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In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions.

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

This study aims to examine how foster carers involved in the project Mentoring families experience the project overall, the support they receive and how they describe that the project has been put into practice. The data was collected by using qualitative interviews with six participants in the project, two mentoring families and four linked foster carers. The results have been analysed through a thematic analysis and then interpreted via the theoretic ideas about social support from peers. The study finds that foster carers have a positive experience of the project and that the support they receive is something they consider to be valuable for the role as foster carers. Another finding is that the project seems to be able to contribute to increased support. The results also show that the mentoring families have an important role for the possibility of putting the project into practice. The results indicate that some of the functions within the project were not implemented as fully as others, such as the network and planned sleepovers. Apart from these findings the study presents plausible risks about the project Mentoring families concerning the support given by non-professionals. / Mentorsfamiljer

Background: Receiving social support facilitates the founding of a nascent entrepreneurs’ business. Support that is received from entrepreneurial parents contributes towards the development of the entrepreneur’s capabilities as well as potentials, thus, shaping the nascent entrepreneur. Our study will focus on one part of social support, namely emotional support, provided by entrepreneurial parents. While parents intend to positively influence the nascent entrepreneur’s well-being and emotional stability, the exchange of support happens rather simultaneously and unconsciously. Purpose: This thesis aims to create a better understanding of the influence of entrepreneurial parents concerning the support system received by a nascent entrepreneur when in the founding stage. Therefore, creating theoretical consistency in the form of a developed conceptual model, which can be put into the broader context of family business and entrepreneurship. Method: Ontology – Relativism; Epistemology – Social Constructionism; Research Approach – Inductive; Methodology – Exploratory Study; Data Collection – 15 Semi-structured interviews with nascent entrepreneurs and three interviews with entrepreneurial parents; Sampling – Purposive, Convenience and Snowball Sampling; Data Analysis – Grounded Analysis. Conclusion: The influence of entrepreneurial parents affects the support approach of a nascent entrepreneur. Specifically, it contributes to the development of the entrepreneur’s entrepreneurial competence and spirit, which in its turn enhances the entrepreneurial activities connected to the founding of a new business.

Diabetes is a public health concern among older adults in the United States due to the increasing prevalence of diabetes among this age group and the associated long-term and financial impacts. Self-management is a key strategy in the control of diabetes. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the association between social support and glycohemoglobin level. The social cognitive theory was the conceptual framework for this study. The research questions were designed to determine whether social support played a role in diabetes management. Data were collected using a cross-sectional survey of secondary data from the 2007-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The participants represented a national sample of adults aged 65 years and older. The dependent variable was the glycohemoglobin level, and the independent variables were emotional and financial support, sources of social support, and sociodemographic factors. Statistical analyses, consisting of univariate analyses, were conducted to characterize the sample, and simple and multiple linear regression analysis were conducted for hypotheses testing. After controlling for the confounders, the multiple regression analyses revealed a statistically significant association between emotional and financial support, sources of social support, the frequency of religious activities, and the size of the social network and glycohemoglobin level. Spousal support, frequency of religious activities, and the size of the social network were positively associated with glycohemoglobin level. The study findings might contribute to positive social change through the integration of social support into clinical practices by using family-centered and church-based approaches to improve diabetes management among older adults.

The rate of thyroid cancer diagnosis has risen, and researchers' findings point to improved diagnostic testing and overdiagnosis as well as increases in actual incidences as the reasons behind this rise. With improved treatments and testing methods, the number of thyroid cancer survivors has also increased. Thyroid cancer presents challenges to coping and can cause significant stress in an individual's life. More specifically, anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) creates complicated challenges for patients and survivors. The problem is patients need support during diagnosis and treatment when adjusting to their 'new normal' and may be reaching to Internet based social support groups to gain health information. Lazarus's transactional theory of stress and coping formed a framework for this generic qualitative exploration of the types of support and information ATC patients and survivors receive through participating in an online Facebook support group. Thematic content analysis was conducted on archival data collected from the group over 4 months, namely 2,384 posts created by 166 group members. From this analysis, a picture relevant to all group participants was developed to include themes found among the data. Themes of emotional, informational and spiritual support emerged as well as the significance of using emojis as symbolic expressions of support. Implications for social change include expanding the theoretical knowledge of the ATC patient and survivor experience and the types of support available in online environments. This knowledge can lead to positive social change in terms of improving support resources, which may help in recovery from ATC; lessening the burden on patients, families, providers, insurance, the healthcare system, and our society as a whole.

