Microtrial Examining the Malleability of Psychological Flexibility in a Sample of Involuntarily Unemployed Job Seekers

Hearing, Casey ProQuest Dissertations & Theses The George Washing 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the malleability of psychological flexibility in a sample of involuntarily unemployed job seekers. Job loss is associated with adverse psychological and health effects, yet few empirically supported interventions designed to target coping in involuntarily unemployed individuals have been established. In this study, a microtrial focusing on changing levels of psychological flexibility in involuntarily unemployed individuals was used to examine the malleability of psychological flexibility, testing its utility as a target for change in individuals facing involuntary unemployment. Psychological flexibility is defined as the mental flexibility needed to appraise a situation, think flexibly about the demands of the given situation, and subsequently utilize an appropriate coping strategy. This study recruited 121 participants from the sample of involuntarily unemployed individuals in the United States, with 57 participants randomly assigned to the control condition and 64 participants randomly assigned to the intervention condition. The intervention drew on components of interventions for coping flexibility and job loss and was a video based, interactive online intervention that was pre-recorded. Analyses of covariance were used to test the post-test mean difference in flexibility between conditions after controlling for pre-test levels of flexibility and covariates to determine the effect of the intervention. These were followed by analyses of covariance that include job search self-efficacy as a moderator to explore whether the effects of the intervention were different for individuals who are higher in job search self-efficacy as compared to those who are lower in job search self-efficacy. Participants who were low in flexibility at T1 and were assigned to the experimental condition saw a decrease in T3 flexibility scores compared to individuals assigned to the control condition. Future research should investigate the effects of a short-term psychological flexibility intervention that includes psychoeducation and skill building at the outset to increase baseline levels of psychological flexibility.

Cost-effectiveness of dialectical behavior therapy in the treatment of borderline personality disorder

Heard, Heidi Lynn University of Washington 2000 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation presents the first evaluations of the cost-effectiveness of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) in the treatment of borderline personality disorder. DBT is a multi-modal, manualized cognitive-behavior therapy developed to treat individuals who meet criteria for borderline personality disorder and who have a history of parasuicidal behavior. The dissertation presents the cost-effectiveness results of two psychotherapy outcome trials involving DBT. In Study 1, subjects were randomly assigned to receive one year of DBT (<italic>n</italic> = 22) or to receive Treatment-as-Usual (TAU) in the community (<italic>n</italic> = 22). Analyses suggested that at the end of one year of treatment, subjects receiving DBT had incurred significantly higher psychotherapy costs, lower psychiatric inpatient costs and lower emergency room costs when compared to TAU. The two conditions did not differ significantly with respect to median medical or total health care costs. Analyses also revealed important differences in variance between the two conditions, with the TAU condition having significantly greater variance in terms of psychotherapy, inpatient, emergency room and total health care costs. Finally, the two conditions also did not differ in terms of employment or global functioning cost-effectiveness ratios. In Study 2, the DBT subjects from Study 1 were compared to subjects whose existing therapists in the community had agree to provide them one year of stable psychotherapy (<italic>n</italic> = 16). At the end of one year of treatment, subjects receiving DBT had incurred significantly lower psychiatric inpatient costs and had a trend toward better global functioning cost-effectiveness ratios. The median costs and cost-effectiveness ratios did not differ significantly between the two conditions on any of the remaining variables. Finally, the TAU condition did have significantly greater variance in terms of psychotherapy, inpatient and emergency room costs. The implications of the findings and their limitations are discussed. Future research directions are described.

Application of statistical methods in risk and reliability

Heard, Astrid E University of Central Florida 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

The dissertation considers construction of confidence intervals for a cumulative distribution function F(z) and its inverse, F-1(u), at some fixed points z and u on the basis of an i.i.d. sample X&barbelow; = xin i=1 , where the sample size is relatively small. The sample is modeled as having the flexible Generalized Gamma distribution with all three parameters being unknown. This approach can be viewed as an alternative to nonparametric techniques which do not specify distribution of X and lead to less efficient procedures. The confidence intervals are constructed by objective Bayesian methods and use the Jeffreys noninformative prior. Performance of the resulting confidence intervals is studied via Monte Carlo simulations and compared to the performance of nonparametric confidence intervals based on binomial proportion. In addition, techniques for change point detection are analyzed and further evaluated via Monte Carlo simulations. The effect of a change point on the interval estimators is studied both analytically and via Monte Carlo simulations.

