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The purpose of this article is to explain why Sweet et al.'s assertions are not well founded and raise unsubstantiated doubt over the use of the Family star Plus and the Outcomes Star suite of tools as outcomes measures.

Evidence is presented of flaws in the analysis, reporting and conclusions of an article published in this journal (Sweet et al., 2020).

Sweet et al. failed to mention a body of Outcomes Star validation work, including over 20 online reports and a manuscript they had seen of a now published article supporting the reliability and validity of the Family Star Plus (Good and MacKeith, 2020). There are significant issues with their methodology, presentation of results and conclusions including: reliance on statistical significance with a small sample size; use of statistics not intended for ordinal data and; and inappropriate conclusions from convergence with measures conceptually different to the Family Star Plus.

Evidence is presented that the Family Star Plus is a useful and valid outcome measure and that Sweet et al.’s conclusions can be attributed to issues with their methodology and interpretation.

This paper aims to assess the reliability, validity and use of the Family Star Plus, one of several Outcomes Stars increasingly used as part of outcomes-based accountability approaches in the delivery of family support services. The Family Star Plus measures progress towards effective parenting but a lack of evidence exists on its psychometric properties and suitability for use as an outcomes tool.

Based on data from 1,255 families receiving a pilot support service, Cronbach’s alpha was used to assess the internal reliability of the 10-item scale, while principal component analysis (PCA) examined the number of constructs in the tool. Using matched data from evaluation of 80 families, correlations between the Family Star Plus and psychometrically validated tools were used to assess concurrent validity. Findings from a process evaluation explore practical issues around use of the tool.

Cronbach’s alpha indicated sufficient internal reliability of the Family Star Plus; however, the PCA raised questions concerning the internal validity the Star. Correlations between the Star and validated tools were not strong enough to support concurrent validity of the Star. Process evaluation findings highlight inconsistencies in Family Star Plus data capture, which may explain these differences.

Further work is required before the Family Star Plus can be considered for use as an outcome measure.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first peer-reviewed analysis of the psychometric qualities of the Family Star Plus.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a pilot to test an approach to measuring inter-rater reliability of the Outcomes Star suite of tools. The intention, in publishing this account, is to show transparency in on-going development of the tool, and to invite further co-operative development.

In total, 24 workers, trained to use the first edition Family Star, scored a tested case study. Scoring was analysed using two metrics on the ten-point scale and the underlying five-point Journey of Change. The case study approach and metrics were evaluated for validity and accessibility.

This initial evaluation suggests this edition of the Family Star has good inter-rater reliability for the five-point Journey of Change, reaching the accepted threshold of 0.8 for the inter-rater reliability coefficient when three outlying workers are excluded. The reliability for the full ten point scale was moderate.

The sample size of 24 raters is small, though sufficient for an initial test of the approach, which will now be applied to larger samples, using other versions of the Outcomes Star.

The findings indicate that it is important that service providers test worker understanding of the scales to ensure consistency of use. The second edition of the Family Star incorporates more precise definitions of the ten-point scales to help improve the reliability.

The case study method and metrics provide an accessible measure of reliability, both for Star development and to enable managers to assess the reliability of an organisation's client data for internal and external purposes.

Administrators in higher-education settings routinely create planning documents that help steer the organization in mission-centric ways. In the area of sustainability planning, strategic plans, sustainability plans and climate action plans are the most common methods used. The purpose of this study is to evaluate if specific forms of planning predict sustainability outcomes.

This question was evaluated via an empirical archival study of the AASHE STARS database in relation to planning, administration and governance credits and criteria to determine if specific forms of planning were predictive of sustainability implementation outcomes in the categories of Education and Research, Operations, Diversity and Affordability, Human Resources, Investment, Public Engagement and Innovation.

Findings support the notion that climate action plans were most predictive of achieving sustainability outcomes, and strategic plans were best able to predict educational outcomes.

These findings have important implications for the design and execution of sustainability planning processes in higher-education institutions.

The academic literature contains relatively few empirical studies that demonstrate the capacity of planning on the realization of sustainability outcomes.

This paper aims to describe the origin, development and increasing application of the Recovery Star within the UK.

The mental health Recovery Star is an holistic and personalised outcomes measurement and recovery‐focused key working tool and it was designed primarily for people of working age. The author describes its origin, development, and increasing application within the UK.

The paper finds that the Recovery Star has been instrumental in promoting social inclusion for many service users, their carers and families.

The paper discusses the Recovery Star as an innovative tool developed by Triangle Consulting and the Mental Health Providers Forum, one which has rapidly established itself as the recovery tool of choice for many service users and providers and fits in well with the personalisation agenda.

Machine learning algorithms are useful to effectively analyse, and therefore automatically classify online reviews. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a novel text-mining framework and its potential for use in the classification of unstructured hotel reviews.

Well-known data mining methods (i.e. boosted decision trees (BDT), classification and regression trees (C&RT) and random forests (RF)) in conjunction with incorporating five-fold cross-validation are used to predict the star rating of the hotel reviews. To achieve this goal, extracted features are used to create a composite variable (CV) to deploy into machine learning algorithms as the main feature (variable) during the learning process.

BDT outperformed the other alternatives in the exact accuracy rate (EAR) and multi-class accuracy rate (MCAR) by reaching the accuracy rates of 0.66 and 0.899, respectively. Moreover, phrases such as “clean”, “friendly”, “nice”, “perfect” and “love” are shown to be associated with four and five stars, whereas, phrases such as “horrible”, “never”, “terrible” and “worst” are shown to be associated with one and two-star hotels, as it would be the intuitive expectation.

To the best of the knowledge, there is no study in the existent literature, which synthesizes the knowledge obtained from individual features and uses them to create a single composite variable that is powerful enough to predict the star rates of the user-generated reviews. This study believes that the proposed method also provides policymakers with a unique window in the thoughts and opinions of individual users, which may be used to augment the current decision-making process.

