Search results

Children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder need special attention for their mental and physical health and education. This study aims to investigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on them.

This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on data collected from an online survey. Respondents were the parents or caregivers of autistic children aged 3–18. It measured opinions about the favorable and unfavorable behavioral changes related to their children during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

In total, 131 respondents participated in the study. The mean age of their autistic children was 11.45 ± 4.26 years, of whom 78% were boys. Improved good behaviors during lockdowns included interaction with parents and siblings, eating healthy foods, quality of sleep, eye contact, pointing and asking for something, imitating sounds and phrases, sharing interests, reaction to emotions and empathy with family members, but sleep hours decreased.

Lockdown provided opportunities for examining the behaviors of children with autism taking into account its favorable and unfavorable effects, to improve communicating and behaving with these children.

Hope and death anxiety as the important sources of adjustment can affect the attitude, health status and quality of life in patients undergoing hemodialysis. Hopelessness and death anxiety are considered as the important factors in patients undergoing hemodialysis, because these can avoid non-adherence and increase mortality rate. This study aims to investigate the effect of the cognitive–behavioral intervention on hope and death anxiety in patients undergoing hemodialysis.

In this randomized controlled clinical trial, 84 patients undergoing hemodialysis were included, who were then divided into two groups as the cognitive–behavioral intervention group (n = 42) and the control group (n = 42). The experimental group received eight sessions of individual chair-side cognitive–behavioral intervention. To measure the hope level and death anxiety, Hearth Hope Scale and Templer’s Death Anxiety Scale were used as tools once at the beginning and once at the end of the study.

The mean scores of the hope levels in the intervention group significantly improved compared to the control group. Furthermore, the mean scores of the death anxiety levels significantly decreased in the intervention group compared to the control group.

Cognitive–behavioral interventions are significantly effective on promoting the level of hope and decreasing the level of death anxiety in patients undergoing hemodialysis. Therefore, applying this psychological intervention to design the individual education programs is recommended.

The purpose of this paper is to present a method to find a generally accepted employee engagement scale, particularly in the presence of various alternatives and objectives.

To find the measurement scales, seminal works encapsulating organizational engagement, job engagement and work engagement in Cinhal, PsycINFO and ABI/INFORM database have been reviewed. For finding the optimal choice from available scales, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method was used.

An agreed-upon measurement scale is achievable through the knowledge of alternatives and consequences, as well as consistent preference ordering and a decision rule. However, choice of the most effective scale varies according to the preference of decision makers.

This study proposes MCDM method as an intervention for practitioners who aim to assess the level of employee engagement in their organizations. It also provides a decision-making method to scholars to surmount conflicting objectives in their measurement.

While previous studies have developed manifold measurement scales, there is no study to indicate which scale best measures employee engagement. This paper attempts to define how to choose one scale among the various existing gauges of engagement.

Optimisation of daylight admission through window is crucial for alleviating glare while maintaining useful daylight levels in order to enhance occupants' health, visual comfort and moderating lighting energy consumption. Amongst various solutions, fixed external shade is an affordable solution for housing spaces that need to be sophisticatedly designed, especially during the period of increasing home spaces as working environments. In the humid subtropical region, daylight control plays an important role in indoor comfort, particularly with areas with a high window to wall ratio (WWR). Due to the insufficient amount of such study on non-office spaces in Australia, shading-related standards are not addressed in Australian building codes.

The chosen methodology for the research is a quantitative data collection and analysis through field measurement and simulation simultaneously. The first step is a multi-objective optimisation of shading elements through a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) on parametric modelling via Rhino3D CAD and simulation engines (DIVA and ClimateStudio). In the second phase, the Pareto front solutions are validated by experimental measurements within a room with a single north-facing window (the most probable for the daytime glare in Sydney) for the seven most common local window configurations.

