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This chapter investigates pandemic impact in a variety of industries, including food, travel, education and pharmaceuticals, considering elements such as isolation, emotions and social influences, which can lead to panic buying. The goal of this research is to ascertain how COVID-19 influences the buying decisions of customers. Additionally, the study aims to identify consumer consumption trends for a spectrum of products and services, including fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs), entertainment, pharmaceuticals, travel and tourism. A comprehensive review of different research papers is done to conclude. The papers considered are from 2020 to 2022. Different keywords are used to search the relevant papers such as ‘pandemic’, ‘COVID-19’, ‘behaviour’, ‘impulsive’, etc. TCCM framework has been applied while reviewing the articles. During the isolation, consumer behaviour moved to panic buying and stockpiling, favouring organic basics, and encouraging e-commerce, as well as economic nationalism favouring made-in-India products. This study helps in knowing the reasons for change in consumers' behaviour for different products and services due to unforeseeable situations like COVID-19 and can find possible ways to deal with them. Business owners learn about changing consumer purchasing behaviours and how to modify products. The government can change policies to improve medical tourism and social protection.

This study examines the drivers of marketing channel participation amongst smallholder rice farmers in the northern region of Ghana.

Using a sample of 397 smallholder rice farmers drawn from a multistage sampling procedure, the study employed multivariate probit (MVP) model in the empirical estimations. In this context, the model assumes that a rice farmer should at least participate in one market channel.

The study reveals that the wholesaler market channel is the most commonly used channel among farmers, followed by the aggregator channel. However, the processor market channel is the least patronized one in the study area. The results also show statistically significant correlation coefficients in four out of the six possible combinations, implying that market channel participation among smallholder farmers is not mutually exclusive. Rice market channel participation is positively and significantly influenced by age, gender, household headship, access to credit, extension service, irrigation, improved seed and access to price information.

This study is limited in extending the analysis to include the impact of market channels on some outcome measures. This is due to data limitation.

The findings of this study add to the growing literature on smallholder market channel participation in Ghana.

The purpose of this study is to examine empirically the impacts of gender differences, telecommunication technology (ICT) and other determinants on private savings in 28 selected Asia–Pacific countries.

This study employs the panel data from 2010 to 2017 across 28 selected Asia–Pacific countries. To enhance robustness and address the possibility of endogeneity issue, the present study utilises the fixed effect instrumental variable (IV) estimator to estimate the private savings model for Asia–Pacific region.

The present study finds that private savings is positively related to disposable income and ICT, but it is negatively associated with the degree of dependency. However, the association between interest rates and private savings are inconclusive as both positive substitution and negative income effects on private savings were observed. Moreover, the results also indicate that working females tend to save less than working males and that of the educated female, despite their impacts are varied across educational attainment levels.

This study provides a novel insight into private savings patterns by focussing upon the gender differences and ICT aspects. In stark contrast to previous literature on the issue, the authors find that working and educated females negatively impact private savings in Asia–Pacific economies due to income inequality and consumption habits. However, the results show that ICT accelerates private savings as it provides easy access to financial services and the requisite frameworks, such as e-business platforms, for generating passive income as well as provide the modalities for more cost-efficient shopping such as price and product comparison frames that yield costs savings which can then be potentially channelled into private savings.

The study’s purpose is to investigate the constraints and facilitators influencing skiing participation in Beijing. This research includes three segments based on the frequency of skiing participation (i.e. non-, low-frequency-, and high-frequency skiers). By doing so, the study offers an enhanced understanding of the Chinese skiing market and unveils insights assisting industry professionals to effectively address their customers' diverse needs and expectations.

An online survey was developed based on prior research and consisted of four sections: (1) skiing participation; (2) constraints; (3) facilitators; (4) demographics. Items in the constraint and facilitator scale were measured using a 7-point Likert scale. A total of 409 participants completed the survey. The participants included 137 non-skiers, 134 low-frequency skiers, and 138 high-frequency skiers.

Through an exploratory factor analysis, three constructs emerged: general constraints, facilitators and learning constraints. As expected, facilitators were a positive predictor of skiing participation. Importantly, the emergent construct of learning constraints was a negative predictor of skiing and yet, the construct of general constraints was insignificant. Furthermore, the three segments differ significantly in household status, income, and education level.

