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The purpose of this study was to get a baseline understanding of the state of reference services in urban public libraries in the United States.

The researchers surveyed all members of the Urban Libraries Council, a network of public library systems in urban centers across the country. The survey asked about their reference services, including how reference is offered, volume and types of questions and staff responsibilities. Participants were also asked how reference has changed in the past 5–10 years and what changes they anticipate in the future.

This study found that the vast majority of urban public libraries still maintain a physical reference desk, but most also offer reference services in other formats as well. Most libraries have seen numbers of reference questions decline. Reference staff members are engaged in instruction, programming and community outreach as well. Looking ahead, some libraries expect reference questions to continue to decline and demand for virtual services to increase.

Directors and reference staff of public libraries, especially those in urban and suburban settings, will find these results useful for benchmarking against their own experiences and for planning for future changes.

While discussions of changes in reference service and volumes of reference questions are plentiful, as are predictions of how these declines will impact reference services, there is little current research on the actual state of those services. This study fills a gap in the literature by providing a baseline overview of the reference services in urban public libraries.

This study aims to critically examine the effects of COVID-19 social discourses and policy decisions specifically on older adult volunteers in the UK, comparing the responses and their effects in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, providing perspectives on effects of policy changes designed to reduce risk of infection as a result of COVID-19, specifically on volunteer involvement of and for older adults, and understand, from the perspectives of volunteer managers, how COVID-19 restrictions had impacted older people’s volunteering and situating this within statutory public health policies.

The study uses a critical discourse approach to explore, compare and contrast accounts of volunteering of and for older people in policy, and then compare the discourses within policy documents with the discourses in personal accounts of volunteering in health and social care settings in the four nations of the UK. This paper is co-produced in collaboration with co-authors who have direct experience with volunteer involvement responses and their impact on older people.

The prevailing overall policy approach during the pandemic was that risk of morbidity and mortality to older people was too high to permit them to participate in volunteering activities. Disenfranchising of older people, as exemplified in volunteer involvement, was remarkably uniform across the four nations of the UK. However, the authors find that despite, rather than because of policy changes, older volunteers, as part of, or with the help of, volunteer involving organisations, are taking time to think and to reconsider their involvement and are renewing their volunteer involvement with associated health benefits.

Working with participants as co-authors helps to ensure the credibility of results in that there was agreement in the themes identified and the conclusions. A limitation of this study lies in the sampling method, as a convenience sample was used and there is only representation from one organisation in each of the four nations.

The paper combines existing knowledge about volunteer involvement of and for older adults.

Research has documented how white teachers often fall short of their anti-racist intentions. However, much of this research is done with preservice teachers or teachers across disciplines. The authors investigate stories in which white English teachers who teach substantial proportions of black students and who self-reported anti-racist goals nevertheless fell short of those goals. The purpose of the study is to understand the tensions between racial liberalism and racial literacy in their pedagogy.

The authors snowball sampled 12 veteran white high school English teachers (3–27 years’ experience) who taught in schools with substantial proportions of black students. The authors used a two-stage interview process to narrow the sample to 7 teachers who confirmed their anti-racist intentions and who wrote narratives of moments when they tried to be anti-racist, but the lesson failed in some way. The authors used a three-stage narrative analysis to analyze how racial liberalism and racial literacy were reflected in the narratives.

The veteran English teachers, despite their anti-racist intentions, told narratives that reflected racial liberalism, portraying racism as an individual and interpersonal phenomenon. Some narratives showed teachers who had taken steps toward racial literacy, but no narratives showed a fully developed sense of racial literacy, portraying the layers of institutional and structural racism in English education.

The sample suggests that veteran white English teachers are subject to similar limited racial literacies as novice teachers. While the authors found glimmers of racial literacy, they still note the work necessary to equip veteran English teachers with the racial literacies necessary for anti-racist instruction. The authors propose directions for teacher education, systemic support and professional development.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

This chapter locates our book in social science debates and critiques challenging ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning researching approaches emanating from the global north. This is an important contextualising move, given that these debates have surfaced crucial understandings about the dangers of unquestioned assumptions underpinning researching approaches in intercultural and cross-cultural contexts. The chapter outlines how practice architectures, the key theoretical lens employed in this book, have attempted to counter these exclusions. It focusses on the theory’s emergence from the relational (political and material) work of the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network. This historicising move is part of our shared authorial commitment to rendering visible the taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning researching approaches, including those, such as practice architectures theory, that have a shared commitment to critical educational praxis. The final section of the chapter considers the possibilities and limitations of practice architectures theory as a means of challenging taken-for-granted ontological and epistemological assumptions of research and researching practices.

