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The purpose of this paper is to present findings from two studies exploring the Health of the Nation Outcome Scale’s (HoNOS) utility within a new payment by results (PbR) system for mental health services in England.

In the first study principal axis factoring extraction was used to explore a sample of 23,641 HoNOS ratings. In a second study confirmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate four subscale structures on a new sample of 34,716 HoNOS ratings.

No HoNOS factor structure evaluated in this study demonstrated adequate fit statistics across several clinical presentations. A new four-factor model was the only structure to achieve fit statistics across all clinical populations, but can only be championed on a “best fit” basis as opposed to “good fit” at the present time.

Data used in the current studies relate to six NHS mental health service providers. Replication using a national sample is recommended. Exploration of different HoNOS factor structures for different mental health clusters within the PbR system in England is also recommended. However, it is also possible that removing redundant or adding new items may result in a more stable HoNOS generic factor structure.

This is the first HoNOS evaluation as a generic outcome measure for use within a PbR system and provides important insights into its mental health utility and limitations. The findings have significant implications for those developing the national PbR quality and outcomes framework for England’s mental health services. However, there are also implications for all nations in which HoNOS is used to report mental health outcomes.

Examines the relationships between five components of students′ quality of learning experience (resources, content, learning flexibility, student‐faculty contact, and involvement) and four criteria of college outcomes (students′ satisfaction with their college experience, perceived performance in college, commitment to their college and students′ grades). The major findings of this study indicate that students′ involvement and learning flexibility are the dominant predictors of all four students′ college outcomes, whereas resources and content are the weakest predictors. In addition, quality of learning experience indicators are effective predictors of students′ satisfaction with their college experience (R⊃2 = 0.27) and grades (R⊃2 = 0.20). Discusses the implications of these findings.

This paper aims to systematically review the current literature on compassion in mental health from a historical, service user and carer (SUAC)/academic researcher perspective with respect to the current paradigm/biomedical model.

Searches were conducted in CIANHL Complete, Academic Search Complete, British Education Index, ERIC, MEDLINE, PsycArticles, Scorpus, Proquest Central using a simplified PRISM approach.

In the UK, the SUAC-movement facilitated the adoption of more compassionate mental health in statutory services. Across the world, compassion-based approaches may be viewed as beneficial, especially to those experiencing a biomedical model “treatment”. Health-care workers, suffering burnout and fatigue during neoliberal economics, benefit from compassion training, both in their practice and personally. Randomised control trials (RCTs) demonstrate compassion-type interventions are effective, given sufficient intervention timing, duration and design methodology. Psychology creates outcome measures of adequacies and deficiencies in compassion, demonstrating their importance statistically, with reservations. The effective protection of mental health by self-compassion in both SUACs and health care professionals is evident. It is clear from qualitative research that SUACs prefer compassionate mental health. It also makes a large difference to mental health in general populations. Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are given, including a necessity to fund RCTs comparing compassionate mental health interventions with the biomedical model. Unless statutory mental health services adopt this emerging evidence base, medics and their SUACs will continue to rely on pharmaceuticals.

This is the first integrated literature review of compassion in mental health from a historical, SUAC/academic researcher viewpoint using all research methodologies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the business education curricula in South Africa in relation to social entrepreneurship and to ascertain pre-service teachers’ perspectives of the reasons for social entrepreneurship not being included in these curricula as observed in classroom teaching practices.

Through interpretivist inquiry, third-year pre-service teachers’ (n=92) comments on online group blogs were analysed to clarify a range of meanings and understandings of their responses.

Social entrepreneurship as a concept and as an ideal as well as certain fundamental concept is not adequately integrated in the business education curricula in secondary schools in South Africa. Furthermore, the schools where the pre-service teachers conducted their teaching practice were failing to integrate activities associated with social entrepreneurship in their business education curricula.

The study was limited to a single tertiary institution. Similar studies in both developing and developed contexts in schools could be initiated as a means of teaching social entrepreneurship for social justice as a subject efficaciously.

The study recommends that social entrepreneurship should be implemented earlier in the secondary education system as a means of enhancing the social entrepreneurial capacities of school learners.

