Internal Attributes That Mitigate Perceived Job Insecurity: Improving Employee Satisfaction

Employee satisfaction has been found to have a strong relationship with perceived job security. This study explored job insecurity in an unstable global economy. Specifically, it examined internal attributes of employees, hypothesizing that such attributes would enable employees to better cope with work-related stressors such as job insecurity. Specific attributes of personality and employability were assessed as potential moderators of job satisfaction and security, utilizing the theory of work adjustment and person-environment correspondence as theoretical frameworks. The specific attributes included facets of conscientiousness and neuroticism as well as dispositions of employability including openness to change at work, work and career resilience, work and career proactivity, career motivation, and work identity. Multiple regression tests analyzed the relationship between these internal attributes and both job insecurity and satisfaction on a convenience sample of 100 participants from 2 companies. Participants completed online assessments of the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire; the NEO Personality Inventory, 3rd edition (NEO-PI-3); and the Dispositional Measure of Employability. The findings of this study showed significant relationships between both work and career resiliency and vulnerability and both job satisfaction and perceived job security. Employees, employers, and future researchers may benefit from the findings. Results suggest options for improving the work environment by enabling employees to derive greater satisfaction and security and by providing employers areas for training opportunities. Additionally, future research could explore methodologies, such as mindfulness and cognitive appraisal, which may further increase resiliency and decreasing vulnerability

Moncure/Haywood, Chatham County : a community diagnosis including secondary data analysis and qualitative data collection

