Perceived Control of Academic Events in Turkish and English Adolescents: Comparing Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory to Detect Item Biases Across Cultures

Perceived control was investigated in secondary school adolescents from secular Turkish and British schools. Five published questionnaires were used. Perceived control was measured mainly with the Control beliefs, Means-Ends beliefs, and Agency Scale (CAMI - Skinner, Baltes, Chapman, 1988) As supplementary measures, Nowicki and Strickland's (1973) Internal-External Locus of Control for Children Scale (CNSIE) and Palenzuela's (1988) Multiple Academic Specific Locus of Control Scale (MASLOC) were also used. Two other questionnaires, measuring social antecedents, were included in the study. These were the Religiosity in Youth Scale (Rothbough & Jessor, 1976) and the F-Scale (Adorno, 1950; Christie, 1991). In order to detect item biases within and between cultures, two procedures were followed: a) The questionnaires were translated from English to Turkish, and then both versions were completed by a bilingual Turkish sample. Translation fidelity was tested using three different approaches: Generalizability theory (Cronbach et al., 1972; Shavelson & Webb, 1991), Classical Item Analysis (Nunnally, 1978) and Item Response Theory (Lord, 1980; Hambleton et al., 1990). The results are discussed in terms of consistency and the cost of the procedure. b) The Turkish and English versions of the questionnaires were completed by unilingual Turkish and English samples in their own language. The purpose here was to detect similar (etic) and different (emic) functioning of the items across cultures using Classical and Modem item analysis. The questionnaires were found to be functioning similarly in the two cultures. But CNSIE was found to be a poor scale in both cultures and was not used in the next stage. In the final part of the thesis perceived control was investigated as a function of culture, religion, religiosity, authoritarianism, age and gender. The perceived control scale showed significant cultural differences on 3 out of 10 subscales of CAM!. Agency beliefs and MASLOC showed significant effects of religion, religiosity, authoritarianism and gender. Generally, the Turkish sample was more Internal, more religious, and authoritarian. The gender differences were more inconsistent in terms of the direction of the relationship, with boys more internal on attribute while girls were more internal on unknown factors and effort

Identificación de conglomerados espaciales de acuerdo a niveles de morosidad de empresas en el Perú

El cumplimiento de las obligaciones financieras que tienen las empresas es respaldado por una correcta gestión de riesgo de crédito, esto evita problemas de liquidez y solvencia. Por ello es importante detectar los niveles de riesgo de morosidad en las empresas. La presente tesis tiene como objetivo identifi car conglomerados de provincias del Perú, en funciona de la tasa de incumplimiento de pagos, conocida también como la tasa de morosidad. Para ello se propone un modelamiento en dos niveles. En el primer nivel se usan modelos aglomerativos jerárquicos para seleccionar n conglomerados candidatos a priori, donde el número fi nal de conglomerados se escoge mediante criterios de selección de modelos. Posteriormente, en un segundo nivel, modelaremos el nivel de riesgo haciendo uso del modelo de Poisson y prioris condicionales autoregresivas en base a los conglomerados de nidos en el primer nivel e incluyendo covariables. Los modelos pueden ser reescritos como modelos Gaussianos latentes, y se puede usar inferencia bayesiana para estimar sus parámetros, específicamente a través de la aproximación de Laplace anidada integrada. Finalmente, como resultado de la aproximación se obtienen conglomerados de provincias de acuerdo a sus niveles de morosidad, permitiendo clasi ficar las provincias en conglomerado de alto, medio y bajo nivel de riesgo de morosidad.Compliance with the nancial obligations of companies is ensured by proper credit risk management, this avoids liquidity and solvency problems. For this reason, it is important to identify the risk level of default in peruvian companies. The goal of this thesis is to identify clusters of provinces of Per u with regard to the default rate of payments, also known as probability of default. Thus it is proposed a model in two stages. In the rst stage hierarchical agglomerative models select prior candidate clusters, and the nal number of clusters is selected through selection criteria of models. In the second stage it is proposed the Poisson model considering autoregressive conditional prioris, the clusters de ned in the rst stage, and also including covariates. This model ll in the class of Gaussian latent models, therfore its paremeters were estimated using bayesian inference, speci cally through integrated nested Laplace approximation. Finally, as a result, we found clusters in accordance with the default level, allowing to classify provinces into clusters of high, medium and low risk level

