An update of Murrayan needs: A pilot study among American college students

Much research work on motives has been based on the taxonomy of psychogenic needs originally proposed by Murray and his colleagues in 1938. However, many of these needs have received little attention, and some of them may be less relevant now than they were 70 years ago. Two studies were conducted to investigate current motives. In Study 1, we used the Striving Assessment to elicit the personal strivings of 255 undergraduate university students. Murray’s taxonomy was unable to account for 50% of the 2,937 strivings. These strivings were thematically groups into 11 new categories and combined with 7 Murrayan needs to form the Comprehensive Motivation Coding System (CMCS). In Study 2, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) stories produced by 143 undergraduate student participants were coded by these two systems. Murray’s system was unable to fully account for 42% of motives identified in the TAT stories, but the CMCS was able to account for 89%. These findings suggest that Murrayan needs may not adequately describe contemporary motivations and that the CMCS has the potential to do so. However, due to the limited demographics of our sample, further investigations are needed.

An internet-based psychosocial Intervention for men treated for prostate cancer

This thesis developed and evaluated an internet-based program addressing many of the unmet psychological and social needs of men treated for localised prostate cancer. The program was found to be appealing to men and there were trends towards significant improvement across areas of sexuality and relationship function.

Categorization of disaster decision support needs for the development of an integrated model for DMDSS

The wide variety of disasters and the large number of activities involved have resulted in the demand for separate Decision Support System (DSS) models to manage different requirements. The modular approach to model management is to provide a framework in which to focus multidisciplinary research and model integration. A broader view of our approach is to provide the flexibility to organize and adapt a tailored DSS model (or existing modular subroutines) according to the dynamic needs of a disaster. For this purpose, the existing modular subroutines of DSS models are selected and integrated to produce a dynamic integrated model focussed on a given disaster scenario. In order to facilitate the effective integration of these subroutines, it is necessary to select the appropriate modular subroutine beforehand. Therefore, subroutine selection is an important preliminary step towards model integration in developing Disaster Management Decision Support Systems (DMDSS). The ability to identify a modular subroutine for a problem is an important feature before performing model integration. Generally, decision support needs are combined, and encapsulate different requirements of decision-making in the disaster management area. Categorization of decision support needs can provide the basis for such model selection to facilitate effective and efficient decision-making in disaster management. Therefore, our focus in this paper is on developing a methodology to help identify subroutines from existing DSS models developed for disaster management on the basis of needs categorization. The problem of the formulation and execution of such modular subroutines are not addressed here. Since the focus is on the selection of the modular subroutines from the existing DMDSS models on basis of a proposed needs classification scheme.