Search

This PhD thesis examines the impact of political ideologies on the welfare-state developments of the Republic of Finland and Federal Republic of Germany from 1960 to 1970, a period of dramatic social expenditure expansion and economic growth. It explores the issue by asking whether different ideas of ruling parties mattered in these developments or were there other factors, such as the level of economic strength, which became more influential in explaining cross-national welfare variations. Whereas mainstream analysts of comparative social policy since the early 1990s have taken for granted that politics mattered in the immediate post- war era reflecting the more pronounced left-right, catholic-protestant and other historical cleavages, this research moves beyond the oversimplified traditional welfare regime typologies and instead considers how welfare systems became intertwined with other more control-focused aspects of state development: in effect, whether and how they became instruments of discipline through educating citizens. Drawing on the Foucauldian idea of power of normalisation - and using educational expansion of the 1960s as a case study - it is suggested that there are aspects of the development of Finnish and West German policing which had a direct bearing on the emergence of the welfare state. Welfare regimes became complex entities which structured the evolution of European nation states after WW2. Yet, it has often been assumed that strong economic development and welfare policies became incompatible. As this study demonstrates, this was not the case in Finland and the FRG. Quite the opposite, both countries emerged stable and democratic into the twenty first century. 1960-1970 was the timeframe during which the groundwork for this success was pioneered and the period was to have a lasting legacy which gave direction to the future. Therefore, a closer study on the interconnectedness between education and welfare state needs to be established. Whereas this thesis confines itself to Finnish-German developments as my original contribution to knowledge, it suggests some grounds for extending the research to other countries.

The purpose of this study was to describe how male, collegiate, certified athletic trainers (AT's) represent knowledge during 5 injury evaluation scenarios. A second purpose of the study was to identify what self-regulatory behaviors participants engaged in to improve or maintain their skills. Knowledge representation was studied as cue selection and knowledge organization while completing the 5 evaluation scenarios during a situational interview. Demographic and self-regulatory behavior data were collected via a questionnaire. During the situational interview, participants responded to 5 injury scenarios via a think-aloud technique. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and member-checked for accuracy. Participants were expert AT's (n = 10) with jobs titles of Director of AT, Head AT, Assistant/Associate AT with a mean age of 41.9 plus or minus 9.78 years and 17.9 plus or minus 10.24 years of experience. The novice AT participants (n = 10) had titles of Graduate Assistant, Intern AT, and Assistant AT with a mean age of 24 plus or minus 1.94 years and 1.3 plus or minus 0.48 years of experience. Differences in groups included strengths with specific injuries and situations. Differences existed in the environmental focus, self-regulatory experiences and goals, and sources of feedback during the acquisition of evaluation domain knowledge. Significant differences (alpha = 0.05) in cue selection were present for only situation 2 (i.e. upper extremity injury) for critical cue selection F = (1,18) = 4.881, p = 0.04, and non-relevant cue selection F = (1,18) = 8.191, p = 0.01. Qualitative analysis of knowledge organization yielded expert and novice AT's both used production rules to guide their protocols. Additional analysis determined that expert and novice AT's both used causal and conditional relationships to link propositions in their protocols. Analysis of non-repetitions statements revealed experts represented knowledge contains fewer situation appraisal concepts, more history concepts, and more prediction concepts. The conclusions of this study may inform the study of expertise in healthcare and how experience in a domain may shape ones knowledge base. Subsequently these findings may contribute to interventions used to improve novice AT's evaluation domain knowledge. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Psychiatry stands at a pivotal point of development. With the advent of brain imaging modalities, descriptive diagnostic criteria have been called into question. Psychotic disorders, historically dichotomized into “schizophrenia” and “bipolar disorder,” and the intermediate “schizoaffective disorder,” have been shown to overlap in clinical symptomatology, familial inheritance, and genetic association studies. Scientific investigation of disease pathogenesis provides an opportunity to develop biological diagnostic criteria from the ground upwards – correlating anatomy, pathophysiology, genetics, and symptomatology. In this context, structural MRI studies have the capacity to shed light on structural abnormalities underlying psychotic disorders (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and psychotic bipolar disorder) and contribute to the development of a comprehensive mechanistic model of disease. Neuropathological and in vivo neuroimaging studies have identified the temporal lobe as a key area of alteration in schizophrenia, but large-scale studies examining the hippocampal volumes of patients across the psychotic spectrum have not yet been performed. Further, until recently, the manual labor and error involved in parcellating hippocampal subfield volumes made the task unfeasible. New automatic parcellation techniques enable the analysis of hippocampal subfield volumes among patients with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder. The objectives of our study were to: (1) investigate using magnetic resonance imaging hippocampal volume in addition to entorhinal cortex volume, parahippocampal gyrus volume, and hippocampal subfield volumes in patients with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder; and, to (2) correlate volumetric alterations with clinical metrics of psychosis and cognition. We utilized a case-control cross- sectional design to collect data from patients with schizophrenia (n=219), patients with schizoaffective disorder (n=142), patients with psychotic bipolar disorder (n=188), and healthy controls (n=337). Freesurfer image analysis software was utilized to automatically parcellate and quantify hippocampal, hippocampal subfield, entorhinal cortex, and parahippocampal gyrus volumes. Clinical ratings and neuropsychological tests were administered as well to assess positive symptoms and cognition. Bilateral hippocampal volume alterations were noted among patients with all three psychotic disorders, while alterations in the surrounding medial temporal lobe regions were noted only in schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia, but not in patients with bipolar disorder. While widespread hippocampal subfield volume alterations were noted in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, only the cornu ammonis 2/3, dentate gyrus, and subicular regions were noted to be altered across all three psychotic disorders. The most prominent alterations were noted in the cornu ammonis 2/3. Hippocampal volumes were negatively correlated with psychosis and positively correlated with measures of declarative memory. Findings suggest that alterations in the hippocampus are present across psychotic disorders and may contribute to the pathogenesis of psychosis. In particular, alterations in the cornu ammonis, an area which supports memory pattern completion, and in the dentate gyrus, an area which supports memory separation may play a role in the pathophysiology of psychosis.