Instructional Coach Job Satisfaction: An Exploration of Role Stressors

This mixed methods dissertation examines the relationships between role conflict and job satisfaction, role ambiguity and job satisfaction, and role conflict and job satisfaction within a convenience sample of American instructional coaches (n = 46). Theoretically, this analysis is formed by Merton's idea of role-sets and how instructional coaches, because of their boundary spanning roles in schools, have role-sets that overlap those of teachers and administrators. Because of these overlapping roles, role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload are likely to influence instructional coach job satisfaction without structures in place to moderate these roles. Through bivariate analyses between role conflict, role ambiguity, role overload, and job satisfaction measures, strong, negative correlations were found between role conflict and supervision satisfaction and role ambiguity and supervision satisfaction, and medium, negative correlations between role conflict and growth satisfaction and role ambiguity and growth satisfaction. Qualitative data collected through structured interviews (n = 6) support quantitative findings and provide a pattern of experiences common to highly satisfied instructional coaches

Matters of Suggestibility, Memory and Time: Child Witnesses in Court and what really happened

Abstract: As a result of an increasing awareness of child sexual abuse over the last few decades, children have been admitted as court witnesses more frequently, yet there has been persistent wariness about the reliability of their testimony. Examining the interaction of legal rationales and paradigms of developmental psychology, it would appear that children are still frequently positioned as deficient and passive witnesses. Three tropes can be distinguished: 1. Children are positioned as unreliable containers of facts. 2. Children have proved to be irritable dispensers of information. 3. Children are volatile interactants. In this paper I will examine how the English legal system employs various special measures that are designed to comfort children's assumed needs in order to enable them to give the most detailed evidence possible while guaranteeing the admissibility of the way in which the evidence is gathered and presented in court. Taking a closer look at the concrete practice I will argue that special measures such as video recorded evidence or closed circuit television links relate to, mediate and create different time zones of veridicality. Hence as such these well intended mediators of children's voice develop their own ambiguous dynamic when they operate and perform at the different stages of the legal procedure and thereby resonate with varying assumptions about how material presences and absences, temporal immediacy or mediatedness bolster or discredit the credibility of a piece of evidence. My analysis will unfold around the specific case of video recorded evidence. Using courtroom observations and data from interviews with legal professionals, I will follow the trajectory of the video from its planning and recording by the police to its presentation in court. Inspired by the work of ISABELLE STENGERS and BRUNO LATOUR, and drawing on discourse analytical tools, I will show that the collision of the different time zones of veridicality creates circumstances under which the video itself can become an ambiguous agent and ultimately a fanciful witness

The Subjective Well-Being Challenge in the Accounting Profession: The Role of Job Resources

The main activity of the accountant is the preparation and audit of the financial information of a company. The subjective well-being of the accountant is important to ensure a balanced professional judgment and to offer a positive image of the profession in the face of the incorporation and retention of talent. However, accountants are subjected to intense pressures that affect their well-being in the performance of their tasks. In this paper, the job demands–resources theoretical framework is adopted to analyze the relationships between job demands, job resources, and the subjective well-being of a large sample of 739 accounting experts at the European level. Applying a structural equations model, the results confirm, on the one hand, the direct effects provided in the theoretical framework and, on the other, a new mediating role of job demands–subjective well-being relationship resources

Actualizing Organizational Core Values: Putting Theory into Practice

The literature on organizational culture and leading by shared values suggests a prescriptive model for use by leaders in actualizing stated organizational core values. Utilizing a qualitative case study approach, this study sought to examine the efficacy of this theoretical model in representing actual efforts by practitioners to embed diversity as a new organizational core value. Leadership actions to embed and actualize diversity as an institutional core value at two private universities were examined and compared. Findings suggest the theoretical model inadequately addresses the critical role of contextual assessment and under represents the dynamic cyclical nature of value embedding and actualization processes, particularly with respect organizations with high stakeholder turnover such as institutions of higher education