Through the simulation of ten genes, 1,560 values and 2.4 × 1,019 of search space, this study found an optimum shade for each local common window layout, resulted in +22% in (UDI) and −16% in views with discomfort glare on average. Moreover, an all-purpose polygonal shade showed an average of 4.6% increase in UDI and a 5.83% decrease in the percentage of views with discomfort glare.

The findings are subject to the room dimensions, window dimensions and layouts, and orientation of windows for selected residential buildings in Sydney.

The study contributes to the development of highly accurate fixed external shading systems with rectangular and tapered-form external shapes. A real-time measurement by luminance-metre sensors and HQ cameras located at six eye levels is conducted to corroborate simulation results of the visual comfort.

The purpose of this study is to identify and examine findings from empirical research regarding organizations’ talent development (TD) strategies, taking into consideration the countries in which the studies were conducted and the TD-approach organizations adopted, and recognize the positive outcomes of TD implementation, as well as potential issues and challenges.

This systematic literature review used Garrard’s matrix method to organize the review of publications. It identified 31 empirical articles from the total of 551 publications.

The findings indicate that a majority of the studies were conducted in countries other than the USA and that they were all published recently, after 2007. The results show that organizations have mostly applied organizational development interventions at the individual level for developing talented employees, followed by formal training and development. Additionally, managerial issues were identified as the most common issue on the way of implementing TD interventions.

Trying to define TD as a discrete concept from HRD could be considered as both differentiating the current literature review and a limitation.

This article is among the first to identify TD interventions through a systematic literature review and provides a model of TD’s intervention antecedents and outcomes for the follow-up empirical works.

A long history of literature has considered the role of information risk in determining the cost of equity. The question that has remained unanswered is whether information risk plays any systematic role in determining the cost of equity. One of the fundamental decisions that every business needs to make is to assess where to invest its funds and to re-evaluate, at regular intervals, the quality of its existing investments. The cost of capital is the most important yardstick to evaluate such decisions. Greater information is associated with the lower cost of capital via mitigating transaction costs and/or reducing estimation risk and stock returns. This study aims to investigate the impact of information risk on the cost of equity and corporate stock returns.

The research sample consists of 960 firm-year observations for companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange from 2009 to 2018. The research hypotheses were tested using multivariate regression models based on panel data.

The results reveal that information risk has a significant positive impact on the firm’s cost of equity. However, the impact of information risk on stock returns is not statistically significant.

To the best of the knowledge, the current study is almost the first of its kind in the Iranian literature which investigates the subject matter; therefore, the findings of the study not only extend the extant theoretical literature concerning the information risk in developing countries including the emerging capital market of Iran but also help investors, capital market regulators and accounting standard setters to make timely decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible relationship between novice vs experienced EFLs teachers’ Big Five personality traits, ambiguity tolerance and risk taking. To this purpose, 30 teachers of TEFL courses were randomly selected, and three instruments of NEO Five-Factor Inventory, Ambiguity Tolerance Scale and Risk-taking Propensity Measure were employed to measure their Big Five personality traits, their ambiguity tolerance and risk taking, respectively.

The study was a quantitative ex post facto study. The first phase of the study was to investigate the relationship among variables of the study. On the other hand, the second phase of the study examined the impact of experience of teachers on their risk taking and ambiguity tolerance.

The results showed that the more experienced the teachers are, the less risk they take and the more ambiguity tolerant they are. On the other hand, the less experienced the teachers are, the more risk they will take and the less they can tolerate ambiguity. The findings of this research can have useful implications for teacher training programs as well as teaching practices.

This study can add to the circle of knowledge and enhance theoretical assumptions of the field. Moreover, considering the Iranian context, a few studies have focused on the importance of uncovering relationship between five big personality traits and teachers’ personality factors. Therefore, this study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between the Big Five personality traits of teachers and their ambiguity tolerance and risk taking.

This narrative study seeks to explore cultural identity (CI) construction of Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in light of Tong and Cheung's (2011) definition of CI.

