van Maanen (2011a, p. 226-227) that the single case study and ethnographic observant-participant methods, often criticized for not producing substantial findings, are informative as they allow exploring the influence of contextual factors. The intended audience of research academics and local/regional/national entrepreneurship policy makers should recognize that research which enhances tools for apprehending contextual factors can provide interesting results. The research design disregards generalization capabilities in favor of accounting for the research process of the researcher and its subject. This is argued to give a fruitful version of truth of network appearance in terms of content and strength and why it appears as such.

Social skills training was investigated in an after-school program setting with four seven- and eight-year-old males. Two were Hispanic and two were African-American. Social skills training consisted of a direct instruction, behavioral learning model of skillstreaming as described by McGinnis and Goldstein (1997). There were four major components to each social skills training session: (1) an explanation of the skill being taught; (2) modeling by the researcher of the skill being taught; (3) role play by each of the participants; and (4) performance feedback regarding the role plays. Sessions lasted approximately 30 minutes and were held weekly throughout the intervention phases of the study. The behaviors taught were raising ones hand before leaving the seat, sitting properly in ones seat, and attending to homework or staff instructions. Participants also received reinforcement for performance of the social skills in homework sessions at the after school program, as is consistent with the literature regarding social skills training. However, the reinforcement and behavior learning (direct instruction) components were introduced both in combination and at separate times to experimentally control for the influence of each intervention component. This research design allows for the investigation into the relative effectiveness of direct instruction versus reinforcement in social skills training. Experimental control was demonstrated through the use of a multiple baseline across behaviors design. Direct instruction and reinforcement for behaviors were systematically introduced at separate times, keeping some behaviors under baseline condition while moving others into intervention conditions. Visual analysis of the results indicates that social skills training was effective in improving the three target behaviors of all four students. Direct instruction, reinforcement, and the combination of the two presented together all were effective in improving the target behaviors. Possible intervention effects not related to social skills training may have influenced the behavior of attending.

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is a chronic rheumatic disease associated with pain, stiffness and increased psychosocial burden. The purpose of this study was to investigate through an ABAB single-case design the impact of a yoga intervention on pain and morning stiffness in adolescent females with JIA. A secondary aim was to assess the impact of this intervention on self-efficacy, mindfulness, and health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Two adolescents with JIA participated in three yoga groups and daily home yoga practice with a DVD. Participants engaged in daily self-monitoring of pain and stiffness and completed questionnaires assessing psychosocial functioning at pre- and post-intervention. A three-month follow-up on primary and secondary measures was conducted. Primary outcomes were evaluated using visual inspection and the conservative dual criterion (CDC) method. Results suggested that for one participant, there were no overall systematic changes in pain or stiffness as a result of the intervention; however, trends toward changes in pain were present during the final phases of the study. For the second participant, systematic changes were observed across most but not all phases for morning stiffness, whereas results for pain were less consistent. Modest changes were revealed on secondary outcome measures; however, not consistently in the direction of hypotheses. Lack of stable baseline data for both participants was a significant limitation of the study and is discussed. More research is needed to determine if the yoga intervention utilized in this study is an effective method for reducing pain and stiffness and enhancing psychosocial functioning in adolescent girls with JIA.

This thesis investigates the reading and writing of two patients with brain injuries due to cerebro-vascular accidents. Background tests show both patients to be moderately anomic and to have severe impairments in reading and writing nonwords. Investigations of the locus of impairment in AN's nonword reading showed her to have normal orthographic analysis capabilities but impairments in converting single and multiple graphemes into phonemes and in phonemic blending. The central issue studied was the role of lexical but non-semantic processes in reading aloud, writing to dictation and copying. For this purpose a "familiar nonword" paradigm was developed in which the patients learned to read or write a small set of nonwords either with or without any associated semantics. Both AN and AM were able to learn to read nonwords to which no meanings were attached but they could still not read novel nonwords. Both patients were unable to report any meanings for the familiar nonwords when they read them and there was no evidence that learning to read them improved their sub-lexical processing abilities. These results are evidence for a direct lexical route from print to sound that is dedicated to processing whole familiar words. It was also shown with AN that if nonwords are given meanings then learning is faster than if they are not given meanings. Experiments designed to test the hypothesis that nonwords are read by analogy to words found no support for it. Both patients have severe impairments in writing novel nonwords to dictation. As they can repeat spoken nonwords after they have failed to write them, this is not due to a short-term memory impairment. Despite their nonword writing impairments, both patients were able to write to dictation the meaningless nonwords that they had previously learned to read at the first attempt, and AN did so one month after learning to read them. Neither patient however, could write novel nonwords made by reordering the letters of the familiar nonwords. Furthermore, the familiar nonwords used spellings that are of a priori low probability. The familiar nonwords must therefore have been written using lexical knowledge. Tests of semantic association showed that the familiar nonwords evoked no semantic information that the patients could report. Function words dictated to AN evoked little semantic information but she wrote them to dictation significantly better than nonwords made by reordering their letters. These results are evidence for a direct lexical route for writing to dictation. Copying was studied both with and without a five second delay between presentation and response. AN was better at delayed copying of meaningless but familiar nonwords than she was at copying novel nonwords. She was also better at delayed copying of six-letter, bi-syllabic nonwords that she had been trained to copy than she was at copying novel nonwords made by recombining the first and second halves of the familiar nonwords such that these halves retained their positions from the parent nonwords. AN was better at copying function words than nonwords made by reordering their letters. She was also better at copying function words than she was at reading or writing them to dictation. These results are evidence for a direct lexical route for copying. AN and AM were both able to write to dictation nonwords that they had never heard or written before but with which they had been made visually familiar during a visual discrimination task. They must have used lexical knowledge to do so because the spellings used were of a priori very low probability. The creation of lexical orthographic information which can be retrieved from novel auditory input raises difficulties for current models and various possible interpretations are discussed. Finally, some of the possible implications of the re-learning abilities shown by these patients, for rehabilitation procedures are discussed briefly.

