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Impact of Life Skills Education on Self-Esteem among Adolescents in Childrens Home
The aim of the current study was to assess the impact of life skills education on self-esteem among adolescents in Childrens Home. The design was experimental and used a pre-test/ post-test design with a control group. Sixty adolescents (30 males and 30 females) from Childrens Home comprised the experimental group (N=30) and control group (N= 30) who were selected from Childrens Homes in Kannur district, Kerala. A life skills education programme was prepared and included sessions towards improving self-esteem among adolescents in the age group 13-15 years. The Rosenbergs Self-Esteem Scale (1965) was administered before and after the life skills education programme to the adolescents. The results indicate that there was a significant difference between the experimental and control group in their self-esteem after life skills education programme including gender differences. The implication of the study reiterates that the inclusion of life skills as part of the curriculum for adolescents residing in Childrens Home plays a role in enhancing self- esteem. Key Words: Self-Esteem, Adolescent, Childrens Home, Life Skills Education -
MEDIATING EFFECT OF PERCEPTION OF POLITICS BETWEEN DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND TURNOVER INTENTION OF EMPLOYEES IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ORGANIZATIONS
During the past few decades, organizational researchers have increasingly focused their attention on the subjective work issues and their impact on various work related outcomes. One of the most prominently studied factor perception of organizational politics has received much recent conceptual and empirical attention. Political work environment are responsible for a variety of harmful work consequences like higher stress, lower job satisfaction and commitment, diminished worker productivity and higher rate of turnover (Ferris et.al 1989, 2002; Kacmar and Baron, 1999) Some researchers focused on the distributive justice aspect as predictors of important outcomes here they pursued studies from the opposite perspective while they examined Perception of politics (Ferris and Kacmar, 1992; Kacmar , Ferris, 1991). Thus research has demonstrated the independent influences of politics, distributive justice, on turnover intention, job satisfaction etc (Cropanzano et.al 1992; Mcfarlin and Sweeney, 1992). Very few studies attempted in finding out how these elements of fairness influence each other in predicting outcomes. In the current study, the mediating effect of perception of politics between distributive justice and turnover intentions has been examined. This study extends the previous research efforts and fills a gap in the reviewed literature by simultaneously investigating the mediation effect of perception of politics between distributive justice and turnover intention of employees in Information technology organizations. 343 employees from the top 10 IT organization as listed by NAASCOM were involved in the present study. The purposive sampling technique was adopted. Employees with minimum 2 years of experience in the organization was chosen as respondents. The major objectives of the study are, to measure employees perception of politics and employees perception of distributive justice; to study the turnover intention of IT employees; to find if perception of politics mediates the relationship between distributive justice and turnover intentions; to find out the significant effect of distributive justice on the dimensions of perception of politics and finally to find out the difference in perception of politics and distributive justice across demographics. Hypothesis was framed in accordance to the objectives stated. The tools of measurement adopted were (i) Perception of organisational politics were measured with the fifteen item Perception of politics scale (POPS), developed by Kacmar and Carlson (1997).( ii) Five item Perceptions of distributive justice were measured with the Distributive Justice Index, developed by Price and Mueller (1986). (iii) Turnover intention was measured using a categorical item developed by Dilys Robinson, Sarah Perryman, and Sue Hayday, (2004). The Crobachs alpha for perception of politics dimensions and distributive justice were above 0.90. The level of perception of politics and distributive justice was found to be moderate. In terms of the logistic regression analysis performed, it was found that there was partial mediation of perception of politics between distributive justice and turnover intention. The result indicated that, even though the employees perceived their work environment to be political, they will have the intention to stay back, as long as the fairness in distribution of rewards exists. Perception of politics which always carried a negative label showed partial mediation in the relationship between distributive justice and turnover intentions, where it explained only 13.9% of the intention to leave factor. This means, even when the environment is political, employees will stay back in the organization when they experience fairness in distribution of rewards. Keywords: Information technology, Organizational behaviour, Human resource management, Perception of politics, Mediation, Distributive justice, Turnover intention. -
SVM Ensemble for Insurance Data Analysis
Data mining is the process of analysing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. Companies with a strong consumer focus use data mining. The information getting from datamining is useful to increase revenue and reduce overall costs of the company. It is applied in retail field, financial sector, communication media, and in marketing organizations. Datamining facilitate these companies to determine relationships among company internal factors such as price, product positioning, or staff skills, and external factors such as competition in products, economic indicators, and customer demographics. Ensemble learning is a machine-learning paradigm where multiple models or learners are trained to solve the problem. This research explores the usage of SVM ensemble for Insurance Data Analysis. The number of Insurance firms is increasing day by day. The main objective of this research is to find out the best policy from a given list of Insurance policies. In this research a detailed study of SVM ensemble is done. An insurance dataset obtained from UCI knowledge discovery in Databases Archive is taken in the research analysis. From the dataset five different Non-life insurance policies were selected and used in this research work. The categories of policies include Fire policy, Home policy, Car policy, Kissan policy and Boat policy. AdaBoost, multiclassifier SVM ensemble was created and tested with the insurance dataset. SVM ensemble produces better accuracy than other ensembles. The knowledge flow of SVM ensemble is loaded in Weka. From each category, the policy that gives a highest accuracy value for SVM ensemble is considered to be the best policy. A graphical user interface is also developed using .NET framework, to view the policy output. This system helps the user to find out a best policy from the analysed data. KEYWORDS: SVM ensemble, Insurance policy, Accuracy, ROC, Support Vector Machine. -
Morphological Characterization of Selected Aliphatic and Aromatic Hydrocarbons.
