More than 4.9 million businesses exist in the United States, and leaders within these businesses have to acclimate to change. Clear and effective communication is vital to the success of an organization. According to scholars and health care leaders focusing on strategies to communicate change during organizational change is a critical aspect of sustainability and profitability. The conceptual framework of this study was communication theory. The purpose of this single case study was to explore successful strategies that some health care leaders used to communicate during organizational change in a health care organization in El Paso, Texas. The data collection process consisted of collecting data from semistructured interviews and organizational documents, and the analysis process included grouping key words and reconstructing data into themes. The 4 key themes that emerged from this process included building trust through organizational communication is critical during change, the use of technologies, as a tool for communication is key during change, 2-way communication needs to occur during organizational change, and communication about change is vital through comprehensive organizational meetings. Health care leaders provided insights on management and communication strategies and responsibilities leaders and employees go through during organizational change. The implications for positive social change include strategies to improve communication that could help health care leaders with their employees and their patients during organizational change, which could increase the profitability of the organization and potentially generate a more thriving and healthy community.

Parents' refusal to immunize their children with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine has resulted in a surge of measles outbreaks in the United States. The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationships between parental knowledge and trust of the MMR vaccine, and their trust in government and medical authorities. The theoretical foundation for this study was the health belief model (HBM). This study determined if there was any relationship between general trust in doctors/governments (i.e., the predictor variable) and attitudes toward MMR vaccine (i.e., the sole dependent variable), and whether gender, age group, or level of education moderated that general trust. A Survey Monkey subscriber database and researcher-developed survey was used to identify and email 2,500 parents of immunization-aged children, resulting in 237 respondents who met the required parameters. The analysis revealed a significant, positive relationship between the criterion and predictor variables, R = .32, R2 = .10, F(1, 235) = 26.39, p. < .001, regardless of gender, age, or education, suggesting an association between higher trust and greater likelihood of a parent allowing vaccination. This study offers significant insights for positive social change by providing pediatricians, primary health care providers, and vaccine educators, with information for communicating with vaccine-hesitant parents: It is not enough to address parental concerns of vaccine safety, efficacy, and necessity. It is also not enough to provide evidence-based scientific data, as doing so has been proven to be ineffective "and for some parents counter-productive" when government and medical authorities are sited as the source. What we need to do is start focusing upon the role of parental trust, including how to best establish that trust, and equally important, what steps are necessary to sustain that trust.

Thesis (LLM) --University of Limpopo, 2010

Thesis (LLM. (Development and Management) -- University of Limpopo, 2005

The environment in higher education and healthcare is rapidly changing. Adaptation through innovation is critical for organizations responsible for the education of healthcare providers. This study examined the climate for innovation at chiropractic colleges and health sciences universities offering a doctor of chiropractic program. The relationship between conflict, resistance to change, trust, justice, and climate for innovation was explored. Prior research involving these variables at chiropractic colleges or health sciences universities offering a doctor of chiropractic program is extremely limited. The chiropractic profession is experiencing significant challenges including market competition, internal conflict, and significant healthcare policy change. Adding to the dilemma, enrollment at chiropractic colleges has experienced a substantial decline over the past decade. This study surveyed faculty at all chiropractic colleges and health science universities offering a doctor of chiropractic program in the United States and Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College. A response rate of nearly 50% was achieved. Data analysis showed higher levels of organizational trust and justice were associated with higher perceptions of climate for innovation. The relationship between justice and climate for innovation was not mediated by trust. Additionally, higher levels of resistance to change and increased conflict between administration and faculty were associated with lower perceptions of climate for innovation. The study findings offer insight for chiropractic colleges and health sciences universities offering a doctor of chiropractic program wishing to promote innovation.

The purpose of this study was to conduct an exploratory investigation of OCB, trust, and commitment among faculty and staff within Catholic IHEs. Faculty and staff from two Catholic IHEs were the focus of the study. Twenty-five schools were randomly selected from the 50 largest Catholic IHEs by undergraduate enrollment, identified from the 2012 list of Catholic IHEs officially recognized by the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU). The successful operation of Catholic IHEs appears to require high levels of trust and commitment. They benefit from higher levels of OCB, as they endeavor to work in common with other IHEs and, concurrently, extend efforts to adhere to the norms and expectations of John Paul II's 1990 Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Catholic IHEs are tasked with fostering spiritual growth and the Catholic intellectual tradition of dialogue between faith and reason. To address the study objectives, the relationships between the variables of OCB, employee trust, and organizational commitment within two Catholic IHEs were investigated. The research included (a) investigating the traditional conceptualizations of OCB, trust, and commitment with the goal of further defining them as multi-level concepts; (b) designating core concepts of OCB, interpersonal- and system-level trust, and commitment; (c) developing a model of OCB, employee trust, and commitment refining from existing theoretical bases; (d) application of core concepts to explore the dimensionality of faculty and staff members' OCB; (e) exploring the relationship between OCB constructs and levels of trust and organizational commitment; and (f) identification of any moderating effects by comparing these relationships at the different IHEs.

