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This research investigates the influence of corporate–NGO collaborations on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure measured in three different ways (i.e. extent, level and quality) in low-income developing economies. Additionally, it examines the moderating effect of corporate profitability in the relationship between corporate–NGO collaborations and CSR disclosure.

This research uses multivariate regression analysis based on data collected from 201 non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSE).

The findings reveal that corporations with NGO partnerships are more likely to disclose CSR information and provide high-quality information regarding workers, the environment and community-related issues. Further, corporate profitability positively moderates the corporate–NGO collaborations and CSR disclosure relationship.

Research limitations are presented in the conclusion section.

The findings underline the crucial significance of NGOs and their associated normative isomorphism logics for CSR disclosure in low-income countries with weak law enforcement and relatively ineffective state institutions, which were previously believed to lack such institutions.

While some research has suggested that companies in developing countries perceive significant pressure from NGOs to adopt social disclosure, no study has specifically explored how internally driven corporate–NGO collaboration (as opposed to external NGO activist pressures) promotes CSR disclosure specifically in developing economies.

The role of evidence-based psychological knowledge in cases of juvenile offending is essential to make appropriate decisions relating to youth who violate legal or social norms, as it carries implications for treatment, intervention and practice. Psychological expert opinions therefore need to meet high formal and methodological requirements while maintaining ethical standards. The purpose of this study is to investigate psychological expert opinions in cases of juvenile misbehavior reported to regional courts in Poland. Juvenile court proceedings concern cases of demoralization and/or delinquent offenses. Demoralization is a legal concept described in the Act of June 9, 2022 on juvenile support and resocialization. This concept was not defined; it was only described through examples of behaviors indicating demoralization. These include the following: violations of the principles of community life; evading compulsory education or schooling; use of alcohol, narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances, their precursors, substitutes or new psychoactive substances; and prostitution.

To reach these goals, court records of juvenile cases in six district courts (N = 253) were gathered and analyzed. A semistructured questionnaire was used to examine the cases in which psychologists were appointed and to analyze the procedures used by these experts for assessing adolescents and their families.

Findings revealed that family judges appoint psychologists both in cases of “demoralization” (i.e. status offenses) and in cases of juvenile delinquency. The opinions were delivered by psychologists who were mostly members of diagnostic teams. Results indicate that such opinions generally comply with the minimal standards recommended by the Ministry of Justice, yet a few problems were observed with the determination of levels of demoralization.

The limitations of diagnostic tools used by psychologists are discussed, and recommendations for future practice are provided.

This article aims to understand users' information needs in the metaverse communities and to analyze the similarities and differences between their information needs and those of users in Internet communities.

This study conducted semi-structured interviews with users in the metaverse communities to gather raw data. Grounded theory research methods were employed to code and analyze the collected interview data, resulting in the extraction of 40 initial concepts, 15 subcategories and 5 main categories. Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, this paper constructs the hierarchical model of users' information needs in the metaverse communities. It compares the differences between users' information needs in the metaverse and Internet fields.

The user’s information needs in the metaverse communities are divided into two types: deficiency needs and growth needs. Deficiency needs have two levels. The first level is the demand for basic information resources. The second level is the users demand for information assistance. Growth needs have three levels. The first level is the need for information interactions. The second level is the need for community rules. The ownership information in the community rules can provide proof of user status, assets and so on. The third level is the need for users to contribute and share their own created information content.

This article presents the latest research data from in-depth interviews with users in the metaverse communities. It aims to help builders and managers of metaverse communities understand users' information needs and improve the design of virtual communities.

This paper aims to explore the intricate relationship between social capital, faith and prison-leaver resettlement, emphasising how penal voluntary sector organisations (PVSOs) aid prison-leavers in their resettlement and desistance journeys, following incarceration.

Employing a combination of narrative and thematic analysis, data was collected from 20 prison-leavers in England through semi-structured interviews. Purposive and snowball sampling was used to recruit participants from various community-based resettlement settings.

