Patients receiving dialysis treatment experience immense changes in their health and well-being, therefore receiving adequate social support services is an integral aspect of their care plan. Thus, the purpose of this study was to gain an understanding about social support services offered by social workers to patients receiving dialysis care. Furthermore, this study sought to develop awareness about additional services need to assist social workers in providing social, emotional, and physical support to patients. This qualitative study used data from a non-probability snowball sample of 10 social workers that work with patients receiving dialysis care. Findings of this study are significant to social work practice as the analysis provided insight that may enhance current practices in dialysis centers. Furthermore, the qualitative analyses gathered through the one-on-one interviews led to the emergence of seven central themes. Themes anticipated by the researchers included the perception about the ability to provide social, emotional, and physical support, as well as to highlight the role of social workers in this healthcare setting. Additional themes identified during this study focused on reasons for patients lacking social support, the scarcity of resources, and recommendations corroborated with first-hand experiences in the field to better serve patients. Recommendations included increased focus on providing therapeutic services within dialysis, additional transportation options for patients, and greater availability of resources to meet the various needs of patients.

The auditing environment is in a period of innovation, and auditors need to maintain their financial reporting commitment to financial statement stakeholders. The purpose of this quantitative cross-sectional survey study was to examine the impact of auditors' perceptions of informal workplace learning contexts on the external auditing profession using a perceived organizational support lens. Organization support theory includes four aspects used to explore informal workplace learning: management support, peer support, supportive organizational culture, and access to work resources. These aspects were used to examine the impact of informal learning on auditors' engagement and performance. Multiple linear regression was used to examine data from a survey of 103 auditing professionals in Connecticut. Data showed that access to work resources, including time and technology, were significant in each model in relation to impact and its subcomponents engagement and performance. This indicated that auditors' access to the resources necessary to stay current has a positive impact in the auditing profession. This study fills the gap in the existing literature on the impact of informal learning on the auditing profession where there is continual change and informal learning is heavily relied upon to diffuse knowledge and skills in a highly knowledge-based environment. Better-qualified auditors can help businesses keep up with ever-changing societal expectations. The accounting profession is in a period of innovation that requires professionals of all levels to adapt to keep pace with the quickly changing globalized organization.

In recent years, family support partners (FSPs) have been hired to work in the behavioral health care system for the state in which this study was conducted. FSPs are legacy caregivers, meaning they have raised a child with a mental health illness. At the time of this study, there was not a set criterion in the state to measure the effectiveness or benefits of FSPs working with families. The purpose of this quantitative, correlational study was to determine whether a caregiver's level of empowerment, as measured by the Family Empowerment Scale (FES), was increased through working with an FSP. Social learning theory provided the framework for the study. Survey data were collected from 93 caregivers using the FES. Simultaneous multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine the predictive relationship between the caregiver's gender, age, ethnicity, length of time as a caregiver of a child or youth with a mental health illness, and length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP, and the level of caregiver empowerment on the family, service system, and community/political levels. On the family level, caregiver age and length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP were statistically significant predictors. On the service system level, length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP was a statistically significant predictor. On the community/political level, caregiver age, ethnicity, and length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP were statistically significant predictors. Length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP was the only variable shown to be statistically significant on all 3 levels. Findings may be used to support peer specialists in the state this study was conducted and other states, not only in the mental health field, but in additional fields as well.

Acute rehabilitation hospitals assist brain injury patients and families who face a life- changing event to achieve greater independence and quality of life. During the acute rehabilitation phase of recovery, care is focused on the patient; however, there is a nationwide movement to implement patient- and family-centered care because caregivers experience grief and uncertainty about how to care for their loved one during hospitalization and upon discharge. The purpose of this staff education project was to educate rehabilitation staff on how to identify and to meet the needs of family members of brain injury patients in an acute rehabilitation center in the western United States. The patient- and family-centered care theoretical framework and Knowles's theory of adult learning supported the development and implementation of the educational program. The project site stakeholders identified educational opportunities to assist staff to meet caregiver needs and improve outcomes. Thirty-two staff including registered nurses, licensed vocational nurses, patient care technicians, and nurse managers, received education for the support of caregivers for patients with brain injuries. The program was evaluated using a 5-point Likert type questionnaire. After receiving the education all participants agreed or strongly agreed that content increased their knowledge, skills, and confidence in caring for family caregivers of brain injury patients. Implications of this project for social change include the potential to improve patient outcomes through caregiver knowledge and skills to provide care to patients with brain injury.