The Effect of Regulations on Performance of Microfinance Institutions in Promoting Small Business Growth in Ghana

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) have emerged to provide financial services to the poor who were hitherto, excluded from the formal financial system. MFIs have pursued the objective of providing financial services to the poor through two different approaches: the welfarist approach and the institutional approach. The welfarist approach focuses on poverty alleviation by emphasizing the depth of outreach, i.e. reaching the very poor and vulnerable in society with microfinance products. The institutionalists, on the other hand, focus on institutional sustainability by pursuing financial self-sufficiency while serving significant numbers of the poor i.e. breadth of outreach. Despite differences in the two approaches, the performance of MFIs should be assessed on the extent to which they fulfil their common objective of meeting the financial needs of the poor. However, for MFIs to reach out to large numbers of the poor with financial services, their businesses should be conducted on sound operating principles. This requires that MFIs are regulated. Regulation is therefore, important to effective operation of MFIs but can limit their ability to reach the very poor with appropriate financial services. Up until recently, MFIs in Ghana were regulated by various bodies. The rural and community banks and savings and loan companies, regulated by the Bank of Ghana (BoG), had the most rigorous compliance requirements ensuring effective governance. In contrast "susu" operators, regulated by the Ghana National Association of "Susu" Collectors, had the least compliance requirements and the most weak governance structures. This study seeks to examine the effect of regulation on the performance of MFIs in promoting small business growth in Ghana. Small business provides an avenue for income generation by a large segment of the poor, many of whom do not have the qualifications and experiences to be employed in positions that generate sufficient income to meet their needs

Electoral Politics Amid Africa's Urban Transition: A Study of Urban Ghana

Africa is rapidly urbanizing. With so many African voters now living in cities, understanding African electoral politics now requires understanding the politics of urban areas. How does urbanization affect the accountability relationships between voters and politicians? Answering this question means answering a series of more specific empirical questions: what do urban voters want from the government? Which types of urban voters participate in politics and which do not? How do urban voters choose which candidates to support? How do politicians campaign in cities? Which types of urban voters do politicians seek to favor with state resources? %These are the core empirical questions examined in the dissertation. Electoral politics in African cities received significant attention in the independence era, but little political science research has examined these cities in the contemporary democratic period. The small literature that has is largely supportive of modernization approaches. Modernization theories expect a series of socio-economic transformations created by urbanization to reduce the political importance of ethnicity and the prevalence of clientelism and other forms of patronage-based politics. But I argue that urbanization also simultaneously creates conditions that reinforce incentives for patronage distribution, clientelism, and ethnic voting. Scarcity in the provision of basic services in contexts of low state capacity encourages politicians to continue employing patronage-based appeals. This solidifies many voters' incentives to support ethnically-aligned parties and drives the new urban middle class away from active political participation, lowering pressure on urban politicians to engage in programmatic, policy-based competition. I explore these incentives through a detailed study of Greater Accra, the largest metropolitan area in Ghana. I combine original survey data and survey experiments, fine-grained geo-coded census data, and extensive qualitative evidence to explore voters' policy preferences, vote choices, and patterns of political participation, as well as politicians' strategies in a cross-section of urban neighborhoods. The findings suggest that rather than pulling political competition in one direction, as modernization theories expect, urbanization in Africa instead moves political outcomes in multiple directions at once: reinforcing ethnic competition and clientelism in some neighborhoods, while undermining these forms of political competition in other neighborhoods within the same city at the same time. Studies of the effects of urbanization must recognize that these dual realities co-exist within African cities. In addition to building our understanding of urban politics in Africa, the dissertation contributes to broader political science debates about the emergence of programmatic competition, determinants of political participation, patterns of distributive politics, the importance of neighborhood context, and the causes of ethnic political competition in new democracies.Governmen

