EFFECTS OF THE DIMENSIONS OF QUALITY OF WORK LIFE ON TURNOVER INTENTION OF MILLENNIAL EMPLOYEES IN THE U.S.

Voluntary employee turnover, or quitting jobs, in the U.S. has been steadily increasing since 2009. This study investigated the relationships among the dimensions of quality of work life (QWL), job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intention among millennial employees in the U.S. It sought to determine whether statistically significant relationships existed among these variables. The study tested a model of the relationships among the aforementioned constructs using structural equation modeling with the IBM® SPSS® Amos 25.0 (SPSS) software package. Using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), 339 respondents drawn from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) were examined. Results showed that job characteristics and compensation and benefits had positive and significant effects on job satisfaction. Additionally, job satisfaction had statistically significant effects on organizational commitment and turnover intention. Neither of the dimensions of QWL had positive and significant relationships with organizational commitment. Finally, neither of the dimensions of QWL had direct and negatively significant relationships with turnover intention. This study contributes to the literature by informing on which dimensions of QWL directly attribute to enhanced job satisfaction and reductions in turnover intention. Such knowledge provides a better understanding of millennial employees and may aid in turnover reductions and costs incurred by organizations that are related to turnover

Hoodoo Women to Robber Queens: Breaking the Bounds of Ethnography and Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston\u27s Circum-Caribbean Marvelous Real

Throughout her career as an ethnographer, Zora Neale Hurston sought to capture the performances that linked African American folk communities of the coastal South to those she encountered in the Caribbean. The conjure woman of New Orleans and the Mambo priestess of Haitian Vodou exhibited performances that dramatized shared cultural and historical memory. These embodied performances connected women\u27s lives across the circum-Caribbean diaspora. By situating the conjure woman in the context of the Marvelous Real, Hurston created a fictive site in which the conjurer acts as the interlocutor of women\u27s recollected narratives and showed how identity could be shaped more directly by shared cultural memory than by geographic bounds. In the novels, Moses, Man of the Mountain, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston portrays the conjurer as an itinerant ethnographer who translates narratives that reflect a circum-Caribbean consciousness among African American and Afro-Caribbean women. This project explores how authors Erna Brodber and Nalo Hopkinson have since enlarged on Hurston\u27s model of the conjure woman-as-ethnographer in the genres of Magical Realist and Speculative fiction.Much like Hurston, Brodber and Hopkinson create narratives that challenge the ways postcolonial femal subjectivity has been inscribed in dominant discourses, while extending the bounds of what is considered national, regional, or cultural identity

Soil Burn Severity and Environmental Covariate Effects on Soil Health Two Years Postfire in the Sierra Nevada

Wildfires have been steadily increasing in both size and severity in recent decades. This global trend is most evident in California, especially the North Coast and Sierra Nevada. Although these trends are rising, there is little known about the effects of these wildfires on forest soils. Soil is the 2nd largest C sink on the planet, and the largest terrestrial bank. Without understanding the implication of rising wildfire severities on these soils, we cannot understand how to help protect this resource in the future. Due to the rapid increase in wildfire size and intensity, there is little known about the effects these “megafires” have on overall soil health, and even less known about these effects in the California Sierra Nevada region. This study aimed to understand both how field SBS and soil forming factors, represented through environmental covariates, effects soil health. 117 samples at a depth of 0-5cm were collected, then processed for sampling. Twelve soil health indicators (Total C, POXC, MinC, C/N ratio, pH, Total N, NO3N, K, P, CEC, Ca, and Mg) were selected and samples were tested in lab for each indicator. Field-validated SBS levels were assigned to each sample, and through ANOVA testing in R, where four variables were significant with SBS (Total C, C/N Ratio, NO3N, and K). Linear regression modeling was then used to observe the effects of environmental covariates on the samples. Environmental covariates were chosen to represent various soil forming factors including terrain, climate, and organisms. Each of the twelve soil health indicators were significant with at least one, if not more, environmental covariates. This information is critical in that soils are the result of not one, but several soil forming factors and processes

Whose Sexuality Is It Anyway? Women's Experiences of Viewing Lesbians on Screen

While critical analyses of media representations of lesbians continue to grow, less attention is paid to audience responses to those representations. This paper explores women’s experiences of viewing lesbians on screen, analysing qualitative data from focus groups with audiences of a women-only film season screened in a UK cinema: “Lesbians on Screen: How far Have We Come?” We consider how the internalisation of the “male gaze” complicates some women’s viewing of lesbian characters and how women attempt to challenge and resist that gaze through their viewing practices and strategies. We discuss audience creativity in re-signifying representations of women, as well as other strategies including choosing to view privately or in women-only spaces. These acts of resistance disrupt the dominance of the male gaze, patriarchal cinema spaces and reception of images on screen. By examining women’s reflections on the experience of being in a women-only audience, a unique cinema space that “felt free” of conventional constraints of heteronormativity and patriarchy, this paper also examines how the gendered cinema space affects audience experiences