Thematic analysis revealed the emergence of faith in various iterations in facilitating desistance, Transforming Rehabilitation failure, identity transformation of the prison-leaver, the role of social capital in effective resettlement and the importance of PVSOs. In particular, the findings demonstrate the vital role of a “Faith Anchor”, defined in this paper as a trust-based relationship with an individual or spiritual entity, in facilitating desistance. This paper argues the need to recognise and fully integrate social capital building, faith and specialised support from PVSOs, as essential components of successful offender resettlement and desistance journeys.

The study considers the connection between faith, social capital and offender resettlement. Although demonstrating the role of faith in positive change and community engagement, there are limitations. Primarily, by exclusively recruiting participants through PVSOs, it might overlook varied resettlement experiences. Additionally, measuring desistance is complex and is limited by some academic views that it centres around abstinence. Although small-scale saturation was reached; generalisation should be approached with caution. Notably, post-Transforming Rehabilitation, the human cost of resettlement gaps became evident. Future research could benefit from a longitudinal lens, tracing desistance beyond initial PVSO interactions and offering richer, longitudinal insights.

Significance of “faith anchors”: A “faith anchor” aids the desistance process. Integrating faith in resettlement offers emotional support for prison leavers. Value of social capital: It is pivotal for offender resettlement. Positive social networks are key for successful reintegration. Role of PVSOs: They provide vital resettlement support. Enhanced collaboration can optimise assistance for prison leavers. Addressing current system shortcomings: Rectifying the effects of Transforming Rehabilitation ensures holistic support, catering to prison leavers’ needs. Concept of “faith exchange”: Merging faith and support offers tailored resettlement approaches, fostering effective reintegration.

The study underscores the social implications of effective offender resettlement strategies. The integration of “faith anchors” and social capital aids in the personal rehabilitation of prison leavers and also supports community cohesion. By acknowledging faith as indictive to building trust-based relationships, communities can reduce the stigma associated with former offenders, promoting inclusivity and understanding. Additionally, the essential role of PVSOs highlights the value of community-driven initiatives in supporting reintegration. A combined approach that combines faith, social capital and community support can reshape societal perspectives on desistance, encouraging a more inclusive and empathetic approach to offender reintegration.

The insights gained contribute to the evolving discourse on prison-leaver resettlement and desistance and uniquely highlight the potential of a combined approach between social capital, faith and voluntary sector support, in achieving desistance goals. The term “faith exchange” emerges from this study as an original conceptual contribution, accentuating the relationship between faith and support in resettlement and desistance.

The purpose of this conceptual article is to examine the role of villainification and heroification in social studies through critically analyzing the author’s place-based encounters with three civil war narratives.

The article describes the author’s critical reflections on three narratives involving confederate figures and examines theoretical and pedagogical implications.

The article introduces a spectrum of ethical judgments which plots villainification and heroification on opposing ends. The author advocates for more nuanced ethical judgments that contextualize decisions as understandable or defensible based on evidence. The term understandable reflects a concept of being able to explain (i.e. demonstrate understanding) why a curricular figure made certain choices without agreeing with or supporting those choices. The term defensible denotes the existence of evidence that provides a rationale for a choice such that the person making the ethical judgment would feel comfortable making (i.e. defending) the same choice.

The article introduces a theory of nuanced ethical judgments in social studies that maps onto existing literature on heroification, villainification and place-based education. Pedagogical implications for social studies education are also identified.

In times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 global pandemic, journalists who write about biomedical information must have the strategic aim to be clearly and easily understood by everyone. In this study, we assume that journalistic discourse could benefit from language redundancy to improve clarity and simplicity aimed at science popularization. The concept of language redundancy is theoretically discussed with the support of discourse analysis and information theory. The methodology adopted is a corpus-based qualitative approach. Two corpora samples with Brazilian Portuguese (BP) texts on Covid-19 were collected. One with texts from a monthly science digital magazine called Pesquisa FAPESP aimed at students and researchers for scientific information dissemination and the other with popular language texts from a news Portal G1 (Rede Globo) aimed at unspecified and/or non-specialized readers. The materials were filtered with two descriptors: “vaccine” and “test.” Preliminary analysis of examples from these materials revealed two categories of redundancy: paraphrastic and polysemic. Paraphrastic redundancy is based on concomitant language reformulation of words, sentences, text excerpts, or even larger units. Polysemic redundancy does not easily show material evidence, but is based on cognitively predictable semantic association in socio-cultural domains. Both kinds of redundancy contribute, each in their own way, to improving text readability for science popularization in Brazil.

