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This study aims to identify comfort food (CF) consumption and its associated factors during the pandemic period. The study also involves an online survey conducted five months after the quarantine started in Brazil.

Data on lifestyle, eating habits and anthropometric data were collected before and during the pandemic, and the differences in these habits were analyzed. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were performed to identify predictors of CF consumption by gender.

A total of 1,363 individuals were included in the sample, with a median age of 31 years old, of whom 80.3% were women. Since individuals were free to respond about the food consumed without predetermined categories, it was possible to carry out a faithful assessment of the occurrence of this behavior. At the same time, allowing the subjectivity and symbolism inherent to the concept of CF to be embraced. CF consumption was present for 54%, with “sweets” being the most mentioned group by both genders. The factors associated with CF consumption in women during the pandemic were increased snacking, increased bread, candies and alcoholic beverage intake, increased time spent at work, worsened sleep quality, reduced meals, perceived stress (PS), emotional eating (EE), age and increased frequency of meat intake. In men, the predictors for CF consumption were remote full-time work/study, PS, EE and early waking time. For both genders, CF consumption during the pandemic period was associated with PS and EE.

This study provides an important overview of the possible contributions of the pandemic on behaviors and food choices related to the consumption of CF in Brazilians. This information is valuable to support further studies to investigate and treat the impacts of the pandemic on lifestyle, eating habits and behavior, mental health and other factors in the postpandemic period.

This study aims to examine core professional competencies required by organizational learning (OL) field, using the main knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) theoretical framework for job candidates in Israel.

An analysis was conducted on 100 job postings from two online platforms using content analysis techniques. The job offers were evaluated according to criteria established by prior research conducted in the USA.

The findings indicate that job announcements appear for three main professions in the field of learning in organizations in Israel: learning designer, learning developer and instructional designer. Most of the offers are for full-time jobs, without requiring a relevant academic degree or previous experience. In comparison to the US employment market, in Israel the demand for OL professionals necessitates communication abilities in English, macro development skills, knowing how to manage professional training and mastery of learning through innovative technology such as augmented reality/virtual reality. The findings also indicated which competencies are most recently required in the OL branch in Israel and the significant differences in KSA necessary for OL professionals in each of the three identified professions.

The study highlighted critical elements of the OL professional field and has implications for OL professionals seeking employment and human resources (HR) recruiters seeking them. Job seekers need to know the current job market requirements in the OL field, and HR recruiters need to know what is happening in the current job market. This can be done by following updated job offers in the OL field and responding quickly to changes. The findings also have implications for the educational/academic aspect of the OL teachers in various settings and inform them to refine the content of their syllabus and course content in accordance with the current requirements of the job market in the field of OL.

The study is based on the KSA theoretical framework and analysis of the OL US job market according to Wang et al.’s (2021) work. This study presents the Israel OL job market and discuss the authors’ critical view on Wang et al.’s work.

The present study investigates the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) and governance quality on carbon emissions in the Economics Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

To achieve the objective of this research, panel data for dependent and explanatory variables over the period 2005–2016, collected in the World Development Indicators (WDI) database and World Governance Indicators (WGI), are analyzed using the generalized method of moments (GMM). Also, the panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) method is applied to the four segments of the overall sample to analyze the stability of the results.

The findings of this study are: (1) FDI inflows have a negative effect on carbon emissions in ECOWAS and (2) The interaction between FDI inflows and governance quality have a negative effect on carbon emissions. These results show the decreasing of environmental damage by increasing institutional quality. However, the estimation results on the country subsamples show similar and non-similar aspects.

This study suggests that policymakers in the ECOWAS countries should strengthen their environmental policies while encouraging FDI flows to be environmentally friendly.

The subject has rarely been explored in West Africa, with gaps such as the lack of use of institutional variables. This study contributes to the literature by drawing on previous work to examine the role of good governance on FDI and the CO2 emission relationship in the ECOWAS, which have received little attention. However, this research differs from previous work by subdividing the overall sample into four groups to test the stability of the results.

