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The uptake of reprocessed construction materials (RCMs) derived from demolition waste (DW) is limited, which questions the long-term sustainability of DW reverse logistics (RL). To address this gap, the current study focused on identifying informational and structural interventions to promote the uptake of RCMs among Australian construction professionals (CPs).

Following a qualitative research approach with thirty-one semi-structured interviews, the study explored potential interventions that can drive broader RCM usage. The study's strength lies in the in-depth qualitative insights gathered through extensive interviews with CPs experienced in using RCMs.

Sixteen informational and structural interventions to promote the uptake of RCMs were identified and mapped against the industry levels at which they should be implemented. RCM suppliers should focus on improving material quality, supply and marketing while minimising material costs. Governments should encourage using RCMs through incentivisation, supportive legislation and approval processes. The significance of awareness building and research was also recognised, which requires the collective efforts of suppliers, governmental and non-governmental bodies and educational institutes.

Despite the talk around sustainable consumption, the actual walk towards this is limited from a construction perspective, as seen through the low uptake of RCMs. This study attempts to bridge this mismatch by outlining informational and structural interventions that would drive CPs to walk the talk and use RCMs for construction applications. While most studies on DW RL have focused on improving waste recovery processes, this study takes a less-trodden path and explores the potential for developing markets for RCMs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the explicit teaching of information text schema with vocabulary instruction to primary-aged students in Hong Kong international education.

Data were collected through three quasi-experimental studies with different age groups and participants. Each study divided participants into two randomly assigned groups, either informational texts (IT) or vocabulary building (VB). Impact was evaluated with gain scores on a standardized reading comprehension test and researcher-designed cloze tests of fiction and nonfiction passages.

The explicit teaching of IT can benefit student reading comprehension from an early age, particularly to first language (L1) English students and possibly second language (L2) English learners. School reading programmes should include opportunities for students to experience IT (nonfiction) and fiction materials, and build their vocabulary through incidental learning and explicit teaching. For IT, they should be exposed to: layout – e.g., headings, sub-headings, glossary, and index; and content – photographs and specific/technical vocabulary. For fiction-based texts and VB, the following themes should be covered by younger aged students: antonyms, synonyms, and affixes.

Several limitations apply to this study which will need to be addressed in future studies. These include: the random sampling of students from the overall student population was not an option, given the necessity of voluntary participation and avoiding disruption to school routines. This study used meta-analysis to aggregate results across multiple comparisons largely because of the extremely small samples available. The data show large standard errors as a consequence of small numbers of participants. Hence, the current results, notwithstanding the power of meta-analysis, need to be validated with much larger samples in future studies.

This paper suggests that greater comprehension and cloze performance among L1 students was found due to the teaching of IT compared to vocabulary training, with the reverse result for L2 English learners.

Existing experimental and quasi-experimental results have demonstrated that both anticorruption initiatives that provide information and/or authority to the recipients of government programs – so-called “bottom-up” interventions – and initiatives that rely on government agencies for enforcement – “top-down” interventions – can be effective in some settings. Yet, in other instances, both forms of intervention have been found to be ineffective in combating corruption. These contrasting results strongly suggest that the effectiveness of both “top-down” and “bottom-up” anticorruption interventions is conditional on other factors. Unfortunately, the existing literature says little regarding the conditions conducive to the success of either forms of intervention. Assessing the conditional effects of anticorruption treatments poses substantial challenges for researchers – particularly for those employing experimental or quasi-experimental approaches. This chapter (1) discusses factors that may condition the effectiveness of both top-down and bottom-up interventions; (2) illustrates the difficulties in assessing these conditional relationships, with particular reference to experimental and quasi-experimental settings; and (3) suggests approaches that might mitigate these problems.

Systems to support literature review (LR) and manuscript preparation tend to focus on only one or two of the tasks involved. The purpose of this paper is to describe an intervention framework that redesigns a particular set of tasks, allowing for interconnectivity between the tasks and providing appropriate user interface display features for each task in a prototype system.

A user evaluation study was conducted on the prototype system. The system supports the three tasks: building a reading list (RL) of research papers, finding similar papers based on a set of papers and shortlisting papers from the final RL for inclusion in manuscript based on article type. A total of 119 researchers who had experience in authoring research papers, participated in the evaluation study. They had to select one of the provided 43 topics and execute the tasks offered by the system. Three questionnaires were provided for evaluating the tasks and system. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on the collected evaluation data.

Task redesign aspects had a positive impact in user evaluation for the second task of finding similar papers while improvement was found to be required for the first and third tasks. The tasks interconnectivity features seed basket and RL were helpful for the participants in conveniently searching for papers within the system. Two of the four proposed informational display features, namely, information cue labels and shared co-relations were the most preferred features of the system. Student user group found the task recommendations and the overall system to be more useful and effective than the staff group.

This study validates the importance of interconnected task design and novel informational display features in accentuating task-based recommendations for LR and manuscript preparatory tasks. The potential for improvement in recommendations was shown through the task redesign exercise where new requirements for the tasks were identified. The resultant prototype system helps in bridging the gap between novices and experts in terms of LR skills.

This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on low-carbon consumption of dairy products through informational interventions. The empirical findings seek to enlighten developing countries' efforts in coping with climate change and potential dietary transitions.

A randomized controlled trial was designed to examine the effects of purpose-differentiated information interventions on individual dairy consumption. The experiment recruited and randomly assigned 1,002 college students into four groups to receive (or not) environmental or/and health information interventions.

