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Psychological elder abuse (PEA) assessment is described with different thresholds. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the prevalence of PEA and the phenomenon’s characterisation varied using two different thresholds.

Participants from the cross-sectional population-based study, Aging and Violence (n=1,123), answered three questions regarding PEA. The less strict measure considered PEA as a positive response to any of the three evaluated behaviours. The stricter measure comprised the occurrence, for more than ten times, of one or more behaviours. A multinomial regression compared cases from the two measures with non-victims.

Results show different prevalence rates and identified perpetrators. The two most prevalent behaviours (ignoring/refusing to speak and verbal aggression) occurred more frequently (>10 times). Prevalence nearly tripled for “threatening” from the stricter measure (>10 times) to the less strict (one to ten times). More similarities, rather than differences, were found between cases of the two measures. The cohabiting variable differentiated the PEA cases from the two measures; victims reporting abuse >10 times were more likely to be living with a spouse or with a spouse and children.

Development of a valid and reliable measure for PEA that includes different ranges is needed.

The study exemplifies how operational definitions can impact empirical evidence and the need for researchers to analyse the effect of the definitional criteria on their outcomes, since dichotomization between victim and non-victim affects the phenomenon characterisation.

The purpose of this paper aims to discuss the outreach strategies of higher education institutions (HEIs) to promote the inclusion of refugees, focusing on two case studies of programs in southern Brazil.

This paper analyzes two outreach programs of Brazilian universities: the Welcome Program for Immigrants (Programa Acolhida ao Imigrante) of the University of South Santa Catarina, a private higher education institution and the Support Center for Immigrants and Refugees (Núcleo de Apoio ao Imigrantes e Refugiados), sponsored by the Federal University of Santa Catarina, a public university. The activities of the two institutions were compared with the targets of the sustainable development goals to discuss the outreach strategies of HEIs aimed at promoting the inclusion of refugees, through descriptive research, with a qualitative approach based on documentary and bibliographic research.

The results show that academic participation in research and outreach programs provides refugees with an education but also represents a social contribution far beyond qualifications and technical training, by mitigating local and global problems. The practice of inclusive education allows a reduction in historically existing inequalities. The findings of this study indicate that the results are much more effective when universities, government and society work together to reduce inequalities.

This study addressed how universities can and should ensure life quality (SDG 3), including an equitable education and fostering lifelong learning opportunities for everybody (SDG 4) and gender equality (SDG 5), to reduce unemployment (SDG 8) and inequalities among people (SDG 10), through outreach projects.

This paper proposes a framework that automatically assesses content coverage and information quality of health websites for end-users.

The study investigates the impact of textual and content-based features in predicting the quality of health-related texts. Content-based features were acquired using an evidence-based practice guideline in diabetes. A set of textual features inspired by professional health literacy guidelines and the features commonly used for assessing information quality in other domains were also used. In this study, 60 websites about type 2 diabetes were methodically selected for inclusion. Two general practitioners used DISCERN to assess each website in terms of its content coverage and quality.

The proposed framework outputs were compared with the experts' evaluation scores. The best accuracy was obtained as 88 and 92% with textual features and content-based features for coverage assessment respectively. When both types of features were used, the proposed framework achieved 90% accuracy. For information quality assessment, the content-based features resulted in a higher accuracy of 92% against 88% obtained using the textual features.

The experiments were conducted for websites about type 2 diabetes. As the whole process is costly and requires extensive expert human labelling, the study was carried out in a single domain. However, the methodology is generalizable to other health domains for which evidence-based practice guidelines are available.

Finding high-quality online health information is becoming increasingly difficult due to the high volume of information generated by non-experts in the area. The search engines fail to rank objective health websites higher within the search results. The proposed framework can aid search engine and information platform developers to implement better retrieval techniques, in turn, facilitating end-users' access to high-quality health information.

Erroneous, biased or partial health information is a serious problem for end-users who need access to objective information on their health problems. Such information may cause patients to stop their treatments provided by professionals. It might also have adverse financial implications by causing unnecessary expenditures on ineffective treatments. The ability to access high-quality health information has a positive effect on the health of both individuals and the whole society.

The paper demonstrates that automatic assessment of health websites is a domain-specific problem, which cannot be addressed with the general information quality assessment methodologies in the literature. Content coverage of health websites has also been studied in the health domain for the first time in the literature.