Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which workplace learning forms a building block in national lifelong learning policies by obtaining evidence, first-hand, from mental health practitioners about their perceptions of their individual country's national lifelong learning policy and, in particular, its application to adults with long-term mental illness.

Text analysis: review of relevant literature and European Union policy documents and survey questionnaire.

It is evident that the use of workplace learning as a linchpin in national strategies for lifelong learning in Denmark and France is clear and empirically supported.

Comparative evidence of evaluations of impact and effectiveness of workplace lifelong learning provision in the two countries examined is patchy at best raising further questions about the “value” of investments in both workplace learning and lifelong learning in these countries.

There is a risk that by focusing on jobs and workplace learning, the specific needs and desires of people with mental illness who, in the main, might want to engage in lifelong learning for reasons other than jobs and workplace learning, may end up being disadvantaged as their (non-economic) needs go unmet.

Until now there has been little or no attempt to examine Europe's conception of lifelong learning policy and its application to a multiple disadvantaged group such as mental health service users. This is a major attempt to remedy current dearth of research in the area.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of personal and moral intensity variables on specific processes, namely, ethical recognition, ethical judgment and ethical intention, involved in the ethical decision making (EDM) of accounting professionals.

A structured questionnaire containing four vignettes of ethical dilemmas is used in the paper to obtain data from 329 accounting professionals. The data are analyzed using Pearson correlation matrix, independent sample t-test, one-way analyses of variance and multiple regression estimation techniques.

The findings of the paper suggest that age, economic status, upbringing, moral idealism and relativism, magnitude of consequence and social consensus are significant determinants of the EDM process of accounting professionals.

The paper provides evidence to guide accounting regulatory bodies on ways to strengthen extant measures that ensure strict compliance with ethics codes among accounting professionals in Nigeria.

The paper provides support for Kohlberg’s cognitive reasoning and moral development theory and Rest’s EDM theoretical model, which will aid the development of a structured curriculum for accounting ethics instruction in Nigeria, as hitherto, there is yet to be a provision for a stand-alone ethics course in the undergraduate accounting programs in Nigeria.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of selected sociodemographic variables in the ethical decision-making (EDM) process of professional accountants in Nigeria.

The study obtained data from 329 professional accountants with the aid of a structured questionnaire containing four dilemmatic ethical vignettes. The data were analysed using Kendall correlation, Kruskal–Wallis and Jonckheere–Terpstra tests.

The results revealed that upbringing, especially parental discipline, and education are significant sociodemographic determinants of EDM. Religion and experience played little or no significant role in predicting accountants’ EDM in the face of ethical dilemmas.

The study used a questionnaire to measure its variables, which may bias and somewhat inflate the findings. Hence, caution should be applied regarding its conclusion.

The evidence in this study could stimulate policy change and review to include a separate ethics course in the accounting education curriculum, which could enhance the ethics training of future accountants. This is important for countries like Nigeria, where no provision is made for a discrete ethics course in the curriculum for accounting under-graduate education.

The study draws attention to the fact that ethical conduct among professionals and in society could be enhanced through proper upbringing and formal education.

The study adds some uniqueness in focusing on professional accountants in Nigeria, a developing country with high corruption profile and weak government institutions, and, as such, contributes to the limited research output on accounting ethics in developing countries.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of ethical ideological orientation (moral idealism and moral relativism), work sector and types of professional membership on the ethical decision-making (EDM) process of professional accountants in Nigeria.

The study obtained primary data from 329 professional accountants with the aid of a structured questionnaire containing four scenarios of ethical dilemmas. The data were analysed using descriptive statistical analysis, independent sample t-test, Pearson correlation analysis and multiple regression techniques.

The results revealed both idealistic and relativistic moral orientation among the accountants surveyed with a higher mean score (>4.0) recorded for moral idealism. Moral idealism was found to have a positive influence, while moral relativism a negative influence on the three stages (ethical recognition, ethical judgement and ethical intention) of EDM examined. Professional accountants with idealistic orientation showed a higher disposition towards making ethical decisions in situations involving ethical dilemmas than those tending towards relativistic orientation. The results also revealed that work sector (private or public) and types of professional membership play significant roles in predicting the EDM process of professional accountants in Nigeria.

The study provides empirical evidence that could be used to support educational and legislative efforts in enhancing the moral ideological orientation of professional accountants, which will, in turn, enhance their EDM processes. The findings could be used to enhance ethics instructions and training of current and prospective professional accountants in educational settings, especially in countries such as Nigeria where there is yet to be a discrete ethics course in the curriculum for accounting undergraduate degree programmes. Professional accounting bodies in Nigeria and other developing countries could use the evidence in this study to strengthen the ethics code for professional accountants.

The study is unique in focussing on professional accountants in developing countries using Nigeria to represent developing countries with high corruption profile and weak institutions and governments and, as such, it contributes to the scarce research output on accounting ethics in developing countries.

To help address the problem of imperfections in the performance of cowpea markets in Ghana, the study sought to understand the costs and benefits associated with different market outlets and factors influencing farmers' choice of these outlets.