This is the first study examining the secondary education curricula in a developing economy, such as South Africa, in relation to the absence of the emerging concept of social entrepreneurship.

Becoming a mother is a significant transition in adult development. For women who wanted to have children but found themselves unable to do so, life without the fulfilment of motherhood can affect meaning-making in everyday life. Although increasing numbers of studies concerning childlessness have been carried out, much of this research has tended to focus on infertility and issues around fertility treatments. Little is known, however, about the psychological impact childlessness can have on women in midlife and how they experience the absence of children. The aim of this chapter is to offer readers an overview of psychological understanding in current research trends by reviewing papers that focus on women in midlife who are involuntarily childless. Findings from the 40 most relevant papers will be discussed under one of four key features: (1) psychological distress: medical consequences of infertility, (2) childlessness: life-span perspectives, (3) involuntary childlessness: psychosocial perspectives and (4) coping: ways of building resilience. The findings point to the dominance of quantitative approaches in researching infertility, while confirming that little has been carried out that looks at lived experience of involuntary childlessness. I hope the findings shown here will point to the necessity of psychological research applying qualitative experiential approaches that can facilitate a deeper understanding of women facing this challenge.

This article aims to examine the criterion‐related validity of two sets of commonly used measures of organizational justice.

Regression‐based dominance analysis is used on self‐report data provided by 214 working college students.

The three‐dimension measure of organizational justice by Moorman was compared to the four‐dimension measure of Colquitt in the prediction of Colquitt's own outcomes. Results suggest that Moorman's measures may dominate Colquitt's measures on some outcomes.

Practitioners are urged to give renewed consideration to Moorman's scales when predicting outcomes, as it appears that this three‐factor measure of organizational justice may outperform the four‐factor measure in some instances.

Organizations may find Moorman's parsimonious representation of justice more useful than Colquitt's version for explaining the nuances of perceptual differences regarding fairness and justice in the workplace.

This study is, to the authors' knowledge, the first to compare Colquitt's measures of justice with Moorman's measures on a subscale‐by‐subscale basis.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

This paper aims to measure outcome quality in banks in India and to make a comparative assessment of its influence on customer service quality perceptions. Though both functional quality (i.e. how service is delivered) and outcome quality (i.e. what is delivered) are important aspects of service quality, it is the functional quality which has primarily been the focus of past studies.

The data used in the study are based on a survey of bank customers located in Delhi and National Capital Region. Using the exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, validity and dimensionality of the multi-item functional and outcome quality scales used in the study were assessed. A structural model of relationships of functional and outcome quality with overall service quality was tested through use of the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach.

The study finds outcome quality as being a significant and major determinant of customer service quality perceptions in banks. Inclusion of outcome quality in the analysis is, moreover, found to be helpful in capturing more exhaustively the variations present in customer overall service quality perceptions.

Both the functional and outcome quality in the study have been measured through scales adapted from past studies. But the same have not been found able to fully capture variations in customer service quality perceptions. More psychometrically sound scales to measure functional and outcome quality are needed. Studies in both the developing and developed countries and additional service sectors are called for to increase the generalizability of the study findings. Furthermore, nomological validity of the outcome quality scale needs to be investigated by relating it with other anent constructs, such as customer satisfaction and their behavioral intentions.

Instead of simply remaining preoccupied with functional quality, i.e. process or how part of service delivery, bank management also needs to gauze customer outcome quality perceptions (i.e. what the customers think they are eventually getting out of their transactions with the service provider) and exercise due care to see that customers in fact are getting the core banking tasks performed for which they approach the banks in the first instance.

Present study is first of its kind in investigating role of outcome quality in banking services sector in the context of an emerging market like India. Use of SEM for analyzing both the measurement and structural models constitutes another noteworthy feature of the study.