The empirical analysis finds that health and combined information interventions have a positive impact on dairy consumption, while environmental information interventions' effect on dairy consumption is insignificant. In the context of the pandemic, health information interventions positively affected participants' perceptions and preferences for dairy products by delivering knowledge about their role in boosting immunity. However, environmental information interventions failed to do the same things as their insignificant effects on both perception and preference.

Macro-external shocks, such as public health events, may offset the impact of universal information interventions promoting pro-environmental behaviors. For a smooth dietary transition to achieve long-term environmental sustainability, diverse stakeholders must be included in more individualized interventions to guide daily consumption, especially in developing countries with large populations.

This chapter takes up the discourse on marginalisation and ‘othering’ surrounding information and communication among the African diaspora in Norway during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. Following the Norwegian Health Directorate (FHI)’s (2020, 2021) concerns about the statistically higher number of infections among immigrant groups, the chapter unpacks the dynamics surrounding this group’s information access and use during lockdown. The chapter explores ‘public institution’ informational initiatives targeting immigrants at local levels and experiences of individual immigrants outside the public institution. Theories on media representation, otherness and trans-national communication were harnessed to analyse data generated qualitatively. While individual experiences were fragmented and diverse, ‘otherness’ and disadvantage on the basis of socio-cultural, economic and political marginality emerged with nuances depending on stratified contexts such as age, educational, nationality, religion. Public institutional efforts were experienced as necessary and valuable but insufficient in fully combating fear, uncertainty and confusion among the immigrants. These, mainly top-down interpretations of national and local directives and statistics, were thus supplemented with alternative and contra sources of information to feed fragmented immigrant informational needs.

This research aims to investigate effective public library environmental education interventions in order to inform the development of a framework for public libraries.

A qualitative research method was developed incorporating surveys and follow-up interviews with librarians working in USA public libraries, who were known to have been involved in environmental education initiatives.

The research determined which environmental education interventions were most likely to lead to action and behaviour change in public library users. The resulting discussion has allowed for the creation of a framework which establishes factors useful for successful implementation of environmental education programmes and activities. These elements include partnership, institutional commitment, inclusion and outreach and practical activities linked to a larger vision.

The research participants were limited to those libraries in the USA which were all affiliated with the American Library Association (ALA) Resilient Communities programmes and had received grants.

The paper concludes with a framework for implementing environmental education programmes in public libraries. Effective interventions are also shared which provide practical ideas and strategies.

Providing structure and considerations for establishing an environmental programme enables libraries to build on experiences of other libraries. As climate change action becomes a more pressing issue, providing these interventions supports action.

The paper discusses the concepts of environmental education and the role which public libraries can play in this arena, concluding that sustainable development should be treated as a new tenet of librarianship and environmental education as a new research field of library and information science.

This paper analyzes the stability and the welfare properties of R&D cooperations in an oligopolistic market with n firms. It is shown that the sizes of stable coalitions vary significantly with the kind and the actual value of spillovers, the institutional arrangement of cooperation between the firms and the underlying stability concept. Moreover, the welfare maximizing coalition is rarely a stable equilibrium outcome, hence there is scope for political intervention. However, the informational requirements on part of the policy makers are high, and they are at risk to adopt inappropriate measures that are detrimental to social welfare.

This study aims to test the efficacy of the awareness of a transformative health service communication intervention targeted to African refugees in Australia, designed to increase their intentions to participate in blood donation and reduce any identified barriers.

Following the intervention launch, a survey was administered to African refugees. The data were analysed with structural equation modelling.

Intervention awareness increases refugees’ blood donation knowledge and intentions. Although it has no direct effect on refugees’ medical mistrust or perceived discrimination, intervention awareness indirectly reduces medical mistrust. The findings, thus, suggest that the intervention was transformative: it directly and indirectly reduced barriers to refugee participation in blood donation services.

Limitations include a relatively small sample size, single-country context and measures that address blood donation intentions versus behaviours.

Addressing health service inequities through intervention awareness, via the mere exposure effect, can facilitate refugees’ health service participation and inclusion.

This study contributes to transformative service research and responds to calls to improve individual and community well-being by testing a transformative intervention targeted towards vulnerable consumers. Not all targeted refugees donated blood, but being encouraged to participate in this health service within the host society can foster their greater inclusion.

Leveraging information technology (IT) to improve the treatment and support of patients is a widely studied topic in healthcare. For chronic diseases, such as diabetes, the use of information technology is even more important since its effect extends from a clinic environment to patients’ daily life. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of one widely adopted information technology, the mobile phone, on diabetes treatment, specifically on the complicated process of patients’ health, emotions and compliance.

We leverage a unique longitudinal dataset on diabetes patients’ health status in rural areas of China to study the problem. We also cross-link the dataset with mobile carrier data to further differentiate mobile phone use to phone calls and network use. To address the endogeneity concerns, we apply PSM and a series of instrument variables.

We identify clear evidence that mobile phone use can significantly improve patients’ emotions and compliance, where the effect is generally larger on patients in worse health conditions. While mobile phone calls clearly benefit diabetes patients, we do notice that mobile phone network use has a negative moderating effect with patients’ health condition on improving compliance.

This study not only enriches our theoretical understanding of the role of mobile phones in diabetes management, it also shows the economic benefit of promoting patients’ use of mobile phones, which should be considered by medical care providers and medical policymakers.