Digital Commons Network^™

Intrapersonal And Community-Related Influences Of Rural Adolescent Pregnancy: A Mixed-Method Approach, Kimberly Becknel Brodie

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The majority of data on adolescent pregnancy pertains to urban communities, therefore, the individual and social influences associated with adolescent pregnancy in rural communities have not been extensively explored. The pregnancy rate among adolescent women aged 15 to 19 in rural Vance County, North Carolina, is 113.7 per 1,000, nearly twice the state average. This sequential mixed-method study used the social ecological model to evaluate the intrapersonal and community-related factors associated with adolescent pregnancy in this rural area. A quantitative survey assessed intrapersonal factors, namely sexual health knowledge, sex-related attitudes, and self-esteem in pregnant or parenting and nonpregnant or nonparenting …

Personal And Professional Spirituality: Muslim Social Workers' Perspectives, Cheryl W. El-Amin

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Research in the area of religion and spirituality in social work practice is lacking minority practitioner representation. This phenomenological study explored the questions of how American Muslim social workers define and experience the religious/spiritual, and perceive the propriety of integrating either, in practice. Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim, early social theorists, suggested that group feeling and affiliation impact personal and professional perception and decision making. American societal views of Muslims are often negative and uninformed. A group of 15 Muslim practitioners with bachelor's or more advanced degrees in social work were recruited through a survey administered via an Internet survey site. …

The Effects Of An Integrated Behavioral Health Initiative On The Behavior Of Providers In An Ob/Gyn Primary Care Clinic, Dean Moritz

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The separation between behavioral services and traditional medicine is increasingly being seen as counterproductive on personal and societal levels. Despite this, there has been little research examining how integrated models blending mental and physical health services could be implemented. The literature revealed that behavioral interventions have been incorporated into traditional medical treatments, but this often has been piecemeal in nature and has yielded equivocal results. This study examined the assertion that effective integration between behavioral and medical services will increase the standard of care for the patient. Integration in this study was accomplished by colocating a psychologist on the primary …

The Relationship Between Religious And Spiritual Factors And The Perpetration Of Intimate Personal Violence, Robbin G. Todhunter

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a multifaceted social issue that affects the Christian faith community as it does the secular community. Though the literature reflects some understanding of general correlates and possible antecedents to IPV within the Christian community, the impact of religious and spiritual factors tends to be homogenized and is often misjudged. Allport's theory of intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation provided a platform for investigating Christian male-perpetrated IPV. This quantitative study utilized survey design and measured the impact of 10 select religious and spiritual factors on the probability of physical or sexual IPV perpetration. Archival data from Wave …

Effects Of Mentoring Preservice Teachers On Inservice Teachers In Professional Development School Environments, Marianne Pratschler

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Colleges and universities collaborte with P-12 public schools in professional development school (PDS) partnerships to improve teacher training, provide professional development for inservice teachers, improve student achievement, and promote action research. Most research has been done on advantages for preservice teachers and for students in classrooms. The purpose of this qualitative study was to better understand inservice teachers' mentoring experiences in order for a local college to support and enrich the professional lives of inservice teachers. Research questions addressed inservice teachers' perceptions regarding mentoring interactions, effects on their own classroom practices, and professional growth. The purposeful sample was comprised of …

E-Commerce Sourcing Models, Anne Fulcher Nelson

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Electronic commerce (EC) involves business transactions, marketing efforts, information gathering, and other functional activities with respect to information technology (IT) both within and without an organization. It provides various opportunities to a firm to adopt different business sourcing models and allows new opportunities to configure organizational structure for both private and public companies within the New Economy. Critical factors for EC success dictate that the firm must re-evaluate its business sourcing model from with complexity theory and the New Economy, thereby emphasizing the need for the firm to effectively coordinate its EC initiatives and consider all sourcing opportunities in this …

Ant Colony Optimization For Multilevel Assembly Job Shop Scheduling, M. Omkumar, P. Shahabudeen

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Job shop scheduling is one of the most explored areas in the last few decades. Although it is very commonly witnessed in real-life situations, very less investigation has been carried out in scheduling operations of multi-level jobs, which undergo serial, parallel, and assembly operations in an assembly job shop. In this work, some of the dispatch rules, which have best performances in scheduling multilevel jobs in dynamic assembly job shop, are tested in static assembly job shop environment. A new optimization heuristic based on Ant Colony Algorithm is proposed and its performance is compared with the dispatch rules.