Government guidelines state that health services must measure outcomes for patients. However, there is only limited evidence on outcome measures for children with learning disabilities. This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the suitability and effectiveness of four outcome measures (Health of the Nation Outcome Scales for Children and Adolescents ‐ HoNOSCA, Children's Global Assessment Scale ‐ C‐GAS, Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire ‐ SDQ, and Commission for Health Improvement Experience of Service questionnaire ‐ CHI) for a community team working with children with learning disabilities. The paper highlights the difficulties in capturing the impact of service intervention in a multidisciplinary community setting. The implications of the research for clinical practice are discussed.

Information and communications technology (ICT) offers enormous opportunities for individuals, businesses and society. The application of ICT is equally important to economic and non-economic activities. Researchers have increasingly focused on the adoption and use of ICT by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as the economic development of a country is largely dependent on them. Following the success of ICT utilisation in SMEs in developed countries, many developing countries are looking to utilise the potential of the technology to develop SMEs. Past studies have shown that the contribution of ICT to the performance of SMEs is not clear and certain. Thus, it is crucial to determine the effectiveness of ICT in generating firm performance since this has implications for SMEs’ expenditure on the technology. This research examines the diffusion of ICT among SMEs with respect to the typical stages from innovation adoption to post-adoption, by analysing the actual usage of ICT and value creation. The mediating effects of integration and utilisation on SME performance are also studied. Grounded in the innovation diffusion literature, institutional theory and resource-based theory, this study has developed a comprehensive integrated research model focused on the research objectives. Following a positivist research paradigm, this study employs a mixed-method research approach. A preliminary conceptual framework is developed through an extensive literature review and is refined by results from an in-depth field study. During the field study, a total of 11 SME owners or decision-makers were interviewed. The recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed using NVivo 10 to refine the model to develop the research hypotheses. The final research model is composed of 30 first-order and five higher-order constructs which involve both reflective and formative measures. Partial least squares-based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is employed to test the theoretical model with a cross-sectional data set of 282 SMEs in Bangladesh. Survey data were collected using a structured questionnaire issued to SMEs selected by applying a stratified random sampling technique. The structural equation modelling utilises a two-step procedure of data analysis. Prior to estimating the structural model, the measurement model is examined for construct validity of the study variables (i.e. convergent and discriminant validity).

The estimates show cognitive evaluation as an important antecedent for expectation which is shaped primarily by the entrepreneurs’ beliefs (perception) and also influenced by the owners’ innovativeness and culture. Culture further influences expectation. The study finds that facilitating condition, environmental pressure and country readiness are important antecedents of expectation and ICT use. The results also reveal that integration and the degree of ICT utilisation significantly affect SMEs’ performance. Surprisingly, the findings do not reveal any significant impact of ICT usage on performance which apparently suggests the possibility of the ICT productivity paradox. However, the analysis finally proves the non-existence of the paradox by demonstrating the mediating role of ICT integration and degree of utilisation explain the influence of information technology (IT) usage on firm performance which is consistent with the resource-based theory. The results suggest that the use of ICT can enhance SMEs’ performance if the technology is integrated and properly utilised. SME owners or managers, interested stakeholders and policy makers may follow the study’s outcomes and focus on ICT integration and degree of utilisation with a view to attaining superior organisational performance.

This study urges concerned business enterprises and government to look at the environmental and cultural factors with a view to achieving ICT usage success in terms of enhanced firm performance. In particular, improving organisational practices and procedures by eliminating the traditional power distance inside organisations and implementing necessary rules and regulations are important actions for managing environmental and cultural uncertainties. The application of a Bengali user interface may help to ensure the productivity of ICT use by SMEs in Bangladesh. Establishing a favourable national technology infrastructure and legal environment may contribute positively to improving the overall situation. This study also suggests some changes and modifications in the country’s existing policies and strategies. The government and policy makers should undertake mass promotional programs to disseminate information about the various uses of computers and their contribution in developing better organisational performance. Organising specialised training programs for SME capacity building may succeed in attaining the motivation for SMEs to use ICT. Ensuring easy access to the technology by providing loans, grants and subsidies is important. Various stakeholders, partners and related organisations should come forward to support government policies and priorities in order to ensure the productive use of ICT among SMEs which finally will help to foster Bangladesh’s economic development.