No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No / The number of young people in Europe who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) is increasing. Given that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to have diets of poor nutritional quality, this exploratory study sought to understand barriers and facilitators to healthy eating and dietary health promotion needs of unemployed young people aged 16–20 years. Three focus group discussions were held with young people (n = 14). Six individual interviews and one paired interview with service providers (n = 7). Data were recorded, transcribed verbatim and thematically content analysed. Themes were then fitted to social cognitive theory (SCT). Despite understanding of the principles of healthy eating, a ‘spiral’ of interrelated social, economic and associated psychological problems was perceived to render food and health of little value and low priority for the young people. The story related by the young people and corroborated by the service providers was of a lack of personal and vicarious experience with food. The proliferation and proximity of fast food outlets and the high perceived cost of ‘healthy’ compared to ‘junk’ food rendered the young people low in self-efficacy and perceived control to make healthier food choices. Agency was instead expressed through consumption of junk food and drugs. Both the young people and service providers agreed that for dietary health promotion efforts to succeed, social problems needed to be addressed and agency encouraged through (individual and collective) active engagement of the young people themselves.

Heavy drinking has been consistently associated with negative legal, academic, and health problems in college students and recent studies suggest that the frequency of undergraduates experiencing alcohol related problems may be increasing. Research aimed at lowering rates of consumption has begun to focus on individual differences in motivations for heavy alcohol use. The following study used a social-cognitive based model to prospectively examine heavy drinking among socially anxious college students. It was hypothesized that alcohol expectancies of social facilitation/anxiety reduction and self-efficacy for avoiding heavy drinking in socially anxious situations would be predictive of drinking in socially anxious college students. Using group testing and individual interview formats questionnaires assessing alcohol expectancies of improved sociability and self-efficacy were developed and shown to have adequate levels of reliability and construct validity. These questionnaires, along with measures of dispositional social anxiety, and a quantity-frequency index of alcohol use were then administered to 372 undergraduates. Seventy-one participants, identified as dispositionally socially anxious, were followed-up six-weeks later and completed both a time-line-follow-back assessment of their alcohol use over the six week interval and a semi-structured interview that assessed the types of situations in which they drank. Results of the study provided partial support for the hypothesized model as the expectancy X efficacy interaction accounted for a significant percentage of the variance in the quantity and frequency of alcohol use after controlling for the main effects of alcohol expectancies and self-efficacy. At the six-week follow-up however, the expectancy X efficacy interaction failed to account for significant variance beyond that accounted for by the expectancy and efficacy effects. Further examination of the follow-up data did provide partial support for the model, as it was found that the main effects of expectancy and efficacy were significant predictors of drinking behavior, but only in situations that were likely to elicit feelings of social anxiety. Results are discussed in terms of the relationship between social anxiety, outcome expectancies and self-efficacy and implications for developing alcohol intervention programs with high-risk college student drinkers. / Ph. D.

The need to develop appropriate computer training techniques has led to an explosion of research in information systems. One of the most recent studies was conducted by Compeau and Higgins (1995) in which two training methods were examined in the context of Social Cognitive Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977, 1978). The training methods examined were traditional lecture-based training and behavior modeling. Based on various anomalies found in the Compeau and Higgins study, this paper introduced a moderating variable, task complexity, into their model and also attempted to replicate their original experiment. This study also incorporated an additional training method, Computer Aided Instruction (CAI), which was examined in an experiment by Gist, Schwoerer, and Rosen (1989). It was hypothesized that task complexity has a moderating effect on the relationships between behavior modeling and performance, between behavior modeling and self-efficacy, and between self-efficacy and performance. Finally, an empirical investigation was performed to determine the relative effectiveness of the three training methods examined. To test these hypothesized relationships, an experiment was conducted that examined prior performance, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and actual performance at two levels of task complexity for each of the three training methods. The data were analyzed using a combination of multivariate and univariate analyses of variance and a structural equation modeling software package, AMOS©. Five of the original nine hypotheses from the Compeau and Higgins study were fully supported; however, none of the task complexity and only one of the avoidance behavior hypotheses were supported. Possible causes of this lack of support were multi-dimensionality of constructs or the need to examine task dimensions other than complexity. Relevant findings in this study included (1) a positive significant relationship between behavior modeling and final performance, (2) a positive significant relationship between prior performance and the endogenous constructs in the model: computer self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and final performance, and (3) a ranking of the three training methods in terms of effectiveness. Although behavior modeling produced the best performance results at all levels of task complexity, CAI was equally effective when the level of complexity was high. For low complexity tasks, however, CAI was the least effective method examined. / Ph. D.