Community health cannot be fully understood without considering the health of the individuals that make up that community and social and environmental health indicators. The Moncure/Haywood community in rural Southeastern Chatham County was examined through Community Diagnosis, a process that integrates quantitative and qualitative data to create a picture of the social, political, psychological, environmental and physical health of communities. Our findings create this document that may provide a tool to help the community in future organizing and developing endeavors. Four students from the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of North Carolina's School of Public Health were assigned the task of exploring the community health of Moncure/Haywood as a learning experience. The four students, Shelly Harris, Kevin Harrell, Katie McIntire, and Dawn Rogers, worked within the community from September 1998 until May 1999, compiling data and interacting with Moncure/Haywood community members with the assistance of a preceptor, Margaret Pollard, the Chatham County Commissioner. The community diagnosis process attempts to understand the community from an insider's perspective. In order to attain this perspective, the methodology acknowledges that health status cannot be determined by statistics alone. Community Diagnosis examines the strengths and resources available to a community while examining the needs and weaknesses. A simultaneous examination may result in matching needs with already available assets and preventing overlap and duplication of services. This document provides a starting point for community members to address needs and use available resources. The project began in the Fall of 1998 with the secondary data collection regarding the general and social health of the community. Statistics gathered include morbidity and mortality, economic and demographic information, and historical and cultural information. Due to the lack of specific data on Moncure/Haywood, information was collected from the 1990 United States Census for the block group that includes Moncure/Haywood. Chatham County statistics were used when block group level data was not available. These data were compared to county and state statistics as well as to government health goals. Sources for secondary data include Log Into North Carolina (LINC), United States Census of 1990, Chatham Community Health Improvement Project (CCHIP), various state and county web sites, and agents within the local community. The qualitative data collection process began simultaneously. Community windshield tours and informal interviews at local gathering spots provided a glimpse into the community life of Moncure/Haywood. One aspect of exploring and introducing ourselves to the community included attending church services and community events. Moncure/Haywood is rich in cultural and community resources, which aided our endeavor. The Moncure/Haywood community sits in the southeast corner of Chatham County bordered by the Deep and Haw Rivers and U.S. Highway One, which are vital resources for the community. Many towns are located within a fifteen-mile radius of the community including Pittsboro, Sanford and Apex. The Research Triangle Park, a major technical and research center, and Raleigh, the state capital, are within 30 miles. The residents of Moncure/Haywood enjoy a community with a long, rich history. Originally attracting farming settlers, Moncure/Haywood lured developers of railroad and industry due to the plentiful natural resources. Religion also played a major role in the development of the community and continues to be of great importance to community members. Moncure/Haywood is a small community with less than 1000 residents. The population is almost equally balanced between African-Americans and White, providing a more integrated feel to the community than other rural towns. The majority of community members own their homes and the unemployment rate is very low. Once a booming town, Moncure/Haywood is now a bedroom community that relies on local industries and larger towns for employment. Residents generally travel to neighboring towns for shopping and recreation. Elementary and middle school children attend Moncure Elementary, and the community’s high school age teens are bussed to Northwood High School in Pittsboro. Moncure/Haywood is unincorporated and has no formal governing body. As a result, all community decisions are made at the county level by elected county commissioners. The community has grappled with the issue of incorporation for many years. Although not all agree, most community members feel that incorporation would be good for the community because of increased access to services and the potential for further growth. Community members obtain health services from the Moncure Community Health Center as well as from providers in Pittsboro, Sanford, Chapel Hill and other neighboring towns. The community health center provides many services and many of the older community members utilize its services. Other services for the community include a mobile health unit, social services, and community organizations. Data collection also involved collecting qualitative data through interviews with community members and service providers. An interview guide was established providing a framework of questions and issues to be addressed with interviewees. Institutional Review Board approval was obtained, and interviews began in January 1999. Interviewees were recruited through the preceptor as well as through informal interviews at church services. Community members suggested other persons to interview that would help create a picture of Moncure/Haywood life. Twenty people were interviewed and emerging issues became apparent as to the assets and needs of Moncure/Haywood. Data from the interviews were and then coded and organized into chapters to demonstrate the concerns of the community. A synopsis of the data was presented to community members in a community meeting on March 20, 1999 in order to reflect our findings and to obtain feedback. The forum provided an avenue for new issues to emerge and to reach residents who had not been heard. The drug problem that has emerged within the past five years in Moncure/Haywood concerned almost every community member. The drug problem has led to increased crime in the community. Many felt that the drug problem is a direct result from the lack of recreation and youth activities for the community's children. With an increase in the number of juvenile arrests within the past five years, the secondary data support the problem among the community's youth. Some community members also felt that lack of police protection may contribute to this problem as well, but action has been taken to place a Chatham County Deputy within a satellite office in the community. Most residents see growth in Moncure/Haywood positively. Growth would increase the tax base and attract businesses to the area. Sanford has begun the construction of a regional airport within two miles of the community which may further development. Residents felt that more opportunities and an increase in services would benefit Moncure/Haywood. The need for the development of a sewer system in Moncure/Haywood would be exacerbated by growth in the community. Many residents expressed that a sewage system needed to be developed in the community in order to attract more businesses and developers. Many residents also felt that this may only be accomplished if the community was incorporated. The strong sense of community and community ties in Moncure/Haywood was heard throughout the interviews. Community members felt that in times of need the community would pull together and assist one another. Churches and relationships between neighbors provide a stable foundation for the community and often catalyze community organizing. These fundamental foundations make the community competent to approach the issues that concern the community and to derive solutions. There are several limitations to the community diagnosis process in Moncure/Haywood. A large portion of secondary data was collected from the 1990 census that may not represent the current population. Lack of data specific to Moncure/Haywood also limited the accuracy of secondary data. The referral process limited the accuracy of the qualitative data. Interviewees referred community members to us. Therefore, data collected may represent one side of community issues. Data may also have been limited by a lack of trust among community members. This community diagnosis process only allowed a limited amount of time to engage and get to know residents. This may have influenced the type of information they were willing to share with us. This Community Diagnosis identified the strengths and weaknesses of Moncure/Haywood. This process can provide community members with a starting place to address their needs and to aid in getting support or funding for potential services. By highlighting the resources already available to the community, community members can also examine what creative solutions may already exist and prioritize the issues at hand.Master of Public Healt

