Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Investigation Of The Relationships Among The Family Of Origin, Need For Achievement, And Career Development, David G. Arcement

Doctoral Dissertations

The study was designed to examine, from a family system theory and a contextual approach, the impact of family environment on career thoughts, career indecision, and vocational identity. It further expanded career development research to include the need for achievement by examining the relationship between need for achievement and career-related variables. A sample of 211 undergraduate college students was administered the Family Environment Scale, Career Decision Scale, Career Thoughts Inventory, My Vocational Situation, and Personal Values Questionnaire. The results revealed a limited relationship between the family of origin and career development outcome measures. Specifically, independence and expressiveness in the family …

Two Essays On Ceo Inside Debt Compensation, Nilakshi Borah

Doctoral Dissertations

In the first chapter, I examine the effect CEO inside debt holdings on firm cash holdings, as measured by the ratio of cash and marketable securities to net assets using a sample of EXECUCOMP firms over the period of 2006 to 2008. Following prior literature on CEO inside debt holdings (Cassell et al., 2012), I use the following two measures as proxies for CEO inside debt compensation: (1) the CEO to firm debt/equity ratio, which is calculated as the CEO's debt/equity ratio scaled by the firm's debt to equity ratio and 2) an indicator variable equal to one when the …

Message Framing Effects In The Delivery Of Sleep Hygiene Information To Parents Of Elementary And Middle School Children, Aimee L. Blackham

Doctoral Dissertations

In order to achieve all the benefits of sleeping, adequate quantity and quality of sleep are required, particularly for children and adolescents because of the issues of physical, emotional, and psychological development. Recent reviews of the literature have concluded children and adolescents consistently do not get enough sleep, and childhood sleep problems have serious negative effects on children and their families. Self-help guides have been proven to be effective, but the particular framing of the message is vital to its overall persuasiveness. Many researchers have found that these framing effects are important to the overall persuasiveness of a message. However, …

Escapist Environments, Restorative Experiences, And Consumer Self-Regulation, G. David Shows

Doctoral Dissertations

The study of atmospherics recognizes shoppers engage in consumption for more than its utilitarian function. The concept of the recreational shopper recognizes the value-producing process of the consumption experience. This research furthers the understanding of consumption by delving into the value-enhancing process of escaping during the experience, as well as measuring the mediating effects of fascination and authenticity. In this study, a test of an individual's self-regulating behavior and the moderating effects on the consumption experience help determine if predetermination affects an escape experience.

Pictured scenes of restaurants were pretested for their ability to produce fascination and represent and authentic …

The Relationships Of Sleep Quality, Length, And Napping To Physical Performance, Rebecca M. Hoffmann

Doctoral Dissertations

College students suffer from more sleep disturbances than the general population. Sleep difficulties can lead to lower levels of performance, memory, and cognitive ability. Sleep quality is known to impact individuals' physical and psychological health. The relationship between sleep variables (i.e., sleep quality, sleep length, sleepiness, and a nap/relaxation) and physical performance (i.e., flexibility, grip strength, and peak performance) has not been fully examined. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between sleep quality, sleep length, and sleepiness and physical performance (e.g., flexibility, grip strength, and peak power), as well as to determine if a short nap …

The Effects Of Procedural Injustice, Rebecca B. Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to test for the existence of procedural injustice (PIJ) in the audit environment and its effect on junior auditor's reporting of time and level of skeptical action. This dissertation theorizes that the conflicting forces between junior auditors' ethical beliefs, formal firm policies forbidding the underreporting of chargeable time (URT), and implicit encouragement from managers to engage in URT result in a unique aspect of the audit environment, PIJ, because entry-level auditors perceive these conflicting beliefs and messages as unfair. In this study, PIJ is defined as the inverse of procedural justice, which is the …

Exploring The Structural Relationships Between Personality And 360-Degree Feedback, Cole N. Napper

Doctoral Dissertations

The process of using multiple sources or raters (i.e., self, supervisor, peers, subordinates, and others) in the assessment of managerial performance has been used pervasively in organizations with the primary goal of motivating behavioral change through feedback (Bracken, Timmrick, & Church, 2001). Multi-source or 360-degree feedback programs are especially suited to help measure behaviors related to performance and assess outcomes, such as leadership, interpersonal relationships, coaching, and communication (London & Smither, 1995). Typically, 360-degree feedback dimensions are measured by meta-categories of behavior called competencies.Bartram (2005) stated that these competencies could be defined as the search for characteristics that separate …

Using Power-Law Properties Of Social Groups For Cloud Defense And Community Detection, Justin L. Rice

Doctoral Dissertations

The power-law distribution can be used to describe various aspects of social group behavior. For mussels, sociobiological research has shown that the Lévy walk best describes their self-organizing movement strategy. A mussel's step length is drawn from a power-law distribution, and its direction is drawn from a uniform distribution. In the area of social networks, theories such as preferential attachment seek to explain why the degree distribution tends to be scale-free. The aim of this dissertation is to glean insight from these works to help solve problems in two domains: cloud computing systems and community detection.

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