Statistical Inference Utilizing Agent Based Models

Heard, Daniel Duke University 2014 해외박사(DDOD)

Agent-based models (ABMs) are computational models used to simulate the behaviors, actions and interactions of agents within a system. The individual agents each have their own set of assigned attributes and rules, which determine their behavior within the ABM system. These rules can be deterministic or probabilistic, allowing for a great deal of flexibility. ABMs allow us to observe how the behaviors of the individual agents affect the system as a whole and if any emergent structure develops within the system. Examining rule sets in conjunction with corresponding emergent structure shows how small-scale changes can affect large-scale outcomes within the system. Thus, we can better understand and predict the development and evolution of systems of interest. ABMs have become ubiquitous---they used in business (virtual auctions to select electronic ads for display), atomospheric science (weather forecasting), and public health (to model epidemics). But there is limited understanding of the statistical properties of ABMs. Specifically, there are no formal procedures for calculating confidence intervals on predictions, nor for assessing goodness-of-fit, nor for testing whether a specific parameter (rule) is needed in an ABM. Motivated by important challenges of this sort, this dissertation focuses on developing methodology for uncertainty quantification and statistical inference in a likelihood-free context for ABMs. Chapter 2 of the thesis develops theory related to ABMs, including procedures for model validation, assessing model equivalence and measuring model complexity. Chapters 3 and 4 of the thesis focuses on two approaches for performing likelihood-free inference involving ABMs, which is necessary because of the intractability of the likelihood function due to the variety of input rules and the complexity of outputs. Chapter 3 explores the use of Gaussian Process emulators in conjunction with ABMs to perform statistical inference. This draws upon a wealth of research on emulators, which find smooth functions on lower-dimensional Euclidean spaces that approximate the ABM. Emulator methods combine observed data with output from ABM simulations, using these to fit and calibrate Gaussian-process approximations. Chapter 4 discusses Approximate Bayesian Computation for ABM inference, the goal of which is to obtain approximation of the posterior distribution of some set of parameters given some observed data. The final chapters of the thesis demonstrates the approaches for inference in two applications. Chapter 5 presents application models the spread of HIV based on detailed data on a social network of men who have sex with men (MSM) in southern India. Use of an ABM will allow us to determine which social/economic/policy factors contribute to thetransmission of the disease. We aim to estimate the effect that proposed medical interventions will have on the spread of HIV in this community. Chapter 6 examines the function of a heroin market in the Denver, Colorado metropolitan area. Extending an ABM developed from ethnographic research, we explore a procedure for reducing the model, as well as estimating posterior distributions of important quantities based on simulations.

Farquhar and the new comedy, 1695--1710 (George Farquhar)

Heard, Elisabeth June The Pennsylvania State University 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

The transition from what critics of an earlier generation called “Restoration” to “Sentimental” comedy remains a subject of enormous confusion. A generation ago A. H. Scouten pointed out that 1670s comedies and 1690s comedies are quite different. Recent scholars have denied that there was ever a unitary “Restoration comedy” and have either denied the existence of “Sentimental comedy” as a genre altogether, or placed it in the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet virtually all writers on the subject have agreed that a major “change” occurs in comedy around the end of the century, and the characteristics of new comedies are substantially different circa 1710 than they were circa 1695. I propose to abandon obsolete and discredited generic categories and to approach the subject of “the change in comedy” afresh. Multiple kinds of comedy exist at all times between 1660 and 1800. My object is to find new and more helpful terms in which to trace the shift in generic norms that occurred over a fifteen year period—a period that more or less precisely coincides with the brief career of George Farquhar. This study covers the works of several playwrights—Congreve, Cibber, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Steele, and Centlivre. Farquhar is foregrounded because he alone wrote plays across the complete spectrum from the “old” comedy (1690s imitation of 1670s sex comedy) to the “new” comedy that became dominant around 1710, and his last two plays—<italic>The Recruiting Officer</italic> (1706) and <italic>The Beaux Stratagem</italic> (1707)—exemplify this shift to new comedy.