Degeneracy measures for the algebraic classification of numerical spacetimes

We study the issue of algebraic classification of the Weyl curvature tensor, with a particular focus on numerical relativity simulations. The spacetimes of interest in this context, binary black hole mergers, and the ringdowns that follow them, present subtleties in that they are generically, strictly speaking, Type I, but in many regions approximately, in some sense, Type D. To provide meaning to any claims of "approximate" Petrov class, one must define a measure of degeneracy on the space of null rays at a point. We will investigate such a measure, used recently to argue that certain binary black hole merger simulations ring down to the Kerr geometry, after hanging up for some time in Petrov Type II. In particular, we argue that this hangup in Petrov Type II is an artefact of the particular measure being used, and that a geometrically better-motivated measure shows a black hole merger produced by our group settling directly to Petrov Type D.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures. Version 2 adds two references

A smooth model of decision making under ambiguity.

We propose and axiomatize a new model of preferences that achieves a separation between ambiguity, identified as a characteristic of the decision maker's subjective information, and ambiguity attitude, a characteristic of the decision maker's tastes.Ambiguity; Uncertainty; Knightian Uncertainty; Ambiguity Aversion; Uncertainty Aversion; Ellsberg Paradox

Identifying Contextual Factors of Employee Satisfaction of Performance Management at a Thai State Enterprise

Although there has been an increase in Performance Management (PM) literature over the years arguing that PM perceptions are likely to be a function of PM process components and contextual factors, the actual relationship between the contextual factors and employee satisfaction of PM remains little explored.  Extending previous research, this study examines relationships between contextual factors and employees’ PM satisfaction.  Derived from the literature, these contextual factors are motivation and empowerment of employees, role conflict, role ambiguity, perceived organisational support, procedural justice and distributive justice.  Seven directional hypotheses are tested accordingly through a series of regression analyses.  This article finds that these contextual factors, with the exception of role conflict, are directly predictive of enhanced employees’ PM satisfaction at the Thai state enterprise

Validation of Soft Classification Models using Partial Class Memberships: An Extended Concept of Sensitivity & Co. applied to the Grading of Astrocytoma Tissues

We use partial class memberships in soft classification to model uncertain labelling and mixtures of classes. Partial class memberships are not restricted to predictions, but may also occur in reference labels (ground truth, gold standard diagnosis) for training and validation data. Classifier performance is usually expressed as fractions of the confusion matrix, such as sensitivity, specificity, negative and positive predictive values. We extend this concept to soft classification and discuss the bias and variance properties of the extended performance measures. Ambiguity in reference labels translates to differences between best-case, expected and worst-case performance. We show a second set of measures comparing expected and ideal performance which is closely related to regression performance, namely the root mean squared error RMSE and the mean absolute error MAE. All calculations apply to classical crisp classification as well as to soft classification (partial class memberships and/or one-class classifiers). The proposed performance measures allow to test classifiers with actual borderline cases. In addition, hardening of e.g. posterior probabilities into class labels is not necessary, avoiding the corresponding information loss and increase in variance. We implement the proposed performance measures in the R package "softclassval", which is available from CRAN and at http://softclassval.r-forge.r-project.org. Our reasoning as well as the importance of partial memberships for chemometric classification is illustrated by a real-word application: astrocytoma brain tumor tissue grading (80 patients, 37000 spectra) for finding surgical excision borders. As borderline cases are the actual target of the analytical technique, samples which are diagnosed to be borderline cases must be included in the validation.Comment: The manuscript is accepted for publication in Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems. Supplementary figures and tables are at the end of the pd

Optimal stochastic modelling with unitary quantum dynamics

Identifying and extracting the past information relevant to the future behaviour of stochastic processes is a central task in the quantitative sciences. Quantum models offer a promising approach to this, allowing for accurate simulation of future trajectories whilst using less past information than any classical counterpart. Here we introduce a class of phase-enhanced quantum models, representing the most general means of causal simulation with a unitary quantum circuit. We show that the resulting constructions can display advantages over previous state-of-art methods - both in the amount of information they need to store about the past, and in the minimal memory dimension they require to store this information. Moreover, we find that these two features are generally competing factors in optimisation - leading to an ambiguity in what constitutes the optimal model - a phenomenon that does not manifest classically. Our results thus simultaneously offer new quantum advantages for stochastic simulation, and illustrate further qualitative differences in behaviour between classical and quantum notions of complexity.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure