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Most senior executives view external benchmarking as an indispensable management tool. Finding out how their companies stack up against industry leaders provides a yardstick by which to measure performance and, equally important, role models to emulate. For some it has become an obsession to which they devote enormous resources.

Currently, the state of practice in experimental design centres on orthogonal designs (Alpizar et al., 2003), which are suitable when applied to surveys with a large sample size. In a stated choice experiment involving interdependent freight stakeholders in Sydney (see Hensher & Puckett, 2007; Puckett et al., 2007; Puckett & Hensher, 2008), one significant empirical constraint was difficult in recruiting unique decision-making groups to participate. The expected relatively small sample size led us to seek an alternative experimental design. That is, we decided to construct an optimal design that utilised extant information regarding the preferences and experiences of respondents, to achieve statistically significant parameter estimates under a relatively low sample size (see Bliemer & Rose, 2006).

The D-efficient experimental design developed for the study is unique, in that it centred on the choices of interdependent respondents. Hence, the generation of the design had to account for the preferences of two distinct classes of decision makers: buyers and sellers of road freight transport. This paper discusses the process by which these (non-coincident) preferences were used to seed the generation of the experimental design, and then examines the relative power of the design through an extensive bootstrap analysis of increasingly restricted sample sizes for both decision-making classes in the sample. We demonstrate the strong potential for efficient designs to achieve empirical goals under sampling constraints, whilst identifying limitations to their power as sample size decreases.

This paper aims to describe the development and validation of the Prison Fellowship Well-being index (PF-WBI), a new quantitative tool for assessing prisoner and staff well-being within prison cultures.

The PF-WBI was developed through an iterative process of item creation, administration alongside established well-being measures and a series of data analyses. Data was collected from both staff and prisoners (n = 989) across four North Dakota prisons.

Analysis supported a four-factor structure for the PF-WBI measuring motivation/self-esteem, relationships/community functioning, hope/mood and stress-related detriments. The PF-WBI demonstrated excellent internal consistency reliability, convergent validity with established well-being measures and criterion-related validity for both staff and prisoners. Measurement invariance across staff and prisoners was also confirmed.

The PF-WBI offers a new and versatile tool for researchers and practitioners to assess staff and prisoner well-being in correctional settings. It can be used to evaluate prison cultures and the effectiveness of culture improvement efforts.

It has long been recognised that humans draw from a large pool of processing aids to help manage the everyday challenges of life. It is not uncommon to observe individuals adopting simplifying strategies when faced with ever increasing amounts of information to process, and especially for decisions where the chosen outcome will have a very marginal impact on their well-being. The transactions costs associated with processing all new information often exceed the benefits from such a comprehensive review. The accumulating life experiences of individuals are also often brought to bear as reference points to assist in selectively evaluating information placed in front of them. These features of human processing and cognition are not new to the broad literature on judgment and decision-making, where heuristics are offered up as deliberative analytic procedures intentionally designed to simplify choice. What is surprising is the limited recognition of heuristics that individuals use to process the attributes in stated choice experiments. In this paper we present a case for a utility-based framework within which some appealing processing strategies are embedded (without the aid of supplementary self-stated intentions), as well as models conditioned on self-stated intentions represented as single items of process advice, and illustrate the implications on willingness to pay for travel time savings of embedding each heuristic in the choice process. Given the controversy surrounding the reliability of self-stated intentions, we introduce a framework in which mixtures of process advice embedded within a belief function might be used in future empirical studies to condition choice, as a way of increasingly judging the strength of the evidence.

This chapter explains how the Social Change Model of Leadership served as the process for uniting the campus on Cabrini Day around one shared vision of Leadership for Social Change. It also uses Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning to examine the resulting transformation that occurred among students engaged in this process.

In an effort to showcase students’ transformation into leaders for social change, the chapter focuses expressly on students enrolled in one particular course. These students worked together to develop a live simulation for Cabrini Day that brought campus community members through the real-world experiences of unaccompanied immigrant minors fleeing to the United States to escape violence in their home countries. The chapter employs an action research methodology to describe how, when, and why these students became transformed. Students’ planning steps, actions within the live simulation event, and reflections on their actions were analyzed using the individual, group, and community values of the Social Change Model, as well as the tenets of transformative learning theory.