These results support previous research noting the relevance in skiing participation of the dimensions: facilitators and learning constraints. The findings point to the need for ski resorts in Beijing to offer instructional sessions for beginners so they may become familiar with skiing fundamentals and enhance their confidence, particularly among nonskiers and low-frequency skiers.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated food insecurity and insufficiency in the United States. However, the causes of food insufficiency among people with disabilities during the pandemic are not well understood. This paper examined how loneliness and household structure are associated with food insufficiency among working-age adults (ages 18–64) with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using 2021 National Survey on Health and Disability data, we conducted logistic regression to estimate the association between loneliness, household composition, and food insufficiency. Measures of household structure, such as the number of children in the household and living with other adults, were not associated with food insufficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondary analyses found that loneliness had a strong association with food insufficiency for those who live alone. Respondents who lived alone and reported feeling lonely had the highest odds of being food insufficient during the pandemic. Our findings indicate that in addition to household structure, it is important to assess psychosocial well-being, such as measures of loneliness, when examining food insufficiency among working-age adults with disabilities.

District-university partners increasingly rely on “grow-your-own” licensure programs to address teacher shortages. Because vacancies in special education represent a chronic issue, our district-university partnership developed LEAP – the Licensed Educators’ Accelerated Pathway, successfully preparing 26 paraprofessionals as special education teachers (SEs). We describe a model university-district partnership in which we collaborated to design and implement paraprofessionals’ SE licensure program.

In this general review, we describe a district-university partnership collaboration that resolved barriers experienced by paraprofessionals working toward licensure in special education (Essential #4, Reflection and Innovation). The specialized design and partnership solutions were grounded in SE preparation research literature.

25 (28 entered the program and 25 completed) paraprofessionals from one large urban and several regional districts completed special education licensure through LEAP. Slightly more than half of LEAP participants were Black or Hispanic (see Table 1), contributing to the diversification of SE workforce. University-district partnership was successful in designing and delivering a program that allowed participants: a) to remain employed, b) attend evening classes in their geographic region or online, c) complete all field experiences in sponsoring districts (Essential #2) and d) receive concierge advising from a “completion coach.” We describe solutions to barriers experienced by paraprofessionals and advocate for district-university collaboration to address chronic teacher shortages.

Limitations include lack of data on success of program completers during their first year of teaching as they began this work in Fall 2023. Further, because the participating district was large and urban, generalization of program details for small and rural districts is difficult.

Practical tips for developing grow-your-own special education licensure programs are providing. Detailed descriptions of barriers candidates experienced and ways the district-university partners resolved these issues are included. Programs like the one described has the potential to positively impact teacher pipeline issues.

The program described provided highly-trained teachers to fill chronic vacancies in special education in three participating districts/agencies. Because students receiving special education services are at risk for school failure and are disproportionately impacted by teacher turnover, addressing this area through grow-your-own licensure programs represents a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. Further, upskilling diverse paraprofessionals to licensed teacher roles represent an economic boost, which they might not otherwise have achieved.

Available research literature signals alarm over persistent teacher shortages in hard-to-staff districts and lack of diversity in the teacher workforce, but few published accounts describe successful programs. Partner collaboration fostered a re-imagining of course formatting and delivery to accommodate adult learners, avoiding problems often reported with alternative programs.

This paper aims to examine the factors associated with a household business entrepreneur’s decisions to formalise the firm at a multidimensions level.

The data set is a panel of 2,336 SMEs and household businesses from Vietnamese SME surveys during the 2005–2015 period.

This study elucidates how firm-level resources, entrepreneur characteristics and costs of doing business influence an entrepreneur’s decision to enter, the speed and the degree of formality.

This study provides insight into the origins of an entrepreneur’s decisions to the multidimensions of business formality through the lenses of the resource-based view, entrepreneurship and institution theories.

Our present quest for sustainable cities requires a holistic understanding of city construction and people’s well-being. Feminist scholars have shown that urban space does not attend to women’s needs. This study focuses on women’s everyday life in Athens, Greece in late-1980s. This is a unique spatio-temporal point since it is located at the edge of several prevailing dichotomies – geopolitical, cultural and temporal. It examines how women use, experience and reconstitute public spaces in the city and aims to understand both how public spaces – with their material and social dimensions – restrict women’s lives, and how women reappropriate and (re)constitute urban space. It is based on in-depth interviews with women from three areas of Greater Athens, with different social class profiles. It focuses on neighborhood as a physical space, women’s social networks in the neighborhood and women’s mobility. The main findings include that the nexus of gender and class is inscribed in public spaces so that these restrict women and their right to the city; the organization of public spaces ignores women’s reproductive responsibilities; women participate in the public sphere, but gender hierarchies have not been eliminated; while local social networks are fundamental for women in their efforts to reappropriate public spaces. It concludes that the transition to sustainable – enjoyable – inclusive cities will benefit from incorporating women’s experiences and needs; adopting a socio-spatial perspective that focuses on everyday life; a focus on social reproduction too; and an explicit aim to eliminate gender hierarchies (rather than inclusion).

