Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ennobling Each Other Through Collaborative Inquiry: Exploring Music As A Provocation For Leadership Development, Ihan Ip

Dissertations

Amid the challenges in a global village, leadership education needs to surpass traditional methods, nurturing creativity, flexibility, and adaptability. This study is a collaborative action inquiry that considers music as an arts-based method in service of leadership development. The study unfolded over five cycles, in which 14 coinquirers collaborated in a process of exploration. The study illuminates the strong potential of music as a provocation for leadership development and reveals crucial realizations in the area of facilitation in collective processes.

This dissertation tells the story of the inquiry with the voices of its coinquirers and offers insights on facilitation through …

Homeless Barriers: A Phenomenological Study Of Service Providers In Thurston County, Washington State, Michael Meredith

Dissertations

Purpose: This qualitative phenomenological study aims to describe the perceptions of homeless service providers in Thurston County, Washington State, and describe barriers to the homeless seeking assistance. This study interviewed ten Thurston County service providers about their perception of the barriers preventing the unsheltered homeless from using available services. Identifying barriers and developing strategies to reduce or remove them is expected to reduce or eliminate homelessness.

Methodology: This qualitative phenomenological study describes the homeless service providers' perceptions of the homeless and the barriers to the homeless seeking assistance. The researcher conducted interviews with a sample of ten service providers to …

The Effects Of Cost, Level Of Safety, And Severity Of Injury On Manager Decisions To Implement A Safety Solution, Jonathan M. Hochmuth

Dissertations

Workplace injuries continue to be a source of substantial human and financial costs each year. Behavioral safety processes have been effective in reducing workplace injuries by increasing safety-related behaviors. In recent years, the focus in behavioral safety has shifted towards the role of managers in establishing and maintaining safe behaviors and conditions in the workplace. Understanding how managers make decisions to allocate resources is critical to improving safety. The field of behavioral economics has developed methods for studying decision-making. While there have been calls to apply these methods to occupational safety, there are only two empirical studies which have done …

Sirencide: The Impact Of Acute Stress On Emergency Vehicle Crashes, Dustin Lambert

Dissertations

Emergency services provide an invaluable service to communities and cities around the world. Research has shown these professionals encounter significant acute psychological stress throughout their work shifts. Acute stress has been shown to impact human performance in various realms, from increased risk-taking to cognitive decline. While the actual work varies between firefighters, law enforcement, and emergency medical services, a shared commonality is the operation of emergency vehicles. Emergency vehicle crashes are recognized as a serious issue by FEMA. The current work aimed to measure the impact of acute stress on emergency responders as measured by fatal emergency vehicle crashes in …

Mindfulness As A Vigilance Intervention: Examining Its Impact On Stress And Mental Demand, Kelli Huber

Dissertations

Occupations involving vigilance performance (i.e., sustained attention in monitoring for rare environmental threats) are known to experience vigilance decrement, a decline in performance over time. These occupations are known to be cognitively and emotionally challenging, giving rise to harmful effects for employees in them and presenting safety implications for the welfare of others. The current study investigated mindfulness as a potentially viable intervention to alleviate outcomes of vigilance demands: stress and mental demand. A mindfulness induction was compared to an unfocused control condition in which both were administered during a break from a vigilance task, specifically, a baggage screening task. …

An Analysis Of Campus Violence Threat Assessment Policy Implementation At Michigan Community Colleges, Russell T. Panico Jr.

Dissertations

This dissertation evaluated campus violence threat assessment policy and procedure implementation at the community college level of higher education. The importance of this topic was to provide a manageable and collaborative initiative for leadership at institutions of higher learning to identify, develop, implement, and evaluate a policy that can effectively prevent acts of campus-related violence. A mixed-methods study approach using a Likert-scale survey with supporting open-ended questions was used to guide the exploration. Bardach’s (2016) Eightfold Path for Policy Analysis was the framework used by Michigan community colleges to apply to their own unique situations. This method determined the prevalence …

Increasing Caregiver Supervision Of Young Children: Teaching Scanning, Predicting Behavior, And Modifying For Safety, Natalie Truba

Dissertations

Unintentional injuries account for a significant number of child deaths and visits to the emergency department. Although increased supervision is routinely shown to be an effective method of preventing unintentional childhood injuries, few interventions systemically teach caregivers behavioral skills to supervise their children appropriately. The present study utilized a multiple baseline design to pilot test an intervention designed to increase caregiver supervision and decrease unintentional childhood injuries by training caregivers how to provide appropriate levels of supervision for their young children (ages 6 to 36 months). Specifically, caregivers were taught in the present study include: (1) scanning the environment (for …

Comparison Of The Effectiveness Of Different Observation Methods And An Exploratory Analysis Of The Importance Of Accuracy Of Various Observations On Safety Performance, Marlies Hagge

Dissertations

Behavior Based Safety (BBS) applies various types of safety observation to improve occupational safety in business. The purpose of the following study was to examine and compare different observation foci: peer-observation, self-observation and a combination of both options as well as supervisor observations and observations of employee behavior obtained by research assistants (RA). Participants were unionized employees of the facilities management department at a Midwestern university. Target behaviors included safe lifting and vacuuming. The dependent variables were safety performance and the discrepancy between the different observation types. Incident data were also reported. The different observational methods were investigated via a …

Use Of Task Clarification, Feedback, And Recognition To Increase Desired Behaviors Within An Organization’S Permit To Work System - Analysis Of Data Previously Collected As An Organizational Consultant, Tarek Abousaleh

Dissertations

The term ‘culture’ can be used to describe both a ‘social culture’ and a ‘work culture’. A social culture can be defined behaviorally as a pattern of overt and covert behaviors that are consequated by the verbal community and the contingency specifying rules that facilitate behavior independent of any first hand experience. It is this community that defines which behaviors are reinforced, extinguished, or punished. Similarly, a work culture can be defined as a pattern of overt and covert behaviors that are consequated by the work community (leadership, employees, self, etc.) and the contingency specifying rules that facilitate behavior/performance independent …

Comparing The Effects Of Simulated, Intelligent Audible, Checklists And Analog Checklists In Simulated Flight, Bryan Hilton

Dissertations

This study examined the effect of using a simulated intelligent audible checklist in simulated flight as compared to a standard analog (paper) checklist. Participants were three Western Michigan University students in the College of Aviation. All participants were licensed pilots with instrument ratings. The main dependent variable was the number of checklist errors or omissions committed by the pilots in simulated flight. During each flight, each participant could make up to 42 errors. The error count would initiate at the appropriate time to perform the “before-take off checklist” and would end one minute after parking the plane, the logical time …