Improving Mathematics Content Mastery and Enhancing Flexible Problem Solving through Team-Based Inquiry Learning

This article examines how student learning is affected by the use of team-based inquiry learning, a novel pedagogy in mathematics that uses team-based learning to implement inquiry-based learning. We conducted quasi-experimental and observational studies in intermediate level mathematics courses, finding that team-based inquiry learning led to increased content mastery and that students took a more flexible approach to solving problems. We also found that in the courses using this pedagogy, women (but not men) had a reduction in communication apprehension over the course of a semester. We conclude that team-based inquiry learning effectively enhances student learning and problem solving, preparing students for future academic success and fostering career readiness

The creation of the Women\u27s Royal Canadian Naval Service and its role in Canadian naval intelligence and communications, 1939-45

This study explores the establishment of the Women’s Royal Naval Canadian Service (WRCNS) on the basis of its British counterpart, and the subsequent restructuring of the service better to suit Canadian needs during the Second World War. This development paralleled and complemented other efforts on the part of the Canadian navy to become more autonomous from British’s Royal Navy. Many Canadians, and the government itself, had profound reservations about the employment of women in military service, but within the navy, as in the other armed forces, these reservations were overcome by much needed skills available among the women who volunteered. The WRCNS made a particularly valuable contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic providing a highly capable, enthusiastic workforce to staff the rapidly expanding communication and intelligence networks developed by the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) to protect convoys, target U-boats and give Canada full partnerships in Allied decision making for operations in the critically important north Atlantic theatre. The work of the WRCNS directly contributed to Allied victory in the Atlantic and to the enhancement of Canadian national autonomy

Spectral tuning of plasmon-enhanced silicon quantum dot luminescence

In the presence of nanoscale silver island arrays, silicon quantum dots exhibit up to sevenfold luminescence enhancements at emission frequencies that correspond to the collective dipole plasmon resonance frequency of the Ag island array. Using electron-beam lithography to alter the pitch and particle diameter, this wavelength-selective enhancement can be varied as the metal array resonance wavelength is tuned from 600 to 900 nm. The luminescence intensity enhancement upon coupling is attributed to an increase in the radiative decay rate of the silicon quantum dots

“Little Annabel Harvey and her fight with cancer”: healthy young people’s representations of youth cancer

Our recent work on the Growing Up with Cancer project showed that a cancer experience profoundly changes relationships between young people (YP) and their peers. YP can experience a sense of social dislocation as peer groups move on, important social markers are missed, or YP develop different life priorities. As part of understanding these experiences we were keen to examine the perspective of the peers who occupy the social worlds that YP return to after cancer treatment.Aim: To investigate the cultural discourses or representations about cancer and young people circulating among adolescents.Conclusions: Few participants drew on personal knowledge about a young person with cancer; their imagining of youth cancer was based on experiences of cancer in older relatives and through the media (this likely accounts for the perception that cancer inevitably leads to death in young people). Participants showed empathy for the experiences of young cancer survivors, particularly in relation to identity and relationship changes. Young cancer survivors may find these insights useful when returning to school and other peer group settings, while healthcare professionals could harness this support to smooth the young people's transitions across social worlds

Parenthood in young cancer survivors is more than a combination of motivation and capacity

Schmidt et al. (2016) recently reviewed published literature on the reproductive intentions and parenthood motivations of cancer survivors. The authors highlight cancer survivors’ incentives for entering parenthood and concerns about having children post-diagnosis. This welcome addition to the literature on parenthood in survivors of cancer in adolescence and young adulthood throws into sharp relief an important gap in current research: the experiences of cancer survivors who do become parents after cancer diagnosis. Between 1998 and 2004, the relative survival rate for Australians aged 12–24 years diagnosed with cancer was 85% (AIHW 2011). In theory, most of these young survivors had many years to consider and/or become parents. In our recent study of young people’s experiences of ‘Growing up with Cancer’ (Lewis et al. 2013), we heard from two women who became mothers despite being told by their oncologist that they were infertile as a result of cancer treatment. They described parenthood as a positive experience, helping them find purpose in a life that had been destabilised by cancer, ‘motherhood gave me something more to look forward to in life. It’s also helping me to actually want to get on track’ (Lewis 2013). We also know from our research that some young cancer survivors face lifelong challenges managing the ongoing effects of illness and treatment including chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and the ever present apprehension of relapse or a second cancer