Seismic and geodetic constraints on Cascadia slow slip

Automatically detected and located tremor epicenters from episodic tremor and slip (ETS) episodes in northern Cascadia provide a high-resolution map of Washington’s slow slip region. Thousands of epicenters from the past four ETS events from 2004 to 2008 provide detailed map-view constraints that correlate with geodetic estimates of the simultaneous slow slip. Each of these ETS events exhibits remarkable similarity in the timing and geographic distribution of tremor density and geodetically inferred slip. Analysis of the latest 15-month inter-ETS period also reveals ageodetic tremor activity similar both in duration and extent to ETS tremor. Epicenters from both ETS and inter- ETS tremor are bounded between the 30- and 45-km plate interface depth contours and locate approximately 75 km east of previous estimates of the locked portion of the subducting Juan de Fuca plate. Inter-ETS tremor overlaps but is generally downdip of ETS tremor and does not yet correlate with geodetically observed slip, but this is likely because the slip is below current GPS detection levels. Based on the tremor and slip correlation and the tremor-duration and slip magnitude relationship, we suggest that the well-resolved, sharp updip edge of tremor epicenters reflects a change in plate interface coupling properties. The region updip of this boundary may accumulate stress with the potential for coseismic shear failure during a megathrust earthquake. Alternatively, plate convergence in this region could be accommodated by continuous slow slip with no detectable tremor or by slow slip events with sufficiently long recurrence intervals that none have been detected during the past 10 years of GPS observations

Effects of perturbations on estuarine microcosms

Microcosms containing planktonic communities from Chesapeake Bay responded to enrichment with sewage by developing larger standing crops of phytoplankton and zooplankton. Data suggest that increased productivity would be reflected up the food chain but might increase existing problems with dissolved oxygen and might lead to qualitative changes in the composition of the zooplankton. Either phosphorus or nitrogen was removed more rapidly from solution depending on where and when the experimental water was obtained. Increases in standing crop of algae were associated with loss of nitrogen from solution in two experiments and losses of both nitrogen and phosphorus from solution in one experiment

Exploring Agenda-Setting for Healthy Border 2010: Research Directions and Methods

Policy makers take action largely on issues that attain the pinnacle of the policy agenda (Pertschuck, 2001). As a result, how decision makers choose which issues are important has been the subject of much research. Agenda-setting conceptualizes the process of how issues move from relative unimportance to the forefront of policymakers’ thoughts (Dearing & Rogers, 1996). An area within agenda-setting research, Health Promotion Agenda-Setting, provides Health Promotion practitioners with an innovative framework and strategy to set agendas for sustained courses of action (Kozel, Kane, Rogers, & Hammes, 1995). In this interdisciplinary and bi-national exploratory study, funded by the Center for Border Health Research of the Paso del Norte Health Foundation, we examine agenda-setting processes in the Paso del Norte Region and evaluates how the public health agenda is determined within the U.S.-Mexico border population. Integrating both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods, the current research is focused on identifying deficiencies in the public health infrastructure in the U.S.-Mexico border area, and identifying channels that exist for working toward the bi-national goals presented in Healthy Border 2010 (U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, 2003). Research directions, design, and methodologies for exploring health promotion agenda-setting in applied settings, such as Healthy Border 2010, provide health practitioners and policy makers the potential to improve public health leadership by influencing the public health and policy agendas

GPS constraints on 34 slow slip events within the Cascadia subduction zone, 1997–2005