Findings reveal that the Social Change Model is a viable process for integrating curricular and cocurricular endeavors on campus. Findings also show that this process can lead to transformative student learning outcomes.

Integrating curricular and cocurricular experiences on college campuses can lead to significant student learning outcomes and experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing body of research literature on case clearance levels. Through a social artifact framework, the authors seek to understand the role that documentation of key solvability factors in investigative reports plays in shaping case clearance outcomes.

For this study, 166 non-fatal shooting investigative case files were obtained from a local mid-sized urban police department and coded to assess whether investigators identified key solvability characteristics for non-fatal shooting incidents. Using a logistic regression, the authors assessed the extent that investigative characteristics mentioned in case files were associated with the odds that the case was cleared by arrest.

The findings from this study indicate that investigative case files as a data source are exceedingly unreliable. Investigators do not consistently document investigative practices and intelligence. And those that are consistently documented are a part of institutionalized practices that are unique to their corresponding police department.

This study is original in that it uses a social artifact framework to sharpen the focus on the role that the effective documentation of critical evidence plays in leading to arrests in gun violence cases.

The paper aims to describe the career and contributions of Joseph Scanlon in gaining labor‐management cooperation through employee participation and sharing the gains from cost savings.

The paper makes use of archives and unpublished sources; correspondence with Scanlon's daughter and a previous colleague; Scanlon's writings; and secondary sources as needed.

Joseph Scanlon used his experiences to develop a plan that encouraged union‐management cooperation and workers and managers sharing gains from improved productivity. Scanlon's background is examined and how his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, especially Douglas McGregor, provided the venue for his ideas to flourish and gain widespread acceptance. An analysis of 117 studies over a period of six decades is used to identify the conditions that appear to promote or to interfere with the Scanlon Plan.

The Scanlon Plan illustrates a means to promote labor‐management cooperation and a means to involve employees through sharing cost savings.

This is the first biographical study to use archival and unpublished sources to provide new insights into Scanlon and how his plan for cooperation and Gainsharing developed.

Purpose – To describe the use of the software platform, TechScaffold, for use in teacher education to provide pre-service and in-service teachers with decision-making heuristics to select apps based on formulation of their instructional purposes for using those apps; participate in a community designed to foster knowledge and experience about effective, purposeful uses of apps; and share project reports to illustrate the use of apps to achieve certain learning objectives.

Design – The authors draw on research related to decision-making associated with purposeful uses of apps as well as analysis of the limitations of similar instructional design tools to develop features for TechScaffold. They sought to scaffold teachers’ decision-making through users formulating open-ended responses to queries with responses matched against a database of apps identified according to platform, purpose, grade level, difficulty, and cost, as well as ways for users to participate as members of a community to share projects illustrating uses of apps. The authors also obtained feedback regarding the potential usability and value of TechScaffold.

Findings – Given research indicating the importance of scaffolding decision-making processes regarding uses of apps, feedback from users indicated that they perceive TechScaffold as a useful tool within the context of teacher education as well as for professional development in schools to foster effective decision-making associated with purposeful uses of apps.

Practical Implications – Teacher educators can employ scaffolding activities to help pre-service and in-service teachers make decisions regarding productive uses of apps through their open-ended formulation of certain purposes through use of a tool such as TechScaffold.

Higher education and student affairs professionals have a very important, active role in the lives of their students. The issues college students face are complex and higher education professionals must be properly trained to be able to address them (Franklin-Craft, 2010). Projections that by 2030 most college students in the United States will be non-White increase the responsibility of those working in higher education to truly understand the developmental issues of a diverse student body (Karkouti, 2015; Rankin & Reason, 2005; Torres, Howard-Hamilton, & Cooper, 2003).

This chapter highlights findings of a study that examined the multicultural competence of graduate students in a higher education program. Employing a snowball sampling method, completed surveys were received from 28 master and doctoral students out of 45 surveys distributed (response rate = 62%). Responses on the Multicultural Competence in Student Affairs – Preliminary 2 Scale (MCSA-P2) were also examined by race, gender, and other pertinent variables. The findings from this research indicate the need for infusing diversity into the curriculum and requiring diversity courses to increase the cultural competence of graduate students in higher education programs. The findings also support the need and call for additional research and analyses to be conducted on multicultural competence of higher education/student affairs professionals. Implications for graduate programs in higher education and reflexivity of the researcher conclude the chapter.