As part of a larger grant-funded project, a professional development (PD) series was conducted within the framework of a school–university partnership to improve teachers’ capacity to meaningfully include fathers and father figures in the school environment, with a particular focus on fathers of children with disabilities. The authors sought to understand the extent to which a school-wide PD framed through the lens of a father of a child with a disability might inform practice with sustainable implementation. Due to the pandemic, the original format of the PD was redesigned for virtual delivery.

A three-phase data collection and analysis approach included a pre-PD survey, a post-PD survey and a one-year follow-up survey. All surveys included both quantitative and qualitative self-report data components.

Results suggest school personnel found the virtual PD valuable, gleaning several useful strategies for reflecting on their own practices, working to improve communication with families of children with disabilities and more meaningfully including fathers and father figures in future school-related activities and programing.

First, the sample size of the present study was small, and participation was variable across PD sessions. In addition, participants self-selected into the series, and therefore, they may be more likely to value father-figure involvement with or without participation in the PD series. The small sample size may minimize the generalizability of these results across other replicable settings and participants. Second, the results of the pre-PD survey could be positively skewed since the university partner’s initial delivery of PD related to this topic began in 2018. In the pre-PD survey, the majority of respondents indicated, as an example, that they believed father involvement was correlated with higher academic achievement. It is not clear if respondents held these beliefs independently at the inception of the partnership or if they perhaps learned of these connections during an earlier PD offered by the authors.

The current study offers a small glimpse into the world of a school–university partnership and its ability to actualize meaningful reflection on family engagement practices. Results also indicate a greater awareness of significant male figures/fathers and their needs. Content delivered during each PD supports capacity building in terms of teachers’ ability to see fathers and father figures as meaningful contributors within the context of the school environment. Participants mentioned that the PD taught them ways to recognize and remediate some of the insidious communication barriers that exist.

Participants stated that they grew in their understanding of intentional connections with significant male figures, noting a concerted effort to ensure communication of information pertaining to school events, conferences and, in some cases, individualized educational programs (IEPs). Staff members also felt as though the pandemic fostered greater connections with fathers who were working at home and who were simultaneously helping their children access online learning platforms. However, it is noteworthy that the latter benefit was likely a positive side effect of mandatory home-based learning as opposed to a direct result of the present study. Socially, the authors all find ourselves embarking on a bit of social uncertainty, where perhaps it is no longer appropriate or significant to mention one's gender. Nonetheless, the research highlights the unique contributions that fathers and father figures can make to children's positive trajectory, and the authors espouse that the current study suggests that virtual PD sessions can help train school personnel to recognize and foster such relationships.

The past few decades have ushered in an awareness of significant male involvement and its importance in the development of young children. Despite this surge of interest, the research on father/significant male involvement in the school context remains limited. Additionally, the implementation of virtual PD and its potential positive impacts remain largely unexplored, especially when the intersection with father engagement practices is considered. As such, the authors espouse that the present study reflects a unique combination of content and pedagogy.

Limited research investigates the travel behavior of the retired adult population before retirement and how it changes after retirement. Currently, most of the travel research on the retired population explores their current travel patterns in retirement. Increased research on travel activity before retirement would allow managers in the tourism industry to better adapt and anticipate the changing needs and demographics of seniors, notably, the various ways this growing population manages travel and specific barriers or concerns they face. The authors examined the changes to the travel patterns – defined as travel frequency, mode of transportation, and geographic location/s (domestic or international) – of those retired traveling before and after retirement. Since retirement is a time of major life change, the authors analyzed how this event impacts travel behavior. This research identified barriers these Baby Boomers and those who are retired experience while traveling, including health, social activities, and financial status, which may impact their travel, the degree to which their travel behavior is affected, and specific environmental and personal factors impacting their travel patterns. This chapter will explore the barriers and motivations to travel for the retired population. Results show that before retirement seniors had less time to travel, obligations at home, and were not interested in as many destinations. After retirement, health barriers negatively impacted an individual’s travel frequency and they were also more concerned about safety while traveling and accessibility to the destinations. After retirement, financial barriers impacted an individual’s domestic travel frequency, with those having lower incomes traveling less. Accessibility to the destination facility and transportation options were major barriers to traveling internationally. Before and after retirement, there was a decrease of 10 percent in international travel.