Ten language teachers were selected using purposeful sampling. Data were collected through reflective teacher journals and focus group interviews. Murray's (2009) data analysis procedures were utilized to analyze the data, which included coding the transcripts of data, looking for connections between codes and grouping codes into categories, configuring the participants' story from the data, sending the story to the participants for their comments, carrying out a cross-story analysis and noting themes as they emerge from the stories.

The inductive analysis of data led to the emergence of three core themes: cultural engagement, openness to differences in L2 cultural values and social practices and navigation of a hybrid CI. That is, the EFL teachers defined their CIs in terms of their commitment to both native and target-language cultures as well as their preservation of cultural diversity.

Findings revealed that L2 acquisition leads to changes of soft cultural forms such as food, clothes and houses as well as modifications of hard cultural forms such as institutional systems and spiritual values. In fact, the participants of this study spoke of the crucial effects of the English language and its culture with regard to both soft and hard cultural forms such as values and standards that brought so many positive changes into their previous lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to optimize the preventive maintenance based on fault tree (FT)–Bayesian network (BN) reliability for sugarcane harvester machine as a fundamental machine in the sugar industry that must be operated failure-free during a given period of the harvesting process.

To determine machine reliability using the algorithm developed based on mapping FTs into BNs, the common failures of 168 machines were carefully investigated over 12 years (2007–2019). This algorithm was then used to predict the harvester reliability, estimate delays by machine downtimes and their consequences on white sugar production losses that can be reduced by optimizing the preventive maintenance scheduling.

The optimization of preventive maintenance scheduling based on estimated reliability of sugarcane harvester machines using FT–BNs can reduce white sugar production losses, the operation-stopping breakdowns and the downtime costs as a crisis that the sugar industry is facing.

Machine reliability gradually decreased by 31.08% approximately, which resulted in a working time loss of 26% in the 2018–19 harvesting season. In total, the white sugar losses were estimated as 204.17 tons for burnt canes and 114.53 tons for green canes. The losses of the 2018–19 harvesting season have been 11.85 times greater than the first harvesting season. The proposed maintenance interval for critical subsystems including the hydraulic, chopper and base cutter were obtained as 1.815, 1.12 and 1.05 h, respectively.

In this study, a new approach was used to optimize preventive maintenance to reduce delays and their implications upon costs in time, inconvenience and white sugar losses. The FT–BNs algorithm was found a useful tool that was over-fitting of failure occurrence probabilities data for sugarcane harvester machine.

International collaboration is a crucial requirement of entrepreneurship, particularly in developing emerging economies. This collaboration seems so necessary in the food industry as a major contributor to environmental, social and economic problems. This paper aims to identify, analyse the influential network relationship and prioritise the key success factors (KSFs) of international collaboration formation in the entrepreneurial food industry with a case study on Iran's emerging economy.

To identify a list of KSFs, a qualitative method, literature review, is initially used. A quantitative method, fuzzy-Delphi, then is employed to finalise the main KSFs based on the entrepreneurial food industry experts' opinion. To analyse the causal relationship, and prioritise the KSFs, a fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL)-analytic network process (ANP) methodology, i.e. FDANP, is applied. At the first stage, the cause–effect diagram of KSFs is extracted using fuzzy DEMATEL and then, the KSFs weights and priorities are evaluated using a fuzzy ANP.

The results illustrate that the characteristics of effective development workers are the leading dimension of a successful international collaboration that directly affects other dimensions. On the other hand, increased marketing and trading is the most important KSF that is directly related to international entrepreneurial collaboration team capabilities and professionalism. The leading and casual role of team members also plays a vital role in strategic and communication issues affecting the collaboration success, e.g. market research and new product development. Availability of financial resources and the ability of partners in continuous financing is also a crucial and required factor for a successful collaboration.

Using an extensive review of the literature to extract the KSFs of international entrepreneurial collaboration and finalising them using a fuzzy-Delphi method and examining the cause-effect relations between them, as well as prioritising the KSFs are the main contributions of this paper.