In the last few years considerable interest has been aroused in the study of amorphous carbon. Amorphous carbon has a wide range of properties that are primarily controlled by the different bond hybridizations possible in such materials. This gives different properties like high strength, flexibility etc. Due to these properties, they are used in thin film technology and in nanoscale electronic devices. Films can range from those with high transparency and are hard and diamond-like, through to those which are opaque, soft and graphitic-like. Application areas include field emission cathodes, electronic devices, medical and optical coatings. Hence study of different carbon structures has been of great interest for many researchers. Several techniques have been used to study various sources of carbon. Hydrocarbons are the most abundant sources of carbon. The majority of hydrocarbons found, naturally occur in crude oil and the decomposition of these give hydrogen and carbon. Incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons leads to the production of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbon combustion therefore mainly have aromatic and aliphatic chains of carbon. Hydrocarbons are by far the most widespread precursors among carbon sources employed in the production of carbon nanotubes and carbon nanosphers. In the present study diesel soot, camphor soot and coal has been used as precursors for nanomaterials. Impurities in the samples can reduce efficiency of production. Mineral matter encompasses dissolved salts in the pore water and inorganic elements associated with the organic compounds, as well as crystalline and non-crystalline mineral particles. Quantitative analysis of minerals and other inorganics contributes to defining coal quality. Therefore a study on effects of bio and base leaching on coal samples are also done. XRD is one of the majorly used techniques to deduct the various structural parameters like interlayer spacing of crystalline (d002) structure, crystallites size (La, Lc), aromaticity (fa), number of layers of carbon atoms per aromatic lamellae(n). According to Scherrer, crystallite size varies inversely with peak width. Therefore it is a known fact that a broad hump in the spectrum indicates the presence of nano layers. These parameters are determined from the intensity profiles of the sample hydrocarbons. Also the structure of the hydrocarbon can be characterized using NMR and SEM EDS. 1H NMR spectra can yield structural information that allows classification of complex mixtures containing hundreds of aromatic, naphthenic, paraffinic, olefinic, and isoparaffinic compounds. SEM/EDS techniques allow both inorganic analysis of bulk materials and determination of chemistry and abundance of microscopic constituents. SEM analysis also gives us the size of nano particles formed in the sample. EDS allows one to identify what those particular elements are and their relative proportions. CHNS analysis gives the elemental composition of the samples. The study shows that the carbonaceous soot produced from combustion of diesel in engine show the presence of significant amount of carbon nanomaterials. The SEM micrographs indicate that nanoparticle present in diesel soot is clusters of carbon nanospheres. EDS analysis reveals the soot particles to be composed of primarily carbon and oxygen along with hydrogen. NMR spectrum of the soot reveals significant aliphatic component with predominance of methyl and methylene groups on ?and ?? positions to aromatic rings. Camphor soot XRD analysis shows presence of ordered layers of nanolayers and laso the presence of CNTs. The SEM micrographs of camphor show the presence of carbon nanostructures. The EDS analysis shows more of carbon and oxygen along with aluminium, silicon and potassium. Study of coal samples treated with biological leaching agents reveals that Penicillium spp (PE) treated sample is having more of a graphitic or ordered structure and the d002 spacing of this sample is 3.37 ?? which is close to graphite. XRD data of coal sample treated with base leaching agents confirms the turbostratic structure of coal. The SEM micrographs of the samples show that KN has more graphite like sheet structures. -
DETERMINANTS OF ORGANISATIONAL CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOUR OF EMPLOYEES IN BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURCING SECTOR
Organizational Citizenship Behaviour is defined as the voluntary behaviour in which employees go beyond what is formally expected of them to contribute to the well being of the organisation and people involved in it. The present study investigated whether Big five Personality Traits and Psychological Contract have significant influence on Organisational Citizenship Behaviour of employees in Business Process Outsourcing Sector. Convenience sampling was adopted to administer the questionnaire (questionnaires were administered to the target sample from the business process outsourcing companies that gave permission, and through the online). Judgmental sampling method was adopted for deciding whom to administer the questionnaire. Employees must have worked for minimum 2 years in the present company to complete the questionnaire. 500 questionnaires were distributed and 381 fully completed questionnaires were compiled for analysis (76.2% response rate). In the present study the dimensions of Big Five Personality Traits ?? Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness to Change, the Psychological Contract Variables - Relational Contract, Transactional Contract, Employer Commitment, and Employee Commitment, and the dimensions of Organisational Citizenship Behaviour- Altruism, Conscientiousness, Courtesy, Civic Virtue and Sportsmanship were measured on 381 employees of top 10 BPO companies listed by NASSCOM . The result of the present study indicated that extraversion dimension of Big Five Personality Traits had a significant influence on Organisational Citizenship Behaviour. Psychological Contract variables Relational Contract, Transactional Contract and Employer Commitment had a significant influence on Organisational Citizenship Behaviour. In this study we have analyzed the implications based on the results found. Some of the implications of the study were the BPO employees high on extraversion, may display more citizenship behaviours towards the organisation. The employees who scored high on the psychological contract measures may result in exhibiting voluntary behaviour towards the organisation. It is suggested for the future researchers to replicate the study to determine how the findings reported here correspond to the results of studies conducted in other work environments to ensure proper generalization. Future researches also need to consider the moderating influences of person and situation-based factors on the relationship between Big Five personality Traits, Psychological Contract and OCB. Additionally, researcher may consider the respondents position in future studies as findings. A dyadic response from both the managers and employees can be a better study to avoid bias and self rating. Key words: Organisational Behaviour, Big Five, Psychological Contract, Organisational Citizenship Behaviour, Human Resource Management. -
Study of two-dimensional, all-time dispersion of a solute in a fluid-saturated porous medium
The effect of interphase mass transfer on dispersion in a unidirectional flow through a horizontally extent of infinite porous channel is examined using the generalized dispersion model of Sankarasubramanian and Gill [91]. The model brings into focus three important coefficients namely the exchange coefficient, the convection coefficient and the dispersion coefficient. The exchange co- efficient exists due to interphase mass transfer. The effects of reaction rate parameter, ? porous parameter, ? and Brinkman number, ??, on the veloc- ity and thereby the convective and dispersion coefficients are discussed. The time-dependent dispersion coefficient and mean concentration distribution are computed and results are represented graphically for various values of ? ? and ??. The results have applications in heat exchangers, petroleum and chemical engineering problems, chromatography and bio-mechanical problems. -
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Gender Differences: Perception of Teasing and Body Image among Young Adults
The main focus of the current research is to determine whether perception of teasing has an influence on an individuals body image. Teasing related to weight may occur more often than many other types of teasing during childhood and adolescence. The study was conducted with a sample 100 under graduate students. The participants were in the age group of 18 to 21 years. The data was collected using teasing questionnaire-revised by Storch et al. (2004) and body image questionnaire by Cash (1994). 10 participants who scored high on teasing questionnaire were interviewed to further explore their teasing experiences and its relation to their body image. The results showed that there are no gender differences between teasing and body image among adults. Teasing seemed to be related to some of the domains of body image. Data from interviews show that peers and family were the major group of people involved in teasing. Teasing seemed to be having many consequences for the individuals results also indicate that teasing on ones appearance influences their body image. Key Words: Gender Difference, Teasing, Body Image and young adults. -
A Study on Parental and Peer Influence on Adolescent Health Risk Behavior
Adolescents are the future of the country. It is this period that they face several problems as it is a stage of exposure and experimentation. They get exposed to several practices like consumption of alcohol, Drugs, Tobacco and unsafe Sexual practice. These behaviours are often triggered by faulty parenting and bad peer influence. Hence this study is an attempt to know the proneness among adolescents to follow such health risk behaviours and how these behaviours are influenced by parent and peers. The study reveals that about 59% of the adolescents are into one or multiple health risk behaviours and it is parental monitoring and peer modelling which are significantly associated with the overall health risk behaviour.(p value <0.05). When it comes to specific health risk behaviour, we can see a significant association between peer modelling and health risk behaviour. Peer modelling is an influence proved to be there on all the health risk behaviours namely consumption of tobacco, alcohol, drugs and practice of unsafe sex. However it is evident from the study that it is boys who are significantly higher in number than girls with regard to the practice of health risk behaviours. Key Words: Adolescents, Health Risk Behaviour, Parental Influence, Peer Influence -
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An Empirical Analysis of Consumer's Environmental Attitude and Purchasing Behavior of Green Product with Special Reference to Bangalore City