A hybrid methodology for data clustering

This thesis introduces and evaluates a new hybrid method for the searching for groups in data - a process referred to as cluster analysis. The Agglomerative - Partitional Clustering methodology (APC) proposed in this work is a novel solution to the clustering problem intended for use with large, noisy data sets and capable of recovering clusters of arbitrary shape. Large sample size, noise and nonhyperellipsoidal cluster shapes can create difficulties for many clustering algorithms. Many commonly used clustering techniques are too inefficient to handle large data sets found in many data analysis problems or are limited by the fact that they implicitly or explicitly define clusters as being hyperellipsoidal (i.e. “globular” in shape) and can therefore fail to recover other types of cluster structure. Moreover, the presence of noise can also make detection of cluster structures problematic, particularly for clustering techniques that are explicitly designed to handle nonhyperellipsoidal cluster structures. APC is able to circumvent these difficulties by hybridising a number of diverse approaches to clustering. Large data sets are dealt with by hybridising fast pattern partitioning techniques with hierarchical and density search methods. Arbitrary cluster shapes are handled by a unique linked line segment representation of cluster shape. In short, rather than representing clusters with their centroids, the clusters are represented via a piecewise linear approximation of the cluster structure. This enables APC to represent any cluster shape that is piecewise linearly approximatable. The purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to introduce APC and to evaluate the ability of APC to recover cluster structure under the conditions described above. First, it is argued that there is a dearth of clustering techniques that can process large, noisy data sets where there exists arbitrarily shaped clusters. Next, the APC approach to clustering is described in detail. Here it is discussed how APC is able to handle voluminous and noisy data without being constrained to any particular cluster shapes. Moreover, as APC represents a hybridisation of clustering strategies and techniques, different ways of implementing APC are also evaluated. The remainder of this thesis is concerned with the evaluation of APC. First, APC is empirically compared to other clustering methods via Monte Carlo simulation on a number of complex data sets. A wide variety of experimental conditions examining cluster shape, dispersion, noise and dimensionality are covered. The use of APC as a data reduction method is also examined. This final experiment also highlights the utility of the linked line segment representation of cluster shape proposed in this thesis. Finally, the concluding chapter summarises the results and limitations of this thesis and discusses some future directions this research could take

Improving urban water quality for livelihoods enhancement in the Odaw-Korle river catchment of Accra, Ghana

Water and environmental resources which provide opportunities for households are threatened by human activities that leads to pollution. The research objectives were to understand the contribution water makes to the livelihoods of urban and peri-urban households; the factors influencing perceptions, attitudes and behaviour in relation to surface water and environmental quality, and measures for promoting community participation in water and environmental management. Ten communities were selected in Accra and its surrounding communities to reflect different levels of infrastructure provision for the study. Four focus group discussions were held in each community, with a mixed group, men, women, and young adults. Issues which emerged were investigated further in a structured household questionnaire survey involving 443 respondents. Key informant interviews were held with the most important government and non government regulatory, research and service provision departments and organizations in water, sanitation, and the environment sectors. Water samples from some of the selected communities were analyzed in the laboratory to compare with respondents’ perceptions. Among the households surveyed, 59.14% were engaged in a water dependent occupation which contributed over 80% of household income in some cases. The study also found that perceptions of water and environment are influenced by the existing social and cultural setting. There were common concepts which helped groups to interpret and make meaning from their environment. The prospects for successful water and environmental interventions can be enhanced through an understanding of this local knowledge and perceptions. There was no clear relationship between attitudes and environmental behaviour or between attitudes and socioeconomic status. Actual behaviour was influenced by ability to pay for services, their availability and the influence of shared community norms. Although citizen participation in water and environmental management decision making is very limited at present, community collective action holds good prospects for future interventions in water and environmental management

The impact of FNGO services on the performance of micro and small enterprises: Empirical evidence from the Volta Region, Ghana