Entrepreneurship can help tackle economic problems, such as unemployment. It is often promoted through education programs. There is a limited comprehensive and rigorous understanding of how entrepreneurship education programs and their ubiquitous distance delivery affect young people's entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intention, particularly in non-formal settings. The purpose of this study is to address this gap.

Underpinned by the Social Cognitive Theory, this paper investigates the effects of one entrepreneurship education program in a study with 145 young people from five countries aged 18 to 25 years, 62 Intervention and 83 Control participants. The program's impact on the participants' entrepreneurial intention and self-efficacy (across six sub-dimensions) was assessed in a one-off two-week quasi-experiment. Ex-ante and ex-post self-reported data were collected about the participants.

One-way analyses of covariance were performed to assess separately for changes in the Intervention participants' answers, relative to the Control group. The results of this study suggest the program significantly affected all measures.

These findings contribute to the discussions on the education programs’ effectiveness in promoting entrepreneurship. As a result, they may contribute to entrepreneurship education overcoming geographical and socio-economic hurdles (cost, time and entry barriers) to advance the development of industry, economy and community worldwide.

Successful digital transformation involves all areas which bring new impacts and challenges to the leadership of the enterprise. From the perspective of organizational identification, the authors construct a theoretical model of digital leadership–digital strategic consensus–digital transformation and explore the different moderated mediation effects of diversity types.

This paper obtains data from 351 Chinese science and technology enterprises and uses regression analysis and bootstrap analysis to test the research hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that digital leadership has a positive impact on digital transformation. Digital strategic consensus partially mediates the linkage between digital leadership and digital transformation. Disparity diversity and variety diversity positively moderate the mediating role of digital strategic consensus between digital leadership and digital transformation, respectively; and separation diversity negatively moderates the mediating role of digital strategic consensus between digital leadership and digital transformation.

The research innovatively measures digital leadership and digital transformation. It expands the application of leadership, strategic consensus, diversity and other related theories in a digital context and provides a decision-making basis for enterprises' digital transformation.

The current study aims to empirically analyze the influence of different information sources, together with the persuasiveness of recommender systems (RSs) on the consumer’s purchase intention (PI). It also expands the research on RSs from the point of view of consumer behavior and psychology, considering perceived usefulness and relevance. In addition, it analyzes how different types of personalized recommendations, along with non-personalized ones, influence PI.

The proposed model has been validated using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), based on the data collected from 597 online shoppers.

This study proves that both information search and RSs influence PI, being complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Recommender systems’ findings indicate that the PI is primarily influenced by the perceived relevance of RSs, the information provided by manufacturers and reviews. Moreover, only the influence of the perceived usefulness of personalized recommendations strongly affects PI. Conversely, non-personalized recommendations do not affect PI.

Developers should focus on increasing the perceived usefulness and relevance of RSs. Thus, they could adopt the hybridization of RSs with the aggregation of both personal shopping behavior and social network contacts. It should integrate information signals from multiple sources to include sentiment extracted from reviews or links to the manufacturer’s page. Furthermore, the recommendation of discounted products must be only for products preferred by customers, because only these influence the PI.

This research provides a structural model that examines together, for the first time, the influence on the PI of the main RSs and sources of information.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of automating Google Scholar searching to harvest citation data of monographs for collection analysis.

This study discusses the creation and refinement of a Scraper application programming interface query structure created to match library collection inventories to their Google Scholar listings to retrieve citation counts.

This paper indicates that Google Scholar is a feasible and usable tool for retrieving monograph citation data.

This study shows that Google Scholar citation data can be harvested for monographs in an automated fashion to serve as a source of bibliographic data, something not typically done outside of individual academics and writers tracking their personal academic impact factors.

This study examines whether international tourism demand in the Visegrád countries is influenced by countries' risk rating on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, as non-economic factors relating to ESG risks have been ignored by previous researches on determinants of international tourism demand.

The study investigates panel data for the Visegrád countries comprising the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia over the period 1995–2019. Recently developed techniques of augmented mean group (AMG) and common correlated effects mean group (CCEMG) estimators are employed so as to take care of cross-sectional dependence, nonstationary residuals and possible heterogeneous slope coefficients.