Research exploring the relationship between social supports and resilience among hospital-based nurses and teachers has offered little to illuminate how school nurses identify and access social support and the impact it may have on their ability to manage ongoing daily stressors or develop resilience. The social networks and social support model suggest that access to social support may underscore the development of effective coping. This study explored the relationship between social supports as measured by a self-report questionnaire, and resilience as measured by the Conner-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). It was hypothesized that a positive correlation would exist between use of personal, professional, and community social support and school nurse resilience scores. Additional hypotheses were that resilience would be positively correlated with longevity, perception of funding, and professional school nurse association activity. A convenience sample of 145 certified school nurses employed in one northeastern state's public schools completed an online survey that included a behavioral questionnaire and the CD-RISC. t tests and correlations were employed to examine the relationship between the variables. Both collaboration with multidisciplinary team members within the school setting and identification of personal and professional social support were significantly correlated with school nurse resilience. Results may influence positive social change for the individual school nurse via an improved ability to cope with workplace stressors. The bidirectional nature of resilience suggests interaction with a resilient nurse may influence the broader school community with an impact on cost, attendance, and learning.

While a growing body of evidence suggests health-related behaviors, such as problem and pathological gambling, are affected by multiple levels of influence, gambling studies using an ecological approach have not been documented. This dissertation work, that contains three studies, contributes to fill such research gap by examining gamblers' behaviors in formal treatment programs using an ecological approach. In study 1, the influences of the environmental and individual level factors on the treatment completion is examined. Previous studies have shown that treatment completion has a positive impact on the recovery path from gambling problems. In study 2 and study 3, interpersonal communication between gamblers and their social support networks is explored. More specifically, these two studies focus on understanding of the disclosure of gambling problems using the Integrated Model of Health Disclosure Decision-making. These two studies are significant because this may be the first attempt in gambling studies to explore disclosure of gambling problems. Disclosure may be a necessary step to ameliorate the negative consequences of gambling by creating or reinforcing gamblers' social support network. Each of these studies uses a distinctive dataset and methodology. Study 1 uses the Iowa Gambling Treatment Outcome system data from 2005 to 2011 from the Iowa Department of Public Health. Study 2 uses the 2011 Iowa Gambling Attitude and Experiences survey data, which included questions designed specifically for gambling disclosure. Study 3 is based on qualitative data (interviews) collected from gamblers who disclosed their gambling problems within their social support network. Results from study 1 based on a generalized linear mixed model suggest that self-reported past behavior of either reducing or quitting gambling behavior has a significant effect on treatment plan completion. Also, gamblers admitted to large treatment agencies that served mostly in urban areas are less likely to complete the treatment plan compared to gamblers admitted in any other type of agencies in urban or rural areas. In study 2, path analysis was performed to examine the disclosure of gambling problems within gamblers' social support network. Severity of gambling was the only significant predictor of disclosure. Study 3 found that the factors that affected disclosure are confrontation, gambling losses, stigma, trust, non-judgmental receivers, and close and long relationship. Outcomes expectations and past experience were also important in disclosure. Disclosures did not have substantial consequences for the size and strength of ties in their social support group, suggesting disclosures did not harm or strengthen relationships. Study 2 and study 3 both suggest that as gambling addiction become more severe, signs of gambling problems could be more visible to the members of social support groups. This may lead to disclosure of gambling problems through confrontations initiated by a friend or family member.

The implementation of schoolwide positive behavioral support (SWPBS) programs is becoming increasingly common in schools across the nation. Although a primary assumption of SWPBS is that schoolwide administration of positive supports to students who meet behavioral expectations will result in fewer behavior problems, surprisingly few studies have investigated the effects of various positive reinforcement rates (RR) on office discipline referral rates (ODR). This study investigated the relationship between RRs and ODRs among schools (N = 44) implementing SWPBS programs with high fidelity. Results revealed no significant differences in RRs or ODRs between Title I and non-Title I schools but did reveal a significant difference in the ratio of RRs to ODRs between the top and bottom ODR quartile schools. Overall, RRs were slightly associated with a decrease in ODRs. Results also suggested schools did not appropriately respond to schoolwide RR and ODR data. The present status of SWPBS data collection and utilization procedures is presented and practical implications are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate child support orders made after legislative adoption of child support guidelines by comparing them to child support orders made prior to uniform guideline adoption to determine if child support orders had increased, decreased, or remained the same; to determine if child support orders were adequately covering the cost of raising children; to determine if child support guidelines had resulted in similar treatment of comparable cases; to determine if judges/hearing officers were deviating from the guidelines; and to determine the reasons for deviation. There was no statistically significant difference found between the mean child support order made under the legislative guidelines and the mean child support order made prior to standardized guideline adoption. When the mean child support order made under the uniform guidelines was compared to the 1990 poverty standard, no statistically significant difference was found. However, the mean child support order under the legislative guidelines was found to be significantly less than both the 1990 USDA estimate of the cost of rearing children and Espenshade's (1984) updated estimate of expenditures on children. No significant difference was found between the rate of compliance/noncompliance with the guidelines by judicial district. However, a statistically significant difference was found to exist between counties. Results indicate that there is still a great deal of variation in the amount of child support being ordered under standardized child support guidelines.