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Earth’s biosphere is sustained by its biological diversity, which forms an intricate network of biological, physical and chemical pathways. This network has many fail-safe redundant func-tions including buffer stocks of inert biomass, huge amounts of water and the large volume of gases in the atmosphere. By contrast, manmade habitats for human space exploration are closed ecosystems that represent only a trivial fraction of Earth’s biosphere. The employment of bio-regenerative processes complemented with physical-chemical tech-nologies is thought to have numerous advantages from the perspective of redundancy and reducing resupply mass for the sustained human presence in space or on other planetary surfaces. However, the combination of bio-regenerative processes, such as plant cultivation, with physical-chemical processes to form hybrid life support systems is challenging. Such systems are a concert of many interdependencies and interacting feedback loops, which are difficult to operate in a desired range of set points. Furthermore, the complexity of such sys-tems makes them vulnerable to perturbations. Applying system dynamics modelling to study hybrid life support systems is a promising ap-proach. System dynamics is a methodology used to study the dynamic behavior of complex systems and how such systems can be defended against, or made to benefit from, the per-turbations that fall upon them. This thesis describes the development of a system dynamics model to run exploratory simulations, which can lead to new insights into the complex behav-ior of hybrid life support systems. An improved understanding of the overall system behavior also helps to develop sustainable, reliable and resilient life support architectures for future human space exploration. A set of simulations with a hybrid life support system integrated into a Mars habitat has been executed and the results show a strong impact of space greenhouses on the life support sys-tem behavior and the different matter flows. It is also evident from the simulation results that a hybrid life support system can recover from a perturbation event in most cases without a fatal mission end. Recycling urine to produce a plant nutrient solution is a novel approach in further closing loops in space life support systems. Within this thesis, a number of experiments have been executed in order to determine the effectiveness of a urine-derived nutrient solution com-pared to a standard reference solution. The results show that in principle plants can be grown with a nutrient solution made of human urine, but that the yield is lower compared to the reference solution. However, the urine-derived solution might be tuned by adding small amounts of additional nutrients to remove the imbalance of certain elements. This way the nutrient salts supplied from Earth could be reduced.

In the automotive industry, assembly lines are used to produce vehicles. These assembly lines improve throughput, and need to be carefully planned. Planning, or balancing, an assembly line constitutes identifying precedence relationships between tasks in the assembly line, and assigning tasks to stations to fit some criteria. This procedure is costly to do by hand, and is well-suited for some level of automation. The problem of balancing assembly lines has been researched since the 1950’s, but modern assembly lines largely rely on engineers to balance the line by hand. This thesis proposes that the work flow of engineers planning the assembly line would be improved by a group decision support system. This group decision support system could supply engineers with proposals for assembly lines, which the engineers can choose to modify further, either by hand or with the decision support system. The group decision support system is realized with a distributed system, consisting of a front-end, a back-end, an application programming interface to balance assembly lines, and two databases. The front-end is a website, where the users can create problems with a precedence graph. The back-end allows data to be permanently stored in the two databases, and allows communication with the application programming interface. The contribution of this thesis is a proof of concept of a group decision support system that can solve two basic types of assembly line balancing problems, SALBP-1 and SALBP-2. During development it was found that the developed system was generic enough to support different types of tasks, such as planning cooking. Further development is needed to use the system in an industrial setting, as real assembly lines need more complex models than the current version support.