The regression estimates suggest that besides economic factors, the perception of international tourists regarding ESG risk is another important determinant of international tourism demand in the Visegrád countries. The study also established that income levels in the tourists' originating countries are the most critical determinant of international tourism demand to the Visegrád countries.

The research outcomes of the study include the need for the Visegrád countries to direct policies towards further mitigating their ESG risks in order to improve future international tourism demand in the area. They also need to ensure exchange rate stability to prevent volatility and sudden spikes in the relative price of tourism in their countries.

The purpose of this study was to determine the factors associated with functionality, a clinical criterion that could predict frailty in the elderly people in a rural context.

This project is a cross-sectional descriptive analysis of 342 adults of age >60 years who are residents of Putumayo province in Colombia. Information regarding demographic characteristics, medical history, health perception and current illness was collected. The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) protocol was used to perform cognitive evaluation; the Yesavage Geriatric Depression Scale was used to establish depressive symptoms; and the Hamilton Rating Scale was used to assess anxiety level. Questionnaire was used to evaluate performance on instrumental activities of daily living that lead to functional independence [daily life questionnaire (DLQ)]. The medical outcomes study scale was used to assess social parameters.

A moderate and negative correlation was found between the DLQ score and age (r = −0.49; 95% CI: −0.57 to −0.47), whereas a positive correlation was found with education (r = 0.17; 95% CI: 0.07–0.27). Older adults with economic independence achieved a higher score in functional performance than those with economic dependence (standardized mean difference = 0.55; 95% CI: 0.33–0.77). This study observed a moderate correlation a moderate correlation between the MMSE cognitive performance (r = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.48−0.63) and the depressive symptomatology of Yesavage Scale (r = −0.36, 95% CI: −0.44 to −0.26). Finally, the structural model determined that age (r = −0.37), economic dependence (r = −0.383) and cognitive state (r = 0.309) determine the functional component.

This study provides empirical support about older adults living in rural contexts, around the functionality variable from a multidimensional approach, highlighting the sociodemographic and cognitive variables. Consequently, the policy of social support in older adults must be oriented toward the development of a range of divergent intervention strategies.

The study deals with the assessment of functionality in the elderly people from an interdisciplinary approach in the rural setting which presents a greater risk of physical and socioeconomic vulnerability. Therefore, the community, the health professionals and the government entities should help implement active aging programs for this population.

Design-thinking (DT) in education has attracted significant interest from practitioners and academics, as it proffers new-age thinking to transform learning processes. This paper synthesises extant literature and identifies the current intellectual frontiers.

First, a systematic-literature-review was undertaken employing a robust process of selecting papers (from 1986 to 2022) by reading titles, abstracts and keywords based on a required criterion, backward–forward chaining and strict quality evaluations. Next, a bibliometric analysis was undertaken using VOSviewer. Finally, text analysis using RStudio was done to trace the implications of past work and future directions.

At first, we identify and explain 12 clusters through bibliometric coupling that include “interdisciplinary-area”, “futuristic-learning”, “design-process” and “design-education”, amongst others. We explain each of these clusters later in the text. Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM), management education, design and change, teacher training, entrepreneurship education and technology, digital learning, gifted education and course development) Secondly, through co-word-analysis, we identify and explain four additional clusters that include “business education and pedagogy”, “content and learning environment”, “participants and outcome” and finally, “thinking-processes”. Based on this finding, we believe that the future holds a very positive presence sentiment for design thinking and education (DT&E) in changing the 21st century learning.

For investigating many contemporary challenges related to DT&E, like virtual reality experiential learning, sustainability education, organisational learning and management training, etc. have been outlined.

Academics may come up with new or improved courses for the implementation of DT in educational settings and policymakers may inculcate design labs in the curricula to fortify academic excellence. Managers who would employ DT in their training, development and policy design, amongst others, could end up gaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

This study conducted a comprehensive review of the field, which to our limited knowledge, no prior studies have been done so far. Besides, the study also outlines interesting research questions for future research.