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Despite the perceived benefits of implementing virtual reality (VR) training in elite sport, arguably the most important element – the perceptions of practitioners – has been largely understudied. Therefore, the present study aims to explore practitioners' perceptions of VR training in elite football and baseball, with a focus on the important factors, obstacles, perceived knowledge and practical use of the technology.

A quantitative approach measuring practitioner perceptions via an online questionnaire was adopted. Football respondents (n = 25) represented practitioners from major football leagues across the world, and baseball respondents (n = 15) represented practitioners from Major League Baseball.

Both football and baseball respondents reported that the most important factor for implementation of VR training was improvement in on-field performance (technical and tactical); whilst cost was viewed as the biggest obstacle. Both football and baseball respondents also noted that the most likely group to receive VR training would be injured and rehabilitating athletes. Mann–Whitney U tests revealed that football respondents perceived coach (p = 0.02) and executive approval (p < 0.001) as significantly greater obstacles than baseball respondents.

This research provides novel and invaluable information for stakeholders within VR regarding what the elite organisations of different sports perceive as the most important factors for implementation, as well as greatest obstacles preventing use. This information should guide future development and marketing of VR training systems in sport.

The purpose of this study was to examine curricular innovation in accounting using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and t-test to measure the effects of transformative sustainability education in accounting on the attitudes of male and female undergraduate accounting students at a public university in the southwestern USA toward the four sustainable development dimensions of environment, economy, society and education.

A quasi-experimental research methodology using data from a convenience sample of 157 accounting students’ responses to an online Qualtrics survey compared the attitudes of male and female undergraduate accounting students who had sustainability education in accounting to those who did not toward the four aspects of environment, economy, society and education for sustainable development using correlation, MANOVA, independent- and paired-samples t-tests.

While there were no significant differences between the male and female accounting students’ attitudes who had sustainability education and those who did not, there were significant differences between some dimensions of sustainable development with medium effect sizes, and correlations between the students’ attitudes were moderate, positive and significant.

This study was relatively small and conducted at one university, but the results indicated that the students consider sustainability education valuable to their future careers, which is important for future curriculum development.

This study showed that transformative sustainability education does not produce gender differences in students’ attitudes toward sustainable development.

The main purpose of this paper is to identify, screen and prioritize customer requirements (CRs) for men’s denim jeans. Moreover, the effect of demographic factors on the primary evaluation criteria has been examined.

The study was initiated by the growing complaints about denim jeans products of a local manufacturing company. First, 24 CRs were identified from the literature and customer complaints. Then, a survey was conducted to rate the identified CRs and solicit more CRs through closed-ended and open-ended questions, respectively. From the survey, 368 usable responses were collected while the participants were shopping in 14 local retail shops. After analyzing the data using factor analysis, univariate and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and content analysis, the resulting 15 criteria were prioritized by experts’ pairwise comparisons employing the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP).

Factor analysis extracted six components (primary criteria) including design cues, pocket design, comfort, size and fit, fashionability, and extrinsic cues from the CRs included in the closed-ended questions. MANOVA showed that age and frequency of purchasing denim jeans significantly affected the primary criteria, while educational level and frequency of wearing denim jeans did not. The weights from the fuzzy AHP revealed that colour fastness, price, durability, fabric weight, workmanship, side pocket design and fit as the most important CRs. Moreover, consumers preferred regular fit, stitched round side pockets, patch back pockets and stretchable denim fabric.

The limitations of the study are discussed in the body of the paper in Section 7.

The paper presents exploratory findings on denim jeans evaluation criteria in a developing country’s context. Moreover, the application of fuzzy AHP for prioritizing denim jeans’ CRs is unique.

Recently, digital competence has become one of the most important work competencies of employees. This study investigated students' digital competence in the context of Chinese higher education and examined digital competence's relationship with students' career adaptability.

The participants were 298 Chinese higher education students from both universities and colleges. MANOVA (Multivariate Analysis of Variance) was carried out through SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) 26.0 to examine whether digital competence varied with the students' personal characteristics, i.e. gender, grade level and school type. In addition, the structural equation model was employed with Mplus 8.3 to analyse the relationship between digital competence and career adaptability as well as the mediation role of digital informal learning and academic performance.

The descriptive statistics revealed that students performed best in the safety construct, whilst worst in the digital content creation construct. The result of MANOVA showed that the digital competence of the participants significantly varied with participants' gender, school type and grade level. Furthermore, the structural equation model results demonstrated that higher education students' digital competence was positively associated with the students' career adaptability. And the mediation role of digital informal learning and academic performance was also confirmed.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study focussing on the relationship between digital competence and career adaptability. In particular, both working and learning perspectives were considered to explore this relationship. Besides, the authors also displayed Chinese higher education students' digital competence with consideration of different districts and school types.

This study examines whether different strategy archetypes deploy specific performance metrics to support their strategic goals and priorities. If so, does alignment of strategy and metrics positively impact organisational performance?

The conceptual framework and hypotheses are couched in Contingency Theory. The role of business strategy as a moderating variable is tested using MANOVA, followed by post hoc pairwise comparisons. The results are based on cross-sectional survey data from 372 manufacturing and service organisations in Italy.

The overall contingency effect of business strategy in selecting and deploying performance metrics and their effect on organisational performance is supported. However, the group-wise post hoc analyses show support only for Prospectors but not for Defenders and Analysers.

This research lends further support in favour of the Contingency Theory from a new geographic context (Italy) that there are no universally best performance metrics that drive organisational performance. However, more research is needed to understand why the theory only holds for certain strategic archetypes and not across all archetypes.

Managers can direct resources and effort towards designing and deploying the “right” type of performance metrics suitable for their strategic orientation and thus optimise organisational performance.