Improved Decision Tree Methodology For The Attributes Of Unknown Or Uncertain Characteristics – Construction Project Prospective, Vijaya S. Desai

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Increasing use of computers, leads to accumulation of data of an organization, demanding the need of sophisticated data handling techniques. Many data handling concepts have evolved that support data analysis, and knowledge discovery. Data warehouse and Data mining techniques are playing an important role in the area of data analysis for knowledge discovery. These techniques typically address the four basic applications such as data classification, data clustering, association between data and finding sequential patterns between the data. Various algorithms that address to classification on large data sets have proved to be efficient in classifying the variables of known or certain …

Enhancing Motivation And Work Performance Of The Salespeople: The Impact Of Supervisors’ Behavior, Mohammed S. Chowdhury

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

This study examines the importance of authoritarian and positive achievement motivation behavior of the supervisors in enhancing salespeople’s motivation and work performance. Survey data were collected from all 105 sales employees in two retail organizations. Supervisors’ ratings were collected on all 105 of the salespersons. All hypotheses were tested using regression analysis and Pearson correlations controlling for background variables of gender, marital status, and ethnicity. The findings indicated that to the extent that supervisors engaged in positive motivational behaviors, salespersons’ intrinsic motivations were increased, which, in turn, increased their performance. Implications and a number of recommendations are discussed.

Mixed-Integer Linear Programming For Vehicle Routing Problem With Simultaneous Delivery And Pick-Up With Maximum Route-Length, S. P. Anbuudayasankar, K. Mohandas

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pick-up (VRPSDP) is the problem of optimally assimilating goods collection and distribution, when no priority constraints are imposed on the order in which the vehicle must perform the operations. This paper considers an additional constraint of maximum route length in VRPSDP. We develop a mixed-integer linear programming model for VRPSDP with an additional constraint of maximum route length. The results are encouraging for a sample benchmark data set.

A Performance Evaluation Of Introducing Balanced Scorecard To High-Tech Related Industries In Taiwan, Y.T. Jou, C.H. Hwang, Chung Li, S.C. Chen, J.H. Jhang

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has become the most desirable performance evaluation tool for industries in Taiwan; however, difficulty or bad performance of system introduction has occurred due to an incomplete understanding of the implementation approaches and correct objectives of the BSC system, causing the risk of cost loss. Two domestic high-tech companies in the high-tech related industry were served as the object of study in this research. The contents of four perspectives of the BSC were converted to twenty key performance evaluation indicators in terms of modern business administration as the variables in the research.

Based on the DMAIC model, the …

Development Of Production Scheduling Model With Constraint Resources And Parallel Machines, M. B. Fakhrzad, H. Khademi Zare

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

In this paper, a production scheduling model with constraint resources and parallel machines has been investigated. This problem is proposed as a multi-product production problem. Shortage is not allowed and the production horizon is indefinite. The objective is to maximize the level of resource usage and support the management’s standpoint (delays reduction). In this paper, this problem is modeled as the popular Knapsack problem in 0 and 1 programming. Then due to being NP-hard type for this kind of problems to obtain an optimal solution, A heuristic approach has been used to obtain the acceptable solution. By using the branch-and …

An Integrated Model For Optimization Of Production-Distribution Inventory Levels And Routing Structure For A Multi-Period, Multi-Product, Bi-Echelon Supply Chain, P. Parthiban, M. Punniyamoorthy, P.D.D. Dominic

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

In many multi-stage manufacturing supply chains, transportation related costs are a significant portion of final product costs. It is often crucial for successful decision making approaches in multi-stage manufacturing supply chains to explicitly account for non-linear transportation costs. In this paper, we have explored this problem by considering a Two-Stage Production-Transportation (TSPT). A two- stage supply chain that faces a deterministic stream of external demands for a single product is considered. A finite supply of raw materials, and finite production at stage one has been assumed. Items are manufactured at stage one and transported to stage two, where the storage …

A Comparative Representation Approach To Modern Heuristic Search Methods In A Job Shop, P.D.D. Dominic, Ahmad Kamil, P. Parthiban, M. Punniyamoorthy

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

The job shop problem is among the class of NP- hard combinatorial problems. This Research paper addresses the problem of static job shop scheduling on the job-based representation and the rule based representations. The popular search techniques like the genetic algorithm and simulated annealing are used for the determination of the objectives like minimizations of the makespan time and mean flow time. Various rules like the SPT, LPT, MWKR, and LWKR are used for the objective function to attain the results. The summary of results from this paper gives a conclusion that the genetic algorithm gives better results in the …

The Antecedents And Consequences Of Rfid Technology Adoption For China’S Logistics Companies, Chieh-Yu Lin, Yi-Hui Ho

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

With the fast growth in China’s economy, the logistics industry in China is set to take off, and more and more logistics companies begin to adopt innovative logistics technologies. RFID technology has been regarded as an important innovative application in logistics operations and supply chain management. This paper aims to study the antecedents and consequences of RFID technology adoption from the perspective of technological innovation by conducting a questionnaire survey on China’s logistics companies. The factors influencing RFID technology adoption consist of organizational and environmental dimensions. Research findings reveal that organizational encouragement for innovation, quality of human capital, organizational accumulation …