Pour répondre aux besoins de précision et d'efficacité des simulations scientifiques, la communauté du Calcul Haute Performance augmente progressivement les demandes en terme de parallélisme, rajoutant ainsi un besoin croissant de réutiliser les bibliothèques parallèles optimisées pour les architectures complexes.L'utilisation simultanée de plusieurs bibliothèques de calcul parallèle au sein d'une application soulève bien souvent des problèmes d 'efficacité. En compétition pour l'obtention des ressources, les routines parallèles, pourtant optimisées, se gênent et l'on voit alors apparaître des phénomènes de surcharge, de contention ou de défaut de cache.Dans cette thèse, nous présentons une technique de cloisonnement de flux de calculs qui permet de limiter les effets de telles interférences. Le cloisonnement est réalisé à l'aide de contextes d'exécution qui partitionnement les unités de calculs voire en partagent certaines. La répartition des ressources entre les contextes peut être modifiée dynamiquement afin d'optimiser le rendement de la machine. A cette fin, nous proposons l'utilisation de certaines métriques par un superviseur pour redistribuer automatiquement les ressources aux contextes. Nous décrivons l'intégration des contextes d'ordonnancement au support d'exécution pour machines hétérogènes StarPU et présentons des résultats d'expériences démontrant la pertinence de notre approche. Dans ce but, nous avons implémenté une extension du solveur direct creux qr mumps dans la quelle nous avons fait appel à ces mécanismes d'allocation de ressources. A travers les contextes d'ordonnancement nous décrivons une nouvelle méthode de décomposition du problème basée sur un algorithme de \proportional mapping". Le superviseur permet de réadapter dynamiquement et automatiquement l'allocation des ressources au parallèlisme irrégulier de l'application. L'utilisation des contextes d'ordonnancement et du superviseur a amélioré la localité et la performance globale du solveur. / To face the ever demanding requirements in term of accuracy and speed of scientific simulations, the High Performance community is constantly increasing the demands in term of parallelism, adding thus tremendous value to parallel libraries strongly optimized for highly complex architectures.Enabling HPC applications to perform efficiently when invoking multiple parallel libraries simultaneously is a great challenge. Even if a uniform runtime system is used underneath, scheduling tasks or threads coming from dfferent libraries over the same set of hardware resources introduces many issues, such as resource oversubscription, undesirable cache ushes or memory bus contention.In this thesis, we present an extension of StarPU, a runtime system specifically designed for heterogeneous architectures, that allows multiple parallel codes to run concurrently with minimal interference. Such parallel codes run within scheduling contexts that provide confined executionenvironments which can be used to partition computing resources. Scheduling contexts can be dynamically resized to optimize the allocation of computing resources among concurrently running libraries. We introduced a hypervisor that automatically expands or shrinks contexts using feedback from the runtime system (e.g. resource utilization). We demonstrated the relevance of this approach by extending an existing generic sparse direct solver (qr mumps) to use these mechanisms and introduced a new decomposition method based on proportional mapping that is used to build the scheduling contexts. In order to cope with the very irregular behavior of the application, the hypervisor manages dynamically the allocation of resources. By means of the scheduling contexts and the hypervisor we improved the locality and thus the overall performance of the solver.

acase@tulane.edu / Agencies declare the development of social and emotional skills critical to child development, and research on outcomes of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programming supports this claim. Despite the growing number of resources for educators, the day-to-day realities of individual school environments provide countless obstacles to implementation of SEL programs and initiatives. Without proper implementation, programs may not produce the desired student outcomes. Administrative support has been identified as a key factor underlying effective implementation, and while this seems to be a concrete way to increase SEL outcomes, the construct lacks a clear definition. This makes it difficult to identify which aspects of administrative support for SEL are the most important, and what mechanisms underlie the provision of support for SEL. Because there is no academic definition to guide school administrators in what supports to provide for effective implementation, it is necessary to research this construct. The current study seeks to do so by listening to the voices of those closest to the work of implementation, administrators and teachers themselves. By determining what supports stakeholders perceive necessary to successfully implement SEL in the context of a specific school site, the study aims to identify salient components of administrator support and create an emic definition to guide implementation. / 1 / Laura C. Cornell