Refinements to GPS analyses in which we factor geodetic time series to better estimate both reference frames and transient deformation resolve 34 slow slip events located throughout the Cascadia subduction zone from 1997 through 2005. Timing of transient onset is determined with wavelet transformation of geodetic time series. Thirty continuous stations are included in this study, ranging from northern California to southwestern British Columbia. Our improvements in analysis better resolve the largest creep events and also identify many smaller events. At 48.5 degrees N latitude, a 14-month average recurrence interval has been observed over eight events since 1997. Farther north along Vancouver Island a host of smaller events with a distinct 14-month periodicity also occurs. In southern Washington State, some of the largest transient displacements are observed but lack any obvious periodicity in their recurrence. Along central Oregon, an 18-month recurrence is evident, while in northern California an 11-month periodicity continues through 2005. We invert GPS offsets of the 12 best recorded events for thrust slip along the plate interface using a cross-validation scheme to derive optimal smoothing parameters. These 12 events have equivalent moment magnitudes between 6.3 and 6.8 and have 2–3 cm of slip. Unlike other subduction zones, no long-duration events are observed, and cumulative surface deformation is consistently less than 0.6 cm. The many newly resolved smaller transient events in Cascadia show that slow slip events occur frequently with GPS best capturing only the largest events. It is likely that slow slip events occur more frequently at levels not detectable with GPS

Integration of transient strain events with models of plate coupling and areas of great earthquakes in southwest Japan

We model the crustal deformation caused by two long-term subduction slip transients in southwest Japan, which we refer to as the 2000–2004 Tokai and the 2002–2004 Bungo Channel slow slip events (SSEs). We use re-analysed GEONET position time-series, and a Kalman filter based network inversion method to image the spatiotemporal slip variation of the two events on the plate interface during the period of 1998–2004.67 and 2000–2005. Both events are found to have complex slip histories with multiple subevents. In addition to a newly identified slip subevent in 2002–2003, we find that the major event in the Bungo Channel SSE initiated in early 2003 beneath the northeastern corner of the region and expanded southwestward, in contrast to the slip characteristics suggested by other studies. The re-analysed GPS data in the Tokai region shows a renewed slip activity for the Tokai SSE in early 2003–2004 at a similar location as in the period of 2001–2002. The equivalent M w for both the Tokai and Bungo Channel SSEs are about 7.0. Our results show that the Tokai SSE appears to start before the Miyaki-Kozu seismovolcanic event. Integrating plate coupling and SSEs shows that the transient slip zones are located in a region between the locked zones and the epicentres of the low frequency earthquakes (LFEs). At least part of the interseismic slip deficit is released by episodic SSEs beneath the Bungo Channel region. We find excellent temporal correspondence between transient slip and adjacent LFEs for both SSE, suggesting that they are closely related and possibly reflect that long-term slow slip may modulate the occurrence of LFEs.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/79234/1/j.1365-246X.2010.04599.x.pd

Seismic tremor at the 9°50′N East Pacific Rise eruption site

Ocean bottom seismic observations within the 9°50′N region of the East Pacific Rise indicate persistent, low-amplitude tremor activity throughout the October 2003 through February 2007 period of monitoring. These signals exhibit either monochromatic or polychromatic spectral characteristics, with a ∼6 Hz fundamental frequency and up to two harmonics. Individual events cannot be correlated between nearby (<1 km) stations, implying the presence of multiple, small-amplitude sources positioned within the shallow crust. Tremor exhibits a semidiurnal periodicity, with some stations recording activity during times of increasing tidal extension and others detecting tremor signals during times of increasing compression. The amplitude, duration, and rate of activity also correlate positively with fortnightly changes in the amplitude of the tides. These spatiotemporal patterns are consistent with tremor generation in response to tidally modulated fluid flow within a network of shallow cracks. Tremor energy flux is spatially and temporally heterogeneous; however, there are extended periods of greater and lesser activity that can be tracked across portions of the array. Despite their shallow crustal origin, changes in tremor amplitude and spectral character occur in the months prior to a major microearthquake swarm and inferred seafloor spreading event on 22 January 2006, with an increase in the degree of correlation between tremor activity and tidal strain in the weeks leading up to this event. After the spreading event, two eruption-surviving stations near the axis continue to show high rates of tremor activity, whereas these signals are suppressed at the single station recovered from the near-axis flanks. This off-axis quiescence may result from the dike-induced closing of cracks or perhaps from the emplacement of impermeable flows near the station