Missing data is very common in survey research. However, currently few guidelines exist with regard to the diagnosis and remedy to missing data in survey research. The goal of this thesis was to investigate properties and effects of three selected...
Longitudinal studies occupy an important role in scientific researches and clinical trials. When taking the analysis of longitudinal data, investigators are often confronted with missing data which will produce potential biases, even in...
AIDS (Disease)--Prevention-- Evaluation; Nurses--Attitudes; Safe sex in AIDS prevention; Self-efficacy
This dissertation is a descriptive, correlational study that explores how a nurse's personal sexual relationship power, vicarious experience, and other interpersonal and socio-cultural variables are related to her self-efficacy to promote and teach...
Intimate partner violence--Psychological aspects; Victims of family violence--Rehabilitation; Victims of violent crimes--Mental health; Creative writing--Therapeutic use; Post-traumatic stress disorder--Treatment
Described as important long-term consequences of trauma exposure, disruptions in emotional processes are regarded as central features of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); however, the nature of these posttraumatic emotional disruptions remains...
In this dissertation research, we aim to solve problems of two types of survival data, clustered survival data with potentially informative cluster size and sojourn time data. The methods for these two types of data are different. However, both...
This study investigates the placebo effect in randomized controlled trials of low back pain. This effect has not been analyzed over time or in respect to low back pain. A meta-analysis was performed using the Pubmed/Medline database for low back...
Image processing; Computer vision; Pattern recognition systems
Image segmentation is one of the most important problems in image processing, object recognition, computer vision, medical imaging, etc. In general, the objective of the segmentation is to partition the image into the meaningful areas using the...
How do words represent emotional states, and how closely are they clustered to an actual emotion? Opinions vary as to how many emotions there are, and whether (or which) emotions are basic. Generally, many agree that basic emotions include fear,...
Brief Overview of the Problem: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a government funded agency, provides both legislative and judicial powers for emissions monitoring in the United States. The agency crafts laws based on self-made regulations...
The purpose of this dissertation is to find ways to decrease Medicare costs and to study health outcomes of diabetes patients as well as to investigate the influence of Medicare, part D since its introduction in 2006 using the CMS CCW (Chronic...
Because of limitations in randomized controlled trials, medical researchers are often forced to rely upon studies of observational data. Confounding is a major difficulty encountered in such studies that can create considerable bias in estimates of...
Self-efficacy; Psychological abuse; Identity (Psychology); Women college students--Mental health
The current research proposed that psychological abuse within an intimate relationship erodes one's self-efficacy and aimed to demonstrate a negative relationship between past psychological abuse and how one reacts to a challenge. It was...
In recent years, a number of computational and statistical problems for identifying SNP-SNP interactions in high dimensional survival data have been studied, and several data mining approaches have been proposed. However, the relative performance...
Student evaluation of teachers; College teachers--Rating of; College students--Attitudes; Teacher-student relationships
This dissertation explored the relationship between student, course, and
instructor-level variables and student course ratings. The selection of predictor variables
was based on a thorough review of the extensive body of existing literature on...
Dentist and patient; Dentists--Training of; Dentistry--Practice; Orthodontics, Corrective
Competition for orthodontic patients is at an all time high. Ways to differentially market an orthodontic practice are essential in attracting patients. It is hypothesized that the patients don't understand the extra training that an orthodontist...
The area of Knowledge discovery and data mining is growing rapidly. Feature Discretization is a crucial issue in Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), or Data Mining because most data sets used in real world applications have features with...
Right-wing extremists--Germany; Political culture--Germany; Germany--Politics and government--1990-; Voting--Germany
Despite twenty years of political reunification Germany remains a politically, socially, and economically divided country. This has fuelled inequalities, which are used by extreme political parties to garner votes from citizens who have become...
Fatigue--Diagnosis; Reaction time--Testing; Physical fitness for women; Women athletes--Physiology
Accumulated fatigue experienced during the competitive season can be detrimental to
athletic success. The purpose of the study was to identify a performance test that best correlated
with markers of fatigue in an attempt to detect accumulated...
Background . Heart failure treatment guidelines emphasize the importance of daily weight monitoring. To support this practice, the Health Care Financing Administration Heart Failure Demonstration Project (2000) was designed to evaluate the effect...
Sovereign wealth funds; International economic relations
The famous oil baron' John Paul Getty once defined his secret to success in three parts, "Rise early, work hard, strike oil." This recipe, however, has not lead to political and economic success for oil-reliant, emerging market states....