This study examines the consumers attitude and purchasing behavior of green product of Indian consumers. To meet this objective, a structured questionnaire has been used to collect the data samples of 300 respondents. The survey results obtained from Bangalore City provide reasonable support for the validity of the proposed model. The collected data has been filtered and found 261 valid data to carry out the data analysis to find the result and conclusion of this research study. The result of this study, consumers who have positive attitude about the environment are giving more importance to buy eco-friendly product (Green Product) and it is clearly observed that there is a positive relationship between the consumers environmental attitude and purchasing behavior of the green product. This study also outlines the green product categories and examines which category is more preference by the consumers with regards to their gender, age, occupation and income. The green product categories are Grocery Items, Health and Beauty, Apparel, Produce, Cleaning and Households, Pet Products, Meat/Fish and Poultry, Paper Products and Electronics and Appliances. Despite the age, gender, occupation and income differences, it is found that majority of the consumer preference to buy Electronics and Appliances and Health and Beauty products out of those green product categories. Even though they also buy other category of the green product but the counts are minimal as compare to Electronics and Appliances and Health and Beauty Products. Furthermore, this study also discusses the different factors that impact on buying decision taken by the consumers. This study specifically studied with three main factors that influence the purchasing decision of the consumer regarding the eco- friendly product. These are constant factor such as Price and Quality; Brand and Environmental Factors. -
A Study on the Impact of Microfinance on the Members of the Self Help Groups in Karnataka State, India
The present study focuses on assessing the extent to which the Microfinance programs have been effective in bringing about the change it is supposed to in the state of Karnataka, India. Therefore, an impact assessment is suited to know the ground reality of these programs. The study takes into consideration the socio-economic variables in order to assess the over-all effect of the programs. Apart from interventions and influences coming from the Microfinance programs, there are also other factors that influence the effect. These other factors are largely associated with the location where these programs are conducted. Locations or Regions bring with it difference in culture, social, occupational and demographical aspects which are also taken into account the study. The study shows that there is a significant change in the socio-economic lives of the poor of the different regions of Karnataka. However, the results are not as impressive as they should have been. All in all, the impact of the microfinance programs exhibits a dull, or rather, yet-to-explore field, urging efforts to reach out more effectively to the rural poor. Keywords: Impact Assessment, Microfinance, Karnataka, Self Help Groups, Savings Accumulation, Consumption Pattern, Accessibility to Credit -
Pedagogic Use of Commercial Feature Film in Christ University Deanery of Humanities and Social Sciences
This thesis discusses the use of commercial feature film as a pedagogical tool in the classrooms within the Deanery of Humanities and Social Sciences of Christ University. It investigates the purpose of using films as pedagogy in higher education and the reasons behind its popularity among both teachers and students. Triangulation method was used for gathering data combining qualitative and quantitative methods such as pretesting posttesting, survey and in depth interviews. Information was gathered by using interview schedule and online questionnaires from teachers and students of the Deanery of Humanities and Social Sciences to analyze the plausible impact of feature films as pedagogy in subjects taught. The findings suggest that films are popular pedagogical tool and are effective if used along with discussions post screening. -
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The Experience of Divorce: The Emotional conflict and coping among divorced young adults
Divorce is the termination of marriage to a legally wedded marriage between a man and a woman. Divorce is fast becoming a common factor among young couples these days. Even though divorce is a way out for the struggling marriage, it is traumatic for most of the individuals who separate from their partners. This study is to capture the experience that every spouse goes through during and after divorce. The first two chapters explain divorce from the previous study undertaken to put into a perspective about the study on divorce. And the subsequent studies on coping and the consequences of coping by the divorcees. This study aims to focus on how they manage to cope and face their marital breakdown. Thereafter how they pick their lives and proceed with their new life after separation. The divorce experience of 12 males and females were recorded and explored through thematic analysis. The findings have indicated that the experience of divorce is traumatic and painful. It takes time for them to get over that bitter experience of divorce. The study highlights various coping strategies enabling the divorced to adapt to life after separation. Keywords: Emotional conflicts, Coping and consequences of coping