This study investigated the effects of crisis communication messaging strategies on the relationship between an organization and its key publics. This study found that none of the strategies tested had a significant impact on the relationship between an organization and its publics, however some strategies consistently influenced a relationship more than others.

In response to water supply depletion challenges, countries such as Australia, the United States, and Namibia have implemented technologies that treat wastewater up to the standards permissible to use for irrigation, toilet flushing, and even drinking water. However, many of these countries have been unable to successfully implement some of their ambitious reclaimed water reuse projects due to negative public perceptions of recycling wastewater. The focus of this study was to understand which factors in risk perception theory are the most influential in shaping community perceptions of reclaimed water reuse as a future source of drinking water within Hillsborough County. The research design was comprised of a mixed methodology approach (quantitative and qualitative analyses). The methods for assessing how each of the five main factors played a role in shaping risk perception in each of the communities was comprised of three main analyses, including spatial, statistical (through multiple regression modelling in R), and personal interview data (an HOA leader, one key informant, and a focus group). Residents (n=417) from various neighborhoods were interviewed through surveys which will evaluate factors found in literature that have been shown to have the most effect in shaping risk perception theory.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The rapid pace of growth in the field of human genetics has left researchers with many new challenges in the area of security and privacy. To encourage participation and foster trust towards research, it is important to ensure that genetic databases are adequately protected. This task is a particularly challenging one for statistical agencies due to the high prevalence of categorical data contained within statistical genetic databases. The absence of natural ordering makes the application of traditional Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) methods less straightforward, which is why we have proposed a new noise addition technique for categorical values. The main contributions of the thesis are as follows. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the trust relationships that occur between the different stakeholders in a genetic data warehouse system. We also provide a quantifiable model of trust that allows the database manager to granulate the level of protection based on the amount of trust that exists between the stakeholders. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that trust has been applied in the SDC context. We propose a privacy protection framework for genetic databases which is designed to deal with the fact that genetic data warehouses typically contain a high proportion of categorical data. The framework includes the use of a clustering technique which allows for the easier application of traditional noise addition techniques for categorical values. Another important contribution of this thesis is a new similarity measure for categorical values, which aims to capture not only the direct similarity between values, but also some sense of transitive similarity. This novel measure also has possible applications in providing a way of ordering categorical values, so that more traditional SDC methods can be more easily applied to them. Our analysis of experimental results also points to a numerical attribute phenomenon, whereby we typically have high similarity between numerical values that are close together, and where the similarity decreases as the absolute value of the difference between numerical values increases. However, some numerical attributes appear to not behave in a strictly `numerical' way. That is, values which are close together numerically do not always appear very similar. We also provide a novel noise addition technique for categorical values, which employs our similarity measure to partition the values in the data set. Our method - VICUS - then perturbs the original microdata file so that each value is more likely to be changed to another value in the same partition than one from a different partition. The technique helps to ensure that the perturbed microdata file retains data quality while also preserving the privacy of individual records.

Grounded theory methodology has guided the grounded theory methods used to explore the acute care paediatric nurses' perspective of what they do when a child has had a severe accident. The research was initiated from the experience of nursing children in the context of a rehabilitation centre and wondering how acute care nurses promoted a child's recovery after a severe unintentional injury.Many avenues were used to search international and New Zealand literature but the scarcity of literature related to what acute care paediatric nurses do was evident. Therefore this research has the potential of informing the speciality practice of acute care pediatric nursing.Nursing children in the acute care ward after a severe accident is complex. It encompasses nursing the family when they are experiencing a crisis. It is critical that the acute care nurse monitors and ensures the child's physiological needs are met, and the nurse "works with" the child to maintain and advance medical stability. Nursing interactions are an important part of "working with", communication is the essence of nursing. This research has focussed on the nurses' social processes whilst caring for the physical needs of the child and interacting with the family and multidisciplinary team when appropriate.An effective working-relationship with a nurse and family is founded on trust. Trust is an accepted part of our day-to-day lives and how to develop a trusting working-relationship with the child and family has not been explored prior to this research. Grounded theory methods supported the process of exploring the social processes of "building trust" whilst "working with" families in a vulnerable position. Nurses rely on rapport to be invited into a family's space to "work with" and support the re-establishment of the parenting role. The "stepping in and out" of an effective working-relationship with a family is reliant on trust. Nurses build trust by spending time to "be with", using chat to get to know each other, involving and supporting the family to parent a "different" child and reassuring and giving realistic hope to help the child and parents cope with their changed future.A substantive theory of the concept of "building trust to work with" has been developed using grounded theory methods. The theory has been conceptualized using the perspective of seven registered nurses working in paediatric acute care wards that admit children who have had a severe traumatic accident.