The present study evaluated the utility of the methods outlined in the Promoting the Emergence of Advanced Knowledge Relational Training System Equivalence Module (PEAK-E) through a single-case evaluation. Validity, reliability, and effectiveness were the variables explored to assess the degree to which the assessment was able to identify appropriate skills for targeted intervention, and the degree to which the programs were efficacious in teaching the targeted skills. Baseline results suggested that the programs identified through the PEAK-E assessment were not within the participants’ repertoires prior to the intervention. Following the implementation of 9 programs across three participants with autism, mastery was achieved for all of the directly trained relations, and all targeted derived relations emerged for 8 of the 9 programs

Submitted by Tatiana Lima (tatianasl@ufba.br) on 2016-06-10T18:53:50Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernandes, Maria Jucineide da Costa.pdf: 911848 bytes, checksum: 8c47848b9fcc21f2ad06ac7723df9986 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Tatiana Lima (tatianasl@ufba.br) on 2016-07-05T20:07:20Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernandes, Maria Jucineide da Costa.pdf: 911848 bytes, checksum: 8c47848b9fcc21f2ad06ac7723df9986 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-05T20:07:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernandes, Maria Jucineide da Costa.pdf: 911848 bytes, checksum: 8c47848b9fcc21f2ad06ac7723df9986 (MD5) / Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar as caraterísticas da escola pública cearense de educação profissional, que apresentou os melhores resultados, na terceira série do ensino médio, no Sistema Permanente de Avaliação da Educação Básica do Ceará (SPAECE) em 2013, identificando aspectos que são característicos de uma Escola Eficaz. Partiu-se do pressuposto que a escola pública cearense de educação profissional com melhor resultado no Sistema Permanente de Avaliação da Educação Básica do Ceará apresenta características de uma escola eficaz. Foi realizado estudo de caso único, de natureza qualitativa e quantitativa, baseando-se em observação direta, pesquisa a documentos, entrevista semiestruturada e questionários. Os resultados indicam que a Escola Estadual de Educação Profissional Adriano Nobre apresentou o melhor resultado, sendo esta a escola estudada. Identificou-se que as características que mais contribuem para o bom desempenho dos seus alunos em avaliações externas são referentes às seguintes categorias e subcategorias de análise: a) liderança na escola: pedagógica e administrativa; b) professores: formação inicial, tempo de serviço e estabilidade da equipe, oportunidades de treinamento, relacionamento entre os professores e apoio do núcleo gestor; c) relações com a família e com a comunidade: como a escola estimula a participação dos pais e como se dá a inserção da escola na comunidade; d) clima interno da escola: expectativa em relação ao desempenho do aluno e a existência de um clima de ordem; e) ensino: ênfase nos aspectos cognitivos, existência de estrutura de monitoramento do desempenho dos alunos, política de reprovação e aceleração dos alunos, o processo de ensino utilizado e a existência de uma referência clara sobre o que ensinar. Na EEEP Adriano Nobre foram encontrados aspectos que não obtiveram total aderência com as características da escola eficaz: infraestrutura e fatores externos à organização da escola, no que se refere ao estado de conservação do prédio e adequação das instalações, suficiência dos recursos didáticos, na percepção dos professores, qualidade da biblioteca, no que se refere ao acesso e atualização do acervo. Os professores, apesar de satisfeitos com o trabalho, não estão satisfeitos com o salário, na percepção de 65% dos pais. Foram encontrados baixos percentuais de respostas referentes à inserção dos pais na administração da escola, quando analisada a categoria relações com a família e a comunidade. Conclui-se que estes resultados obtidos estão consonância com a literatura e com o pressuposto, pois a escola estudada possui categorias aderentes com as características de uma escola eficaz. This work aims to analyze the Ceará public school characteristics of vocational education, which showed the best results in the third year of high school, the Permanent System of Evaluation of Basic Education of Ceará (SPAECE) in 2013, identifying aspects that are characteristic an Effective School. It started with the assumption that the Ceará public school vocational education with best results in the Permanent System of Evaluation of Basic Education of Ceará has characteristics of an effective school. Was performed in one case study, qualitative and quantitative, based on direct observation, search the documents, semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The results indicate that the State School of Professional Education Adriano Nobre showed the best result, which is the studied school. It was identified that the characteristics that contribute most to the performance of their students in external evaluations refer to the following categories and subcategories of analysis: a) leadership in school: pedagogical and administrative; b) Teachers: initial training, length of service and team stability, training opportunities, relationships between teachers and support core manager; c) relationships with family and the community: how the school encourages parental involvement and how is the school integration in the community; d) School indoor climate: expectations regarding the performance of the student and the existence of a climate of order; e) education: emphasis on cognitive aspects, existence of monitoring framework of student performance, failure of policy and acceleration of the students, the teaching process used and the existence of a clear reference about what to teach. In EEEP Adriano Nobre found aspects that did not find full compliance with the characteristics of effective schools: infrastructure and factors outside the school organization, in relation to the building conservation status and adequacy of facilities, adequacy of teaching resources, perception teachers, library quality, with regard to access and update the acquis. Teachers, although satisfied with the work, are not satisfied with the salary, in the view of 65% of parents. Low percentage of answers were found regarding the inclusion of parents in school administration, when analyzing the category relationships with family and community. It was concluded that these results are consistent with literature and with the assumption, because the categories studied school has adhered to the characteristics of an effective school