This pilot study aims to examine the prevalence of test anxiety and its interplay with attitudes, confidence, efficacy, academic performance and socio-demographic factors within the domain of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses.

The authors employed a quantitative, cross-sectional design with 549 sixth-grade students from public lower secondary schools in Prishtina, Kosovo, using the Student Attitudes Toward STEM Survey (S-STEM) for middle/high schools and the test anxiety questionnaire.

Over 70% of Kosovo's sixth-grade students reported moderate to severe test anxiety. The age of students was found to be inversely related to academic performance in STEM. The father's employment was associated with favorable STEM attitudes, confidence, efficacy and academic performance. Having a personal study environment was connected with favorable STEM attitudes, confidence and efficacy in STEM, whereas access to technology was associated with positive academic performance. Test anxiety, academic performance and personal study space predicted students' attitudes, confidence and efficacy in STEM and 21st-century learning.

Educational institutions should prioritize student well-being. By addressing test anxiety, these institutions can create supportive learning environments that improve attitudes, confidence and efficacy in STEM fields. These efforts are crucial for STEM career development and student success in the 21st-century workforce.

The current study findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the factors influencing STEM student engagement and performance, highlighting the importance of addressing test anxiety for positive learning outcomes while emphasizing the need to consider socio-economic and contextual factors in education.

Today, appearance is an integral aspect of a politician's image and personality and therefore his or her brand (Budesheim & DePaola, 1994; Sanghvi & Hodges, 2015; Smith & French, 2009). While appearance is critical to political marketing, most of the research focusing on appearance in politics is experimental in nature (Lenz & Lawson, 2011; Olivola & Todorov, 2010; Todorov et al., 2005). This study investigates the importance of appearance for marketing politicians through a qualitative interpretivist framework that offers implications for theory. Moreover, this chapter offers a specific focus on the importance of appearance for female politicians.

Research shows women face greater scrutiny on their appearance (Carlin & Winfrey, 2009; Sanghvi, 2018). This chapter examines myriad of issues women in politics face based on their appearance. It also examines how women have successfully managed the issue of appearance at local, state and national levels. Thus, this study delivers a multifaceted view of the topic and facilitates the understanding of how appearance management enters into the political marketing process.

As young individuals transition from educational settings to embark on their career paths, their expectations for their future careers become of paramount importance. Ng et al. (2010) examined the expectations of young people in post-secondary education in 2007; those colloquially referred to as “Millennials” or “GenY”. The present study replicates Ng et al.'s (2010) study among a sample of post-secondary students in 2019 (referred to as Generation Z or GenZ) and compares the expectations of young adults in GenY and GenZ.

This study employs a time-lag comparison of GenY and GenZ young career entrants based on data collected in 2007 (n = 23,413) and 2019 (n = 16,146).

Today's youth seem to have realistic expectations for their first jobs and the analyses suggest that young people continue to seek positive, healthy work environments which make room for work–life balance. Further, young people today are prioritizing job security and are not necessarily mobile due to preference, restlessness or disloyalty, but rather leave employers that are not meeting their current needs or expectations.

Understanding the career expectations of young people allows educators, employers and policymakers to provide vocational guidance that aligns those expectations with the realities of the labor market and the contemporary career context.

While GenY was characterized as optimistic with great expectations, GenZ can be described as cautious and pragmatic. The results suggest a shift away from opportunity, towards security, stability, an employer that reflects one's values and a job that is satisfying in the present.

This study aims to investigate the mediation effects of employee voice and employee well-being on the relationship between relational leadership and organizational citizenship behavior.

This study used a Web-based survey method to collect data from 301 respondents in the four public hospitals of the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis. This study used PLS-SEM (WarpPLS) to test the study’s hypotheses.

The findings show that relational leadership has a positive impact on organizational citizenship behavior, and that this link is mediated in part by both employee voice and employee well-being.

This study demonstrates the importance of leaders, paying close attention to employees’ well-being and opinions when attempting to drive organizational citizenship behavior in the health sector.

Based on the review of the extant literature on the impact of leadership on employee behavior and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is likely that this study will be the first to show how relational leadership, employee voice, employee well-being and organizational citizenship behavior are related in the health sector, thereby advancing the thrusts of the social exchange and relational leadership theories.