Cybersecurity competitions can effectively develop skills, but engaging a wide learner spectrum is challenging. This study aims to investigate the perceptions of cybersecurity competitions among Reddit users. These users constitute a substantial demographic of young individuals, often participating in communities oriented towards college students or cybersecurity enthusiasts. The authors specifically focus on novice learners who showed an interest in cybersecurity but have not participated in competitions. By understanding their views and concerns, the authors aim to devise strategies to encourage their continuous involvement in cybersecurity learning. The Reddit platform provides unique access to this significant demographic, contributing to enhancing and diversifying the cybersecurity workforce.

The authors propose to mine Reddit posts for information about learners’ attitudes, interests and experiences with cybersecurity competitions. To mine Reddit posts, the authors developed a text mining approach that integrates computational text mining and qualitative content analysis techniques, and the authors discussed the advantages of the integrated approach.

The authors' text mining approach was successful in extracting the major themes from the collected posts. The authors found that motivated learners would want to form a strategic way to facilitate their learning. In addition, hope and fear collide, which exposes the learners’ interests and challenges.

The authors discussed the findings to provide education and training experts with a thorough understanding of novice learners, allowing them to engage them in the cybersecurity industry.

In the COVID-19 era, sign language (SL) translation has gained attention in online learning, which evaluates the physical gestures of each student and bridges the communication gap between dysphonia and hearing people. The purpose of this paper is to devote the alignment between SL sequence and nature language sequence with high translation performance.

SL can be characterized as joint/bone location information in two-dimensional space over time, forming skeleton sequences. To encode joint, bone and their motion information, we propose a multistream hierarchy network (MHN) along with a vocab prediction network (VPN) and a joint network (JN) with the recurrent neural network transducer. The JN is used to concatenate the sequences encoded by the MHN and VPN and learn their sequence alignments.

We verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach and provide experimental results on three large-scale datasets, which show that translation accuracy is 94.96, 54.52, and 92.88 per cent, and the inference time is 18 and 1.7 times faster than listen-attend-spell network (LAS) and visual hierarchy to lexical sequence network (H2SNet) , respectively.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework that can fuse multimodal input (i.e. joint, bone and their motion stream) and align input streams with nature language. Moreover, the provided framework is improved by the different properties of MHN, VPN and JN. Experimental results on the three datasets demonstrate that our approaches outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of translation accuracy and speed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of the literature on the variables associated with self-harm and aggression in women who committed a criminal offence.

Studies were identified through online databases, namely, PsycINFO, PubMed, ERIC and EBSCOhost, as well as manual searches of reference lists of the selected studies. The target population included women who committed a criminal offence and have engaged in self-harm and aggressive behaviors during their incarceration, either in correctional institutions or in forensic psychiatric settings.

Of the 1,178 studies identified, nine met inclusion criteria. The studies were conducted in six different countries and included data from 6360 female participants. Few studies examine self-harm and aggression in women who committed a criminal offence which speaks to the still sparse literature on this topic. This review of the association between self-harm and aggression in women offenders highlights the finding that a small group of women is often involved in both self-harm and aggression. The authors have identified possible psychological factors associated with women engaging in both self-harm and aggression. The findings also reveal a possible connection between types of aggressive behaviors and specific time periods during sentences or stays in forensic psychiatry.

The findings of this scoping review have clinical implications which may be considered by both researchers and the case management teams of women involved in both self-harm and aggression.

Despite the limited number of studies examining self-harm and aggression in women, this scoping review highlights gaps in the literature as well as notable psychological correlates of women who engage in self-harm and aggression.