The Multilevel modeling (MLM) approach has a great flexibility in that can handle various methodological issues that may arise with single-case studies, such as the need to model possible dependency in the errors, linear or nonlinear trends, and count outcomes (e.g.,Van den Noortgate & Onghena, 2003a). By using the MLM framework, researchers can not only model dependency in the errors but also model a variety of level-1error structures. The effect of misspecification in the level-1 error structure has been well studied for MLM analyses. Generally, it was found that the estimates of the fixed effects were unbiased but the estimates of variance parameters were substantially biased when level-1 error structure was misspecified. However, in previous misspecification studies as well as applied studies of multilevel models with single-case data, a critical assumption has been made. Researchers generally assumed that the level-1 error structure is constant across all participants. It is possible that the level-1 error structure may not be same across participants. Previous studies show that there is a possibility that the level-1 error structure may not be same across participants (Baek & Ferron, 2011; Baek & Ferron, 2013; Maggin et al., 2011). If much variation in level-1 error structure exists, this can possibly impact estimation of the fixed effects and random effects. Despite the importance of this issue, the effects of modeling between-case variation in the level-1 error structure had not yet been systematically studied. The purpose of this simulation study was to extend the MLM modeling in growth curve models to allow the level-1 error structure to vary across cases, and to identify the consequences of modeling and not modeling between-case variation in the level-1 error structure for single-case studies. A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted that examined conditions that varied in series length per case (10 or 20), the number of cases (4 or 8), the true level-1 errors structure (homogenous, moderately heterogeneous, severely heterogeneous), the level-2 error variance in baseline slope and shift in slope (.05 or .2 times the level-1 variance), and the method to analyze the data (allow level-1 error variance and autocorrelation to vary across cases (Model 2) or not allow level-1 error variance and autocorrelation to vary across cases (Model 1)). All simulated data sets were analyzed using Bayesian estimation. For each condition, 1000 data were simulated, and bias, RMSE and credible interval (CI) coverage and width were examined for the fixed treatment effects and the variance components. The results of this study found that the different modeling methods in level-1 error structure had little to no impact on the estimates of the fixed treatment effects, but substantial impacts on the estimates of the variance components, especially the level-1 error standard deviation and the autocorrelation parameters. Modeling between case variation in the level-1 error structure (Model 2) performs relatively better than not modeling between case variation in the level-1 error structure (Model 1) for the estimates of the level-1 error standard deviation and the autocorrelation parameters. It was found that as degree of the heterogeneity in the data (i.e., homogeneous, moderately heterogeneous, severely heterogeneous) increased, the effectiveness of Model 2 increased. The results also indicated that whether the level-1 error structure was under-specified, over-specified, or correctly-specified had little to no impact on the estimates of the fixed treatment effects, but a substantial impact on the level-1 error standard deviation and the autocorrelation. While the correctly-specified and the over-specified models perform fairly well, the under-specified model performs poorly. Moreover, it was revealed that the form of heterogeneity in the data (i.e., one extreme case versus a more even spread of the level-1 variances) might have some impact on relative effectiveness of the two models, but the degree of the autocorrelation had little to no impact on the relative performance of the two models.