People with energy poverty are denied the modern energy services such as cooking, lighting, heating, cooling and communication. These needs are all crucial to maintaining an acceptable level of living standards. This paper aims to examine the effects of energy poverty on health and education.

This systematic review was conducted using the 2009 Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. The ScienceDirect, Scopus and Google Scholar databases were used to search the studies conducted between 2012 and 2022. Studies included in this review were searched with some combinations of keywords and saved in Mendeley Desktop for review and referencing. Of 1,745 articles retrieved after removing the duplicates from the databases, 22 met the inclusion criteria.

Out of the total 22 studies reviewed, six were conducted in Asia, six in Europe, four in Africa, three in developing countries and one each in North America, Australia and at global level. Results indicated that impacts of energy poverty on health and education were negative. Efforts should be made to improve the economic conditions of the population in order to allow them access to energy services to achieve higher levels of living.

As this systematic review excludes non-peer-reviewed literature, case studies, reports and theses, and only includes studies published between 2012 and 2022 in English language only, consequently, it may not provide an exhaustive overview of the literature on topic.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic review to investigate the relationship between energy poverty, health and education conducted here. The search methodologies involve systematic searches of databases and other manual searches. Considering the wide inclusion criteria, this review is useful as a general overview of the issues and identifies particular gaps in the existing evidence.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the attempts by one youth homelessness service to implement the conceptual ideas of the psychologically informed environment (PIE) into a practical and beneficial service for very challenging young people who have been homeless, are leaving care or have left custody.

The approach of the paper is descriptive, outlining the thinking behind a PIE with young people and the operationalising of this understanding in the day-to-day practice of the service.

Although homelessness and housing support staff are not therapists, the nature of the work entails a need for understanding and sensitivity, and the activities of the service are designed to create positive opportunities and relationships. Reflective practice, supervision and evaluation are then essential tools in developing a “learning organisation”, where the collective dynamics at an organisational level support the psychological work of the PIE.

The implications for homelessness work that can be drawn from the outcome of this project is to better understand how the PIE linked to the concept of a learning organisation can provide a truly robust framework for providing a service that can evolve harmoniously, tying in disparate funding streams to offer very challenging young people an outstanding service that addresses their homelessness and its underlying causes.

The practical implications shown are the psychological skills that can be developed in housing workers; the limits of those skills and how they are complemented by partnership work with other voluntary sector organisations and mainstream health providers; how the ideas of the learning organisation can naturally underpin the work of the PIE.

The combination of the concept of the learning organisation, reflective practice and the PIE provides a highly original and truly robust framework for providing housing workers with the psychological tools to make a transformative difference in the lives of especially vulnerable young homeless people.

This paper seeks to describe the development process for the Outcomes Stars as a suite of tools which are designed to simultaneously measure and support change when working with vulnerable people as service users. It describes the original process of development of the first Star, in homelessness services in the UK, and subsequent roll out to other client groups and in other countries. The paper indicates the theoretical and philosophical under‐pinning of an approach which aims to embody both research and values‐based practice in empowerment and respect for the individual.

As a case study of development by the development team, the paper is based on first‐hand knowledge but builds upon extensive consultations with practitioners and users and relates these to the needs and strengths of service users, the contemporary policy framework, and wider research in the field.

The Outcomes Star draws on the core principles of Action Research and Participatory Action Research and extends them beyond research into assessment and outcome measurement. As yet there has been no formal research on the usefulness of the Star approach; but, there is a rapid take up of this approach within the UK and further afield. The paper argues that the approach has proved popular, because the Outcomes Star is rooted in a philosophy that is more in tune with that of people delivering services and more closely reflects the reality of those receiving services, compared to traditional measurement techniques.

The paper aims to stimulate further thought and effective practice in measuring outcomes for vulnerable people, and on the most useful means to engage and support people in the co‐production of their own futures.

Although the development and take‐up of the Outcomes Star approach has been rapid in practice, this is the first paper in which these more theoretical and philosophical roots have been outlined and explored in such depth. It will be of use to service providers, to deepen their awareness, and to commissioners, policy makers and regulatory bodies wishing to promote practical approaches to quality assurance of evidence‐based and evidence‐generating practice. It will also be of interest to moral philosophers and others wishing to understand the translation of values into social practice.

The purpose of this paper is to follow a comparative framework to investigate the effects of outcome quality on loyalty through the mediating role of perceived value in four-star hotels and five-star hotels.

Following a review of the literature, some hypotheses were formulated to examine the effects of outcome quality on attitudinal loyalty and behavioral intention through the mediating role of perceived value. The data guiding the comparative analysis were collected from two groups of visitors staying either in four-start or five-star hotels. The sample included 356 international tourists who stayed overnight in four- or five-star hotels in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Analyzing the data obtained helped to construct three models. In the first model, the effects of outcome quality on attitudinal loyalty and behavioral intention through the mediating role of perceived value in both group of customers was analyzed. In the second model, the effects of outcome quality on behavioral intention through the mediating role of perceived value were compared across the two groups. In the third model, all dimensions of attitudinal loyalty and behavioral intention were combined into one single variable called composite loyalty.

In the first model, the (in)direct effect of outcome quality on both of the dimensions of loyalty (attitudinal loyalty and behavioral intention) was confirmed through perceived value as the mediating variable. The results of processing the second model showed that the impact of outcome quality on behavioral intention was greater in the four-star hotels clients, whereas the effect of perceived value on behavioral intention was greater in the five-star hotels visitors. The third model revealed that the (in)direct effect of outcome quality on composite loyalty through perceived value was greater in the four-star hotels clients than that in the five-star hotels clients.