The relationship between learning and study skills and student persistence in a community college

Heard, Michael Lynn University of Virginia 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

The community college has become an important avenue by which a large number of people gain access to higher education opportunities. Unfortunately, about half of the students who attend community colleges depart before completing a program of study. This study sought to address the problem of persistence in the community college. The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of the relationship between measures of learning, study strategies and student persistence. A sample of 169 students was considered. Recent high school graduates, enrolled full-time at the community college, who had declared a major were the focus of this investigation. These group characteristics were used because previous studies of persistence predictors suggested that age, enrollment status and intent were the most important predictors of student persistence. An ex post facto design was used in the study. The dependent variables were course persistence and program persistence. The independent variables were the scales of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) (Weinstein, Palmer & Schulte, 1987). Data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS Version 10). Multiple regression procedures were employed. The findings were: (1) Motivation and concentration were significant predictors of course persistence; (2) Motivation explained approximately 6 to 7% of the variance in measures of course persistence in the stepwise model but concentration was excluded from the model; (3) Anxiety and self-testing were significant predictors of program persistence; (4) While anxiety explained about 3 to 40 of the variance in program persistence in the stepwise model, self-testing was excluded. The research contributes to understanding of the problem of persistence in the community college by providing evidence of the nature of the relationship of motivation and anxiety to student persistence.

The life course of family structure and school engagement among adolescents

Heard, Holly Ellen The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

Recent demographic family changes, including a rise in single parent families, have led to increasing concern for children who grow up without both biological parents in the home. I use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine the influence of various family structure types (such as two-biological parent, single parent, and stepparent families) on school engagement during adolescence. I take a life course approach by considering the entire family structure trajectory, from birth through adolescence, when predicting three indicators of school engagement: school grades, educational expectations, and suspension or expulsion. This dissertation contributes to the family structure literature by using measures of family structure status, duration of exposure to parental figures, and changes in parental roles to model the family structure trajectory. As expected, results show significant negative effects on school engagement for adolescents living in nonintact families. In addition, exposure to biological mother absence and instability in the mother role both have long-term negative consequences for adolescents. I also find that race and ethnicity serve to moderate the effects of the family structure trajectory; for example, African American adolescents seem to recover relatively quickly from a family structure change, and Hispanic and Asian adolescents show few family structure effects. Finally, examination of the mediating influence of family and parental resources shows that family income (and, to a lesser extent, parents' educational aspirations for their children) help to explain family structure disadvantage, but only for adolescents living with single mothers. Overall, this dissertation shows that consideration of the entire family structure trajectory can help to illuminate how family structure influences adolescent school engagement.

Queer Personae as Public Discourse Natalie Clifford Barney and Gertrude Stein

Heard, Elizabeth New York University 2016 해외박사(DDOD)

In this dissertation I understand the erotic as chaotically alive and queerly generative in all aspects of living, including in the many ways in which we participate in the collective labor of public discourse, and I argue that the intensely pleasurable intimacies of erotic exchange serve broad consensus-making processes in important ways. As an uncontainable impulse to come close---to touch, with/in pleasure---the erotic works at the most intimate levels of human belonging and becoming, where the continual ordering and reorganizing of tasks and pleasures, bodies, needs, and knowledge takes place. To explore these points, Queer Personae as Public Discourse considers the self-performances of the salonierre/writers, Natalie Clifford Barney and Gertrude Stein in relation to salon culture, identity politics, and the larger public sphere, arguing that, beyond their usefulness to the enfranchisement efforts of the LGBTQ movement, these iconic figures enact queer pleasures with a broad reach and much to offer to thinking about the erotic in democratic public discourse. I outline the gender and class politics of salon culture that fostered such queer public self-performances, then map out their crafting, dissemination, and reception, and finally explore their effects within public discourse. My study of Barney and Stein's public personae is offered in the service of identifying the radical ideas concerning modern citizen-subjectivity that each has to offer and putting those ideas to work in the imagining of more nimble, ludic approaches to democratic public discourse.

The Influence of Professional Development on Teachers' Efficacy to Implement Common Core State Standards

Druitt Heard, Theresa ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Kean University 2018 해외박사(DDOD)