A two-stage sampling technique was adopted to collect data from 300 cowpea farmers through purposive sampling of communities and simple random selection at the farmer level in Ejura Sekyedumasi municipality of Ghana. Analytical methods including profitability measures such as gross margin, net margin, return on investment and multinomial logistic (MNL) regression model were used to analyze the data.

The results showed that production and marketing of cowpea is profitable with farmers who trade in wholesale markets recording the highest gross margin (Gh₵1245.85 (US$227.76)), net margin (Gh₵1029.37 (US$188.18)) and return on investment (ROI) of 63%. Important nonfarm-related factors including household size, farming experience, membership of farmer-based organization and extension contact were found to significantly influence the choice of marketing outlets in the study area. In addition, market attributes such as produce selling price, volume of cowpea sold and post-harvest value addition were also key determinants of cowpea market outlet choices.

The results of the study are vital to agricultural administrators in devising efficient cowpea market systems for smallholder farmers in Ghana. Likewise, the study provides important information to smallholder farmers in the choice of market outlets that maximizes their returns.

Previous studies on marketing of cowpea in Ghana emphasized on direct retail or consumer marketing to maximize farmers' returns. Meanwhile, there are claims to suggest that the sale of cowpea grains in the country are carried out through varied market outlets which come with differing costs and benefits implications for smallholder farmers. Therefore, the present study comprehensively compared associated costs and benefits in all available cowpea market outlets so as to settle the confusion surrounding most profitable and efficient marketing channel for smallholder farmers toward poverty reduction.

When a large number of project proposals are evaluated to allocate available funds, grouping them based on their similarities is beneficial. Current approaches to group proposals are primarily based on manual matching of similar topics, discipline areas and keywords declared by project applicants. When the number of proposals increases, this task becomes complex and requires excessive time. This paper aims to demonstrate how to effectively use the rich information in the titles and abstracts of Turkish project proposals to group them automatically.

This study proposes a model that effectively groups Turkish project proposals by combining word embedding, clustering and classification techniques. The proposed model uses FastText, BERT and term frequency/inverse document frequency (TF/IDF) word-embedding techniques to extract terms from the titles and abstracts of project proposals in Turkish. The extracted terms were grouped using both the clustering and classification techniques. Natural groups contained within the corpus were discovered using k-means, k-means++, k-medoids and agglomerative clustering algorithms. Additionally, this study employs classification approaches to predict the target class for each document in the corpus. To classify project proposals, various classifiers, including k-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machines (SVM), artificial neural networks (ANN), classification and regression trees (CART) and random forest (RF), are used. Empirical experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by using real data from the Istanbul Development Agency.

The results show that the generated word embeddings can effectively represent proposal texts as vectors, and can be used as inputs for clustering or classification algorithms. Using clustering algorithms, the document corpus is divided into five groups. In addition, the results demonstrate that the proposals can easily be categorized into predefined categories using classification algorithms. SVM-Linear achieved the highest prediction accuracy (89.2%) with the FastText word embedding method. A comparison of manual grouping with automatic classification and clustering results revealed that both classification and clustering techniques have a high success rate.

The proposed model automatically benefits from the rich information in project proposals and significantly reduces numerous time-consuming tasks that managers must perform manually. Thus, it eliminates the drawbacks of the current manual methods and yields significantly more accurate results. In the future, additional experiments should be conducted to validate the proposed method using data from other funding organizations.

This study presents the application of word embedding methods to effectively use the rich information in the titles and abstracts of Turkish project proposals. Existing research studies focus on the automatic grouping of proposals; traditional frequency-based word embedding methods are used for feature extraction methods to represent project proposals. Unlike previous research, this study employs two outperforming neural network-based textual feature extraction techniques to obtain terms representing the proposals: BERT as a contextual word embedding method and FastText as a static word embedding method. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no research conducted on the grouping of project proposals in Turkish.

This study aims to explore and compare the approach and avoidance factors in motivating students to study using three different learning methods: face-to-face learning, online learning and hybrid learning.

This research uses in-depth online interviews to gain insights from students. Purposive sampling was applied to recruit 33 informants from two private universities in Indonesia. The verbatim data were analyzed using a thematic content analysis to identify motivational factors.

This study revealed four motivational factors regarding the approach to face-to-face learning/avoidance of online learning and five motivational factors regarding the approach to online learning/avoidance of face-to-face learning. Most of the motivational factors (i.e. learning effectiveness, social interaction, campus life experiences, physical wellness, flexibility and technological learning) are also found in the approach to hybrid learning.

The existing qualitative research suffers from generalizability, as does this study. Future research can investigate other contexts or use quantitative research to validate the findings.

By identifying the approach and avoidance motivational factors, higher education institutions can enhance the approach (positive) factors and minimize or eliminate the avoidance (negative) factors that motivate their students to study using different learning methods.

This research complements the existing literature using new perspectives, namely, the approach and avoidance factors that motivate students to study through face-to-face learning, online learning and hybrid learning post-COVID-19.