UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item COLLABORATIVE CO-DESIGN OF PORTABLE WORK BENEFITS POLICY MODEL AND NON-POLICY PROTOTYPE BASED ON DIRECT CARE WORKERS' NEEDS, ATTITUDES, AND BELIEFS(2024) Kuo, Charlene C.; Aparicio, Elizabeth M.; Public and Community Health; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Direct care workers (DCWs) assist people with disabilities and frail elders with activities of daily living, thereby preventing institutionalization, hospitalization, and other costly medical services. From 2016 to 2060, the number of adults aged 65 and over is expected to increase from 49.2 million to 94.7 million. The number of adults 18 to 64 will remain the same, leading to a shortage of family caregivers. A shortage of family caregivers will require a robust direct care workforce. The direct care workforce is expected to grow by 1.3 million from 2019 to 2029 but this growth will not keep pace with the projected demand. The turnover rate among DCWs is high due to poor work conditions and inadequate compensation. Exploring ways to improve DCW working conditions and compensation is critical to prevent further shortages. DCWs' health is put at risk due to the nature of the work, low wages, and lack of worker protections and traditional work benefits. DCWs are vulnerable to injury, abuse, infectious diseases, and other poor health outcomes due to the previously listed disadvantages (Campbell, 2019c; Hughes, 2020; Jaffe, 2017; M. M. Quinn et al., 2016). DCWs in the United States are predominantly women, members of racial and ethnic minority groups, and one in four workers are immigrants.Work benefits improve health outcomes and protect clients of DCWs from healthcare-associated infections by allowing DCWs to take paid sick leave when ill. Portable benefits are benefits employees can take from job to job, prorated so that multiple employers can contribute, and accessible to all workers. Portable benefits are not widely available. I held 1)individual in-depth interviews and focus groups to explore the needs, attitudes, and beliefs of DCWs regarding work benefits, 2) two co-design sessions and a member checking session with DCWs to develop and refine policy recommendations for Maryland DCWs' portable work benefits, and 3) a co-design session and member checking sessions to develop usability recommendations for websites delivering portable benefits to DCWs. This study provides findings about direct care workers' experiences with inadequate or nonexistent work benefits, their recommendations for policy to support benefits that meet their needs and preferences, and their usability recommendations for portable benefits websites. This study provides information on how to design work benefits for DCWs that protect them, protect those around them, and improve work conditions in hopes of improving work conditions and compensation.Item PERFORMANCE AND QUALITY INDICATOR DATA AVAILABILITY FOR P3 PROJECTS(2015) Robinson, Matthew Christian; Cui, Qingbin; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Public Private Partnerships (P3’s) are a relatively new project delivery method. In reaction to the increased attention to this delivery method, the Federal Highway Administration has begun to enhance its existing P3-VALUE toolkit, an educational toolkit which demonstrates the potential benefits of utilizing a Public Private Partnership over a traditional method like Design Bid Build for transportation projects. The toolkit utilizes assumptions about P3 project characteristics to build the scenarios for its analyses. Unfortunately, there is a significant lack of data which would serve to justify assumptions made about improved P3 quality performances. Furthermore, there is a basic lack of knowledge regarding what data is even available to make certain assumptions. The intent of this thesis is to identify what data can be collected, what data can be shared, and to determine what data can be expected to be reliably available, and not subject to proprietary rights, for future analysis regarding the improved P3 quality performance.Item AVIATION CONGESTION MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENTS IN MODELING THE PREDICTION, MITIGATION, AND EVALUATION OF CONGESTION IN THE NATIONAL AIRSPACE SYSTEM(2014) Vlachou, Kleoniki; Lovell, David J.; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The air transportation system in the United States is one of the most complex systems in the world. Projections of increasing air traffic demand in conjunction with limited capacity, that is volatile and affected by exogenous random events, represent a major problem in aviation system management. From a management perspective, it is essential to make efficient use of the available resources and to create mechanisms that will help alleviate the problems of the imbalance between demand and capacity. Air traffic delays are always present and the more air traffic increases the more the delays will increase with very unwanted economic impacts. It is of great interest to study them further in order to be able to more effectively mitigate them. A first step would be to try to predict them under various circumstances. A second step would be to develop various mechanisms that will help in reducing delays in different settings. The scope of this dissertation is to look closer at a threefold approach to the problem of congestion in aviation. The first effort is the prediction of delays and the development of a model that will make these predictions under a wide variety of distributional assumptions. The work presented here is specifically on a continuum approximation using diffusion methods that enables efficient solutions under a wide variety of distributional assumptions. The second part of the work effort presents the design of a parsimonious language of exchange, with accompanying allocation mechanisms that allow carriers and the FAA to work together quickly, in a Collaborative Decision Making environment, to allocate scarce capacity resources and mitigate delays. Finally, because airlines proactively use longer scheduled block times to deal with unexpected delays, the third portion of this dissertation presents the assessment of the monetary benefits due to improvements in predictability as manifested through carriers' scheduled block times.Item WHAT IS THE PRICE OF CRIME? NEW ESTIMATES OF THE COST OF CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION(2009) Roman, Jonathan Kilbourn; Reuter, Peter; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Robust estimates of the price of crime, measured as the costs of crime to victims, inform a wide range of policy analysis. The most commonly cited studies are constrained by limited data and rely on indirect methods to estimate prices. In these studies, health statistics are used to estimate direct losses from crime, jury award data are used to estimate indirect damages from crime, and self-reported crime data are used to weight injury prevalence within broad crime categories. While the relationship between injury and damages can be observed at the individual level in civil court records, individual level data have not previously been available that link crimes and injury. Since both individual and aggregate data are combined in these studies, prior research has not corrected sampling bias, and the estimates of victimization costs have been reported only as point estimates without confidence intervals. Estimates have been developed for only a few broad categories of crime and these estimates have not been robust to study design. This study analyzes individual-level data from two sources: jury award and injury data from the RAND Institute of Civil Justice and crime and injury data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Propensity score weights are developed to account for heterogeneity in jury awards. Data from the jury awards are interpolated onto the NIBRS data based on the combination of all attributes observable in both data sets. From the combined data, estimates are developed of the price of crime to victims for thirty-one crime categories. Until data become available linking information about criminal incidents to jury award data, the strategy used here is likely to yield the most robust estimates of the costs to crime victims that can be generated from the jury compensation method.