The effects of a sexual victimization history, sexual attitudes, and ethnicity on women\u27s sexual assault scripts

This study examined the effects of a sexual victimization history, sexual attitudes, ethnicity, and proximity of past sexual assault on womens hypothetical sexual assault scripts. It also compared previously sexually victimized women\u27s hypothetical sexual assault scripts to their actual assault narratives. Two hundred forty-seven undergraduate women wrote hypothetical sexual assault scripts describing an unwanted sexual experience and completed measures assessing the individual differences variables of interest. Women who reported a victimization history then wrote about their assault experience while women who did not report such history wrote about a bad date or \u27hook-up\u27 experience. A coding manual was developed and experts in the sexual violence research area coded the hypothetical scripts and assault narratives. Qualitative analysis revealed several important relationships between the individual differences variables and specific script characteristics. Specifically, victimization history had the most differences related to individual variables. Victimized women included alcohol, consensual kissing, and the context of a party in their hypothetical scripts more frequently than nonvictimized women. They described knowing the man for between one month and one year less frequently than nonvictimized women. Results also indicated distinct incongruence between women\u27s hypothetical scripts and their actual assault narratives. These results suggest that this relationship should be explored further to understand how women develop and make adjustments to their sexual assault scripts as it could inform the development of prevention programs as well as assist in identifying women at risk for victimization

The Development of the Sexual Assault Script Scale

This mixed methods study involved the qualitative development of and quantitative testing of the Sexual Assault Script Scale (SASS). In Study 1, 31 undergraduate women participated in semi-structured interviews that included qualitative questions about their expectations of a hypothetical sexual assault. Information from these interviews then was used to create items for the SASS. These items asked women to estimate the likelihood that specific contextual characteristics would be present during a hypothetical sexual assault. In Study 2, 500 undergraduate women completed the SASS. An exploratory factor analysis of the SASS resulted in a 40-item, four-factor solution. The subscales of the SASS were named Stereotypical/Severe Assault Beliefs, Acquaintance Assault Beliefs, Assault Resistance Beliefs, and Date/Friend Assault Beliefs. The association between the SASS subscales and measures tapping putative risk factors for sexual victimization (e.g., previous victimization history, sexual refusal assertiveness, alcohol use, number of consensual sexual partners, and attitudes about casual, impersonal sex) were examined. Regression analyses also were conducted to examine which risk measures uniquely predicted responses to the SASS subscales. More severe sexual victimization history predicted higher scores on the Stereotypical/Severe Assault Beliefs subscale. Higher sexual refusal assertiveness, a greater number of lifetime sexual partners, greater alcohol use, more severe sexual victimization history, and more positive attitudes about casual, impersonal sex predicted higher scores on the Acquaintance Assault Belief subscale. Higher sexual refusal assertiveness predicted higher scores on the Assault Resistance Belief subscale. Finally, greater alcohol use predicted higher scores on the Date/Friend Assault Beliefs subscale while higher sexual refusal assertiveness predicted lower scores on this subscale. While several studies still need to be conducted on the SASS, the measure may have utility for sexual assault prevention programs in identifying women at higher risk for victimization

Physical and Performance Characteristics May Influence Successful Completion of Military Tasks on the Sandhurst Competition

Identification and development of physical characteristics that lead to efficient performance of military skills or tasks has been a consistently difficult task for the United States military for decades. The literature suggests certain physical characteristics may be more important, although this information is conflicting. Furthermore, the military physical fitness training program that is intended to prepare soldiers for combat is commonly evaluated with the Army Physical Fitness Test (PFT), a test that is more suited for evaluating health and wellness rather than task-specific fitness. All of this testing and training of soldiers focuses on the individual soldiers and their abilities although military skills or tasks are seldom if ever conducted independently. The first purpose of this dissertation was to identify relationships between the PFT, anthropometrics, measures of strength, and power. The second purpose was to identify the team characteristics that influence team performance during the Sandhurst Competition (a 2-day simulated military operation). Strong correlations were found between PFT events and weak correlations were found between PFT measures and evaluations of strength and power. The strong correlations between PFT events could indicate that only one event may be necessary to determine health and wellness. The weak correlations between events of the PFT and measures of strength and power suggest the PFT is not an assessment of strength and power based on the strength and power measures employed in the current study. The evaluation of team characteristics indicated that age (possibly experience) had the largest effect on Sandhurst Competition performance. Further analysis of each event supported the contention that age influences performance but also identified specific aerobic, anaerobic, and anthropometric variables that influenced performance on particular events. The data from this dissertation suggests that teams competing in the Sandhurst Competition should attempt to recruit team members with more experience, very high run scores, and high vertical jump heights

Do-it-Together Concept for Production Ecosystems

The do-it-yourself mentality is particularly widespread in the furniture sector. Homemade furniture is very popular. The individualisation of furniture can be observed in internet forums, such as the online platform Pinterest. These creative ideas of potential customers show a need for individualized sustainable pieces of furniture. The current production structures, however, do not allow individual production according to the end customer's specifications. In addition, information logistics faces a major challenge: making the creative ideas of end consumers available to producers in parametric form. Topics such as customer requirements in relation to sustainable production, material specifications, industrial property rights, fair production conditions and traceability are the focus of this data interchange. An open and innovative European furniture ecosystem must be created to connect all stakeholders in the production process. This is made possible by a platform that channels the creativity of consumers and makes it designable and producible through the professional skills of designers. This requires the involvement of manufacturing specialists who can produce personalised products through sustainable intelligent production technologies. An exchange of information must also take place securely and quickly in order to protect the personal rights of the sources of ideas. This is being developed in the EU research project INEDIT - Open Innovation Ecosystem for do-it-together process. By connecting many different stakeholders along the entire value creation process, a change towards efficient collaborative collaboration is achieved. This paper presents a project insight for the development of an international co-creation platform by presenting the problem and linking it to a potential solution

A Fuzzy-set-based Joint Distribution Adaptation Method for Regression and its Application to Online Damage Quantification for Structural Digital Twin

Online damage quantification suffers from insufficient labeled data. In this context, adopting the domain adaptation on historical labeled data from similar structures/damages to assist the current diagnosis task would be beneficial. However, most domain adaptation methods are designed for classification and cannot efficiently address damage quantification, a regression problem with continuous real-valued labels. This study first proposes a novel domain adaptation method, the Online Fuzzy-set-based Joint Distribution Adaptation for Regression, to address this challenge. By converting the continuous real-valued labels to fuzzy class labels via fuzzy sets, the conditional distribution discrepancy is measured, and domain adaptation can simultaneously consider the marginal and conditional distribution for the regression task. Furthermore, a framework of online damage quantification integrated with the proposed domain adaptation method is presented. The method has been verified with an example of a damaged helicopter panel, in which domain adaptations are conducted across different damage locations and from simulation to experiment, proving the accuracy of damage quantification can be improved significantly even in a noisy environment. It is expected that the proposed approach to be applied to the fleet-level digital twin considering the individual differences.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figure

Tests of integration of real estate and financial asset markets in Singapore and the Asia-Pacific counties

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENCE (ESTATE MANAGEMENT