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The purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of two school-based outreach initiatives geared toward the promotion of psychological well-being in borderland children. This chapter discusses first Cruzando Fronteras, an outreach initiative that provided support to children impacted by the violence in the US-Mexico border through the use of liberation psychology and narrative approaches. This chapter then presents an overview of the Kimochis program, a social skills program focusing on the promotion of social–emotional learning and resilience in children Pre-K through third grade. This chapter also includes a reflection of my experience as a social justice advocate and concludes with a discussion of rewards and challenges inherent to social justice work.

This paper aims to provide a quantitative decision approach to the service quality management, developed on the basis of Kano's theory of attractive quality. The proposed approach aims at exploiting contacts with service made by “mystery guests” rather than traditional surveys on customer opinions.

A specific probabilistic model of the process of serving quality is the adopted basic tool. Multiple comparison tests aimed at controlling the service quality are the core of the proposed decision approach. In order to collect the needed sampling data, a few mystery guests who experience many customer‐service contacts are employed.

A quantitative decision methodology which both allows one to evaluate the actual service quality level and provides, via comparison tests, a tool to highlight the weak and strong points of the service delivery process.

The proposed quality map is an original graphical tool, which enables one to pin‐point strengths and failings in service quality, prioritize corrective actions and recognize improvements, if any. The operative value of the whole methodology is tested through a real application to the hotel service industry.

The Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) Service System was created in 1973 in the United States as a way to help people with disabilities access necessary supports and services to return to work and live independently. The program receives federal funds and operates in all 50 states and territories. The program is designed to allow consumers to develop a rehabilitation plan in collaboration with a VR counselor and receive necessary services and supports in order to meet their rehabilitation goals. Unfortunately, there are serious issues with access to services and rehabilitation success for minority individuals in the program, particularly African Americans. The chapter will first provide a brief overview of the Rehabilitation Act and its purpose, then we will introduce some of the research that has been conducted to evaluate the program over the years, with particular emphasis on the outcomes for African Americans, and then will focus on a series of studies that have been conducted by the authors in the state of Illinois. The chapter will conclude with some suggestions about ways in which the system could be improved and ways to empower African Americans in pursue of their rehabilitation and independent living goals, including peer-support and supported employment.

The purpose of this paper is to provide maintenance personnel with a methodology for using masked field reliability data to determine the probability of each subassembly failure.

The paper compares an iterative maximum likelihood estimation method and a Bayesian methodology for handling masked data collected from 227 identical radar power supplies. The power supply consists of several subassemblies hereafter referred to as shop replaceable assemblies (SRAs).

The study examined two approaches for dealing with masking, an iterative maximum likelihood estimate procedure, IMLEP, and a Bayesian approach implemented with the application WinBUGS. It indicates that the performances of IMLEP and WinBUGS in estimating the parameters of the SRA distribution under no masking conditions are similar. IMLEP and WinBUGS also provide similar results under masking conditions. However, the study indicates that WinBUGS may perform better than IMLEP when the competing risk responsible for a failure represents a smaller total percentage of the total failures. Future study to confirm this conclusion by expanding the number of SRAs into which the item under study is organized is required.

If an item is considered to be comprised of various subassemblies and the failure of the first subassembly causes the item to fail, then the item is referred to as a series system in the literature. If the probability of a each subassembly failure is statistically independent then the item can be represented by a competing risk model and the probability distributions of the subassemblies can be ascertained from the item's failure data. When the item's cause of failure is not known, the data are referred to in the literature as being masked. Since competing risk theory requires a cause of failure and a time of failure, any masked data must be addressed in the competing risk model.

This study indicates that competing risk theory can be applied to the equipment field failure data to determine a SRA's probability of failure and thereby provide an efficient sequence of replacing suspect failed SRAs.

The analysis of masked failure data is an important area that has had only limited study in the literature due to the availability of failure data. This paper contributes to the research by providing the complete historical equipment usage data for the item under study gathered over a time frame of approximately seven years.

The purpose of this paper is to examine risk factors associated with Western Australian secondary school students’ involvement in violence-related behaviours.

This cross-sectional study examined data collected using an anonymous self-completion questionnaire from 542 school students aged 13-17 years. The questionnaire measured risk factors associated with being a perpetrator and/or victim of violence-related behaviours.

Gender was significantly associated with being a victim and perpetrator of violence-related behaviours. Males were significantly more likely than females to be a victim of threatening and physical violence at school, and to be a perpetrator of physical violence at school and in the community. Males were significantly more likely than females to watch violent media, with exposure to violent media associated with physically hurting someone at school. Students involved in greater acts of animal cruelty had increased odds of being involved in all forms of the violence measured.

Limitations such as the cross-sectional nature of the study and the small sample size are noted, along with suggestions for future research.

Implications of the research for practitioners working with adolescents, with a particular focus on the school setting, are discussed.

Most previously published research on adolescent involvement in violence has been conducted outside Australia, and as such, may not be directly applicable to the experiences of young people in Western Australia.

The purpose of this paper is to promote successful application of quality function deployment (QFD) combined with quantitative techniques in service organizations.

The paper assesses advantages and disadvantages of implementing the QFD method in service organizations. It discusses the integration of quantitative techniques with QFD in order to overcome some of the problems that organizations face in its application. The implementation of QFD along with AHP and ANP is studied within the bank sector. With the intention of completing the first House of Quality and thus prioritizing customers' bank selection criteria, a field survey was carried out with customers of a bank. Also, information from interviews with the bank's managers was utilized.

The real world illustration confirms the compatibility between QFD, AHP and ANP and demonstrates the applicability and ease of use of the proposed model.

A procedure is presented to help practitioners of this improved QFD framework deal with the challenges of quick response to dynamic shifts in customer needs by automating the House of Quality (HOQ). The paper could be useful to academics and practitioners in developing the integrated QFD‐AHP‐ANP method to design high quality services in various services.

This chapter proposes a global agenda to eliminate racism in nursing by targeting reform at nursing education administration internationally. First, the history of racism in nursing is reviewed, along with two models – the diversity model and the cultural competence model – that were applied unsuccessfully to counteract racism in nursing. Second, a description of how racism is entrenched in nursing leadership globally is presented. Third, the recalcitrant structures that serve to maintain institutionalized racism (IR) in the international nursing education system are carefully examined. Specifically, the components and constructs involved in IR in nursing education are delineated, and the way in which these negatively impact both ethnic minority (EM) students and faculty are explained. Based on this, a global agenda to eliminate racism in nursing education internationally is proposed. Eliminating racism in higher education in nursing is a mandatory social responsibility if global healthcare is ever to be equitable. Five actionable recommendations are made to eliminate racism in higher education are summarized as follows: (1) components of nursing programs which are designed to eliminate racism in nursing education should be governed at the country level, (2) to design and implement a system of surveillance of the global nursing community to enable standardized measurement to ensure nursing education programs in all countries are meeting anti-racism benchmark targets, (3) nursing education programs should be established worldwide to provide individual pipeline and mentorship programs to ensure the career success of EM nursing students and faculty, (4) nursing education programs should be conducted to reduce barriers to EM participation in these individual support programs, and (5) nursing education programs are required to teach their nursing faculty skills in developing anti-racist curricula that seeks to eliminate implicit bias.

The paper seeks to offer a critique of the Piagetian developmental cognitive psychology model which dominates research into children and brand symbolism, and to propose consumer culture theory as an alternative approach. The paper also aims to present the design and interpretation of an empirical study into the roles brands play in the everyday lives of junior school children, which demonstrates the richness of this alternative framework.

The key literature on children and brand symbolism is reviewed and the main concepts from consumer culture theory are introduced. A two‐stage qualitative study involving 148 children aged 7‐11 is designed using group discussions and a novel cork‐board sorting exercise. Findings from group discussions with 56 children in stage 2 of the study are analysed from a consumer culture theory perspective.

The analysis focuses on two aspects of the ways in which children use brand symbols in their everyday lives: their fluid interpretations of “cool” in relation to brand symbols, and the constitution of gender in children's talk about iconic brands, notably on “torturing Barbie”.

A key aim of this paper is to critique an existing framework and introduce an alternative perspective, so the analysis offered is necessarily partial at this stage. Future research could also use a consumer culture approach to investigate the role of brands in the everyday lives of children with differential access to financial resources, children from different ethnic groups, and children from different parts of the world.

The introduction of a new framework for researching children and brands offers a host of possibilities for academics and practitioners to understand the effects of brand symbols on the lives of today's children, including a more informed approach to socially responsible marketing. This is also the first study to apply consumer culture theory to children's consumption behaviour. Studying consumption practice from the child's viewpoint offers exciting new angles for the development of this theoretical perspective.