This is a rare study that tests the moderating role of business strategy using all four strategic archetypes of the Miles and Snow typology. It deploys both financial and non-financial measures and uses a very large sample of both manufacturing and service organisations from a relatively unexplored region of the world. The study provides additional evidence in favour of the Contingency Theory whilst advocating for more research to refine our understanding of why the contingency perspective is not so important for firms that are not the first-in.

This study scrutinizes the attitudes of postgraduate students specializing in education toward research at one University of Education in Myanmar.

Having collected data from 121 Master in Education (MEd) students in three education departments, the study validated Papanastasiou's (2014) Revised-Attitude toward Research (R-ATR) scale by performing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A one-way MANOVA was used to establish the significance of mean differences between groups and ANOVA was used for the same purpose among groups.

The R-ATR scale is fit with the sample (χ²/df = 1.60), and the students' attitudes toward research are favorable with mean value for research usefulness (5.98), positive research predispositions (5.55) and research anxiety (3.61), despite feeling stressed and anxious. There was a significant difference in the students' attitudes toward research regarding their departments, while no significant difference was found based on their research experience, gender and age.

There should be an effective mechanism in implementing the research course and in online delivery mode, collaboration between the faculties in the process of revision and review of the research courses, effective strategies of improving research instructors' quality and also internationalization to sustain students' positive attitudes toward research and to reduce their stress and anxiety.

This research is empirically novel, and the initiative attempts to first use the R-ATR scale in teacher education in Myanmar.

The purpose of this study was to assess the body characteristics (body size, garment sizes worn, shape and body satisfaction) of Ethiopian young adult female consumers and their effects on garment fit satisfaction and fit preferences of ready-to-wear garments such as T-shirts, blouses/shirts, skirts and jeans trousers.

Through a structured questionnaire, 418 usable responses were collected from young female university students. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) were used to examine differences in garment fit satisfaction with the body characteristics of the respondents. Moreover, a multiple regression analysis was used to determine the effect of body characteristics and fit satisfaction on fit preferences in four of the ready-to-wear garments.

The body shapes of above half of the respondents were either bottom hourglass or spoon. The respondents were somewhat dissatisfied with the fit of the ready-to-wear garments, and above 70 per cent of them faced fit problems on average. BMI showed significant fit satisfaction differences in four of the garments, while garment sizes worn were significant only in skirts. However, no statistically significant difference was obtained with body shape. The effect of body characteristics and fit satisfaction on fit preferences was found significant in T-shirts and jeans trousers. The respondents preferred looser shirts and skirts irrespective of their body characteristics.

The paper is unique in comprehensively examining the relationship between body characteristics and garment fit satisfaction and their effects on fit preferences in selected garments in the context of female consumers in a developing country.

This study explores the motivations for sharing personal information and self-disclosure by mentally ill people in public and private Facebook groups. The purpose of the self-disclosure comparison between public and private groups is to understand how mentally ill people use different kinds of online communication channels in order to advance their goals and needs concerning their illness.

The study was carried out using questionnaires distributed in Facebook groups for people with mental illnesses. A total of 123 full and valid questionnaires were received. Statistical analysis was performed on the data.

Findings revealed that there are no significant differences between public and private groups concerning motivations for self-disclosure and that both types of groups create a safe and supportive place for mentally ill people. However, findings suggest that participants in public groups tend to display higher social involvement than those who participate in private groups.

This is a path breaking study on the entire subject of discourse of people with mental illnesses in private Facebook groups and its importance is derived from this. The study clarified and emphasized the importance of the sense of belonging to a community. Moreover, findings encourage people with mental illnesses to make use of social media channels to meet their social and personal needs.

The goal of this study was to determine the impact of access to credit facilities on financial performance among farmers of cooperative societies. The study also tested the predictive power of financial literacy.

The descriptive survey research design was used for the study while the sample size was 240 farmers of cooperative societies from South-East Nigeria. The farmers were categorised into those with access to credit facilities and those without access to credit facilities. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data for the study. Data were analysed using multiple analyses of variance (MANOVA) and multiple regression analysis.

Farmers with access to credit facilities reported higher financial performance such as return on investment, working capital, net profit, profit margin and sales. However, those without access to credit facilities reported lower mean scores on financial performance. Also, financial literacy, like financial knowledge, attitude and awareness, significantly predicts the impact of access to credit facilities on financial performance. It was also found that the duration of repayment of credit facilities, like medium and long term, contributes more to improving financial performance.

This study has shown that even though access to credit facilities impacts financial performance, financial literacy is an important consideration. Also, the duration of repayment is a crucial factor.

When retail businesses, especially small businesses with greater vulnerability, could not meet consumers in person during the recent pandemic crisis, how did they adapt to the situation? This study examined how small business practitioners (SBPs’) perceptions, trust and adoption intention levels for social media, as well as the relationships among these variables, changed before and during the crisis based on the integration of the contingency theory and the diffusion of innovation theory (DIT).

Online surveys were conducted with USA SBPs before (n = 175) and during (n = 225) the recent pandemic. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM), multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multiple-group SEM analysis.

The results confirmed significant sequential positive relationships between SBPs’ perceived external pressure and perceived benefits of adopting social media, which in turn led to their trust in and then adoption intentions for social media. Further, the comparisons between the pre- and in-pandemic samples revealed that SBPs’ perceptions and adoption intentions all became significantly higher during (vs before) the pandemic, but the structural relationships among these variables weakened during the pandemic.

This study uses a novel approach to integrate the contingency theory with the DIT to propose small businesses' perceptions, trust and adoption intentions for social media during the innovation decision process under rapid contingency changes. Our findings also offer practical implications including recommendations for small businesses’ innovation management as well as training programs.