A Study On Attitude And Intention Towards Internet Banking With Reference To Malaysian Consumers In Klang Valley Region, S. Arunkumar

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

The development of online banking technology revolution in recent years, and speed of this development is extremely rapid. Online banking technology also spreads widely and influences deeply not only economic activities of business, households and governments but also various areas of people’s daily life. With the liberalization and internalization of financial markets, in terms of the entrance of the World Trade Organization, banks in Malaysia face pressures in service quality and administrative efficiency. Predicting customers' intention towards Internet banking is an important issue. Internet banking is a new type of information system that uses the innovative resources of the Internet …

Choosing Successful Strategies: A Checklist For Executives And Entrepreneurs, William T. Evans, Clyde Eiríkur Hull

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Every day, executives are confronted with strategic investment decisions. In this paper we draw on decades of making these decisions for a well-known Fortune 500 company to provide a straightforward way to choose successful strategic investments. A successful strategy requires a significant opportunity, the ability to extract value from that opportunity, and an investment balanced with the returns possible from that opportunity. We begin with five basic questions which should be asked of any strategic investment opportunity. The answers to these questions are often enough to indicate that the investment opportunity should not be pursued. The next step, assuming the …

Strategic Themes For Balanced Scorecard Construction Based On Fuzzy Logic, Adolfo Alberto Vanti, Rafael Espin, Alonso Perez-Soltero, Denise Ciotta

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Balanced Scorecard is a methodology for strategic management with emphasis in strategic, tactic, and operational control. If you don’t measure something, you don’t manage it. Last statement is a way to emphasizes one of the most important assumptions of this methodology that is very well implemented by it. However, BSC can’t express strategy in actions, nor translate verbalization of strategic planning, important topics to build an effective Balance Scorecard. This paper defines priorities of topics about strategic planning considering the SWOT analysis - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats – (Andrews, 1971). SWOT analysis is completed considering actions and objectives through Fuzzy …

The Adoption And Diffusion Of Computing And Internet Technologies In Historically Black Colleges And Universities, Lawrence Joseph

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

The rapid growth of technologies is providing the opportunity for innovative design and delivery of curriculum and instructional materials to college students; yet many college faculty members, especially in historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), are not using this technology. With a widening gap in access to technologies for minorities, this is a significant issue. In this study, specific research questions focused on HBCU faculty’s current use of technology, desire to incorporate new technology, view of organizational support, and potential gender or age differences. Surveys were conducted at five HBCU with established records of leadership in education. Using quantitative statistics, …

Performance Comparison Of New Heuristic With Genetic Algorithm In Parallel Flow Line Set Up, K. Balasubramanian, A. Noorul Haq, N. Rajeswari

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

A new heuristic has been developed to solve the problem in parallel flow line scheduling. It involves the minimization of the makespan by the optimal allocation of a finite number of jobs to finite number of lines in the first phase and the optimal sequencing of allocated jobs in each line in the second phase. Here new heuristic and genetic algorithm for analyzing the parallel flow line scheduling are discussed and executed on a set of randomly generated problems. The results obtained for the test problems suggest that the developed new heuristic can be used successfully to solve large scale …

Modeling And Analysis Of Resource Sharing Approach In Common Platform Strategy Using Petri Net Theory, M.A. Shafia, M. Saidi-Mehrabad, M. Fathollah

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

The most competitive advantages in business and manufacturing is resource-sharing.We must share common resources to produce a group of product family with using common platform strategy. This strategy helps us to increase profit and value in business. It is necessary to apply this strategy to model and analyze resource achievability in different situations. In this paper we try to develop a practical model for analyzing common resource behavioral in platform area with using Petri net theory. Petri Nets have been successfully used for modeling and control the dynamics of flexible manufacturing systems.This paper presents some important concepts about common platform …

Supply Chain Collaborations Changing The Face Of Indian Automobile, Arpita Khare

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

The emphasis given on improving supply chains in organizations both by companies and academia in past two decades shows the growing importance of integrating manufacturing and marketing processes of organizations. In the recent years supply networks are being recognized as strategic tools that enable companies to fight global competitive battles.

The paper studies the nature of supplier collaborations and technology’s role in improving coordination across the supplier networks. The paper provides an insight into supplier networks of Indian automobile companies and presents some cases to demonstrate this.