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Financial Non-Governmental Organisations (FNGOs) are regulated microfinance institutions (MFIs) that operate with the social welfare logic in the delivery of Microcredit (MC) and Entrepreneurship Training (ET) to the poor in Ghana. The provision of these two capitals (MC and ET) is aimed at supporting the poor to create sustainable Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) which is aimed at generating both skilled and unskilled employment. The major aim of this study is to investigate the impact of MC and ET delivered by FNGOs on the performance of MSEs in Ghana. Theoretically, the study adopts both the Institutional Theory and the Resource-Based View theory as the underlying theoretical frameworks, assuming that institutional and resource factors have a great influence on FNGOs in their delivery of MC and ET to MSEs in Ghana. The research design adopted in undertaking this study is based on the pragmatic research philosophy. Specifically, the mixed strategy with an explanatory triangulation method has been used. The mixed method has been adopted purposely for model testing as well as for exploring various issues on FNGOs and their role in the performance of MSEs. Primary data were collected through a quantitative method using a survey as well as through qualitative interviews. Adopting a stratified random sampling method, a total of 720 self-administered questionnaires were sent out in March 2017 to MSEs in the Volta Region of Ghana to collect primary data. Out of the number sent, 506 questionnaires were retrieved generating a response rate of 70.2%. Also, interviews were conducted with 10 MSEs. A multiple regression model was applied in measuring the impact of MC and ET on the performance of MSEs. The findings suggest that firm characteristics such as gender, managers educational level, industry category and business age correlate positively with employment sales and profitability growth which are statistically significant at 1% level. Secondly, the study also found that both MC and ET factors have a significant impact on MSE performance in the areas of employment, sales and profitability at 1% significant level. The qualitative findings also support the model tested in this study in the sense that the combined approach of both MC and ET have a significant impact on MSE performance in Ghana. This study has made two main contributions. Firstly, the provision of MC by FNGOs can only have the desired impact on the performance of MSEs if it is combined with entrepreneurship training, thereby leading to a sustainable employment, sales and profitability growth. Therefore, by using the 506 MSEs financed by FNGOs in the Volta region of Ghana, this study has for the first time in the Ghanaian microfinance landscape tested an empirical model and came out with meaningful findings for effective integration of ET into microfinance to improve the delivery of financial services to MSEs in Ghana by FNGOs and other socially oriented MFIs. The study has therefore developed a practical framework for ensuring that ET is provided alongside the delivery of MC in order to have the desired impact on the performance of MSEs. The study provided implications for policy and practice for making MC and ET more accessible to MSEs to achieve the desired goal of creating employment. Secondly, even though FNGOs play a very important role in providing entrepreneurial finance to MSEs particularly in developing countries, it has received insufficient research attention. This study has, therefore, added to the scanty research available about FNGOs and their contribution to entrepreneurship development and poverty reduction in developing countries

Credit referencing, bank lending methodologies and SME access to finance in Ghana.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Academic as well as policymakers acknowledge the importance that access to credit to entrepreneurs plays in stirring the economic growth and development in both developed and developing countries. Despite the increasing use of use different lending methodologies in their dealings with Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs), a significant segment of SMEs are yet to benefit from these methodologies. This study examined the association between bank lending methodologies, Credit Reference Information (CRI), and SMEs ' access to credit in Ghana. This study adopted a mixed-methods research approach characterised by the quantitative (cross-sectional) approach and qualitative technique. The accessible population of SMEs was 2,354, out of which a sample of 1,061 SMEs was determined using the simple random sampling method. The sample applied to the qualitative aspect of the study was eight managers who were selected using the purposive sampling method. A survey questionnaire and interview were used to gather data. Quantitative data were analysed using Pearson’s correlation test, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis. Thematic analysis was employed to analyse qualitative data from interviews. Data analysis revealed that two domains of methodologies, namely Collateral Based Records (CBRs) and Personal Business Characteristics (PBCs), were applied to the participants to a great extent. The average scores associated with these dimensions were significantly higher than the median of the measurement scale. Furthermore, responses from the qualitative analysis suggest that CBRs as a methodology were more applied, but financial institutions also applied PBCs. Applying the two methodologies is necessary as they play unique roles in lending, though CBRs better cushions banks against default. This implies that both transaction-based and relationship-based lending methodologies are applied mainly by banks in Ghana though transaction-based lending is the most applied. The study contributed to the literature by proposing a framework of steps that SMEs in Ghana can take towards successful loan applications