Mitigating Denial-Of-Service Attacks On Voip Environment, Igor Jouravlev

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

IP telephony refers to the use of Internet protocols to provide voice, video, and data in one integrated service over LANs, BNs, MANs, not WANs. VoIP provides three key benefits compared to traditional voice telephone services. First, it minimizes the need fro extra wiring in new buildings. Second, it provides easy movement of telephones and the ability of phone numbers to move with the individual. Finally, VoIP is generally cheaper to operate because it requires less network capacity to transmit the same voice telephone call over an increasingly digital telephone network (FitzGerald & Dennis, 2007 p. 519). Unfortunately, benefits of …

Bridging The Gap: Home-School Partnerships In Kindergarten, Keenjal Pattni-Shah

Frank Dilley Award for Outstanding Doctoral Study

Although home-school partnerships support Kindergarten children's development of vocabulary, the alphabetic principle, and phonological awareness, the mechanisms through which these partnerships are established and facilitated with immigrant parents from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds are largely unknown. Therefore, the major research questions that guided this qualitative, grounded theory study focused on exploring how successful Kindergarten teachers defined home-school partnerships with parents, the strategies the teachers used to communicate with parents, the ways these teachers reached out to parents to create and sustain partnerships, and how the teachers used these partnerships to support children's learning. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory served as the …

Alternative Energy Choices, Conservation, And Management: A Primer For Advanced Manufacturing Managers, Jeffrey M. Ulmer, Troy E. Ollison

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Manufacturing managers need to understand the interrelated links between advanced manufacturing technology, primary and alternative energy choices, energy output values and costs, and energy conservation over the life of a project. Through an overview of these topics and the manager’s energy conservation processing optimization model developed in this paper, manufacturing managers, engineering technologists, and academics gain greater insight to the impacts of energy technologies upon manufacturing activities.

The Integration Of Cost Into Mechanical Engineering Design Curricula, Gary S. Drigel

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

The integration of cost into design courses in engineering and engineering technology programs is necessary to provide graduating engineers the skills to become immediate contributors to the goals and profits of their chosen companies. There are many methods that can be used, including sophisticated decision science techniques. One example of a teaching and analysis technique developed for use in strength of materials course is described. In this example, a simple selection model, called a decision matrix, is used to decide what combination of factors provided a cost- effective design. This type of technique will allow teaching professionals to introduce and …

Prabha - A New Heuristic Approach For Machine Cell Formation Under Dynamic Production Environments, A. Muruganandam, G. Prabhakaran, R. V. Murali

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Over the past three decades, Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMS) have attracted a lot of attention from manufacturers because of its positive impacts on analysis of batch-type production and also a wide range of potential application areas. Machine cell formation and part family creation are two important tasks of cellular manufacturing systems. Most of the current CMS design methods have been developed for a static production environment. This paper addresses the problem of machine cell formation and part family formation for a dynamic production requirement with the objective of minimizing the material handling cost, penalty for cell load variation and the …

Quality Improvement In Higher Education Through Normalization Of Student Feedback Data Using Evolutionary Algorithm, S. Vishnupriyan, L. Govindarajan, G. Prabhakaran, K. P. Ramachandran

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Student Feedback is a vital information that helps not only to evaluate the existing academic practices but also to rectify the discrepancies if any, enabling continuous quality improvement. Often the educational institutions make decisions on the teaching and delivery strategies and requirements of the students based on the students’ Feedback. Due to various factors like the composition of the class in terms of student background, personal relationship with the teacher and other factors, the Feedback generally remains so scattered that at times it may not be possible to arrive at a conclusion based on the feedback. Any decision, based on …

Nonprofit Organizations: An Introduction To Charity Rating Sources And Cautions In Their Use, Diana Stork, Jill Woodilla

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

We describe services that rate the performance of charitable organizations in the United States as a potential source of data for comparisons by donors and may be of interest and use to researchers. Such services have the potential to be considered as a surrogate for quality metrics in the nonprofit sector. The three services considered, The American Institute of Philanthropy, Charity Navigator, and the Wise Giving Alliance of the Better Business Bureau, create different rating schemes. Statistical analyses of a dataset comprised of charities in the Nonprofit Times Top 100 clarify points of similarity and difference among the services. We …

The Impact Of Powers-Of-Two Based Schedule On The Minimization Of Inventory Costs In A Multi Product Manufacturing Environment, V. Mahesh, Sandeep Dulluri, A. Chennakesava Reddy, C.S.P Rao

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

This paper discusses about the scheduling problem of a multi product manufacturing industry. Often there has been a problem of applying optimization algorithms to solve the makespan minimization criterion of a job shop due to its inherent NP-hard nature. It is therefore unrealistic to try obtaining a solution through a commercial solver in polynomial time. In this context, we propose a computationally effective heuristic, which is based on the powers-of-two policy in inventory, for solving the minimum makespan problem of job shop scheduling. The research discussed in the current paper is a real time scheduling problem faced by a large …