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Many health-care professionals leave clinical practice temporarily or permanently. Interventions designed to facilitate the return of health-care professionals fail to consider returners’ psychosocial needs despite their importance for patient care. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of a psychoeducational intervention in improving personal skills and well-being among UK-based health-care professionals returning to clinical practice.

In total, 20 health-care professionals took part in the one-day intervention and completed measures of demographics, self-efficacy, positive attitudes towards work and perceived job resources before and after the intervention. A baseline comparison group of 18 health-care professionals was also recruited.

Significant associations were detected between return-to-work stage and study group. Following the intervention, participants reported improvements in self-efficacy and, generally, perceived more job resources, whereas positive attitudes towards work decreased. While none of these changes were significant, the intervention was deemed acceptable by participants. This study provides modest but promising evidence for the role of psychoeducation as a tool in supporting the psychosocial needs of returning health-care professionals.

Additional research is needed to clarify the reliability of intervention effects, its effectiveness compared to alternative interventions, and the impact across different subgroups of returning health-care professionals.

Return-to-practice interventions should address the psychosocial needs of health-care professionals in terms of their personal skills and well-being. Psychoeducation can increase self-efficacy and perceptions of job resources among returning health-care professionals.

This study sheds light on a relatively understudied, but fundamental area – the psychosocial challenges of health-care professionals returning to clinical practice – and further justifies the need for tailored interventions.

For many emerging adults, committed romantic relationships are perceived as offering the ideal context for sexual exploration and companionship. However, these relationships are often short-term and breakups between committed partners can be emotionally intense and create a significant amount of distress. While casual sex relationships appear to be an increasingly popular alternative, providing many of the same benefits of committed relationships without the emotional involvement, they are also consistently associated with sexual regret. Previous research indicates that both emotional reactions are reported at higher levels by women, but the extent to which breakup distress and sexual regret differ by relationship type remains unclear. The current study examined differences in breakup distress and sexual regret as a function of sex and type of sexual relationship (committed vs casual) among a sample of 230 undergraduate college students. As expected, women reported more breakup distress and sexual regret as compared to men, and men and women in committed relationships reported more breakup distress than those in casual relationships. Contrary to previous findings, there was no significant difference in sexual regret between committed and casual relationships, and this was consistent for both men and women. In addition, participants reported relatively low levels of both breakup distress and sexual regret overall. The results suggest that, in general, breakups may not pose a severe emotional threat to young adults, who seem to be confident in their sexual decision making regardless of relationship type.

Evidence-informed decision-making is considered best practice when choosing interventions in applied settings across health, social care and education. Developing that evidence base, however, is not straightforward. The pupose of this paper is to describe the process implemented by the Sharland Foundation Developmental Disabilities Applied Behavioural Research and Impact Network (SF-DDARIN) that systematically develops an evidence base for behaviorally based interventions.

In this case study, the progressive research steps undertaken by the SF-DDARIN to develop the evidence base for an online reading intervention, the Headsprout® Early Reading programme (HER®), which uses behavioural principles to promote learning to read, are described.

A series of discrete projects targeting gaps in the evidence base for HER^® led to funding two randomised controlled trials in England, one in education and one in health and social care.

This case study illustrates an original, creative and effective way of collaborating across academic research departments and applied settings to extend the evidence base for a chosen intervention systematically.

While social media data are used increasingly in studies of social movements, social media evolves far more rapidly than academic research and publication. This chapter argues that researchers should adopt historical and archival approaches to social media data. Treating social media data as an “instant archive” – one that is self-curated, is co-constituted, and changes rapidly – we caution researchers to pay attention to the features of this archive and their implications for working with the data therein. Applying insights from recent discussions of archival methods for social science research to the specific features of social media data, we explore how platform features, repressive effects, and user innovations affect the content of the instant archive. We then offer strategies for researchers' methodological approaches, including how best to select units of analysis and platforms, how to collect and interpret archival materials, and how to identify silences in the data.

This study aims at understanding how higher education institutions (HEIs) can contribute to sustainable development, by designing their programmes for bringing about a transformative impact on communities and students, and also to examine what alternative pedagogical approaches could be used for that. In the past decades, HEIs have increasingly created social innovation (SI) programmes, as a way to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These community-oriented and field-based programmes are difficult to ally with conventional classroom education. This study explores how these programmes could integrate the participatory approach and what would be the benefits. It also investigates the effectiveness of the experiential learning approach for teaching sustainability.

A case study method is used to document SI projects initiated by an HEI programme in rural India.

It was found that the participatory approach contributes to empowering communities and also benefits the students in terms of academic, professional and personal growth. Empirical findings show that experiential learning is an efficient method to teach sustainability. Ultimately, both pedagogical approaches are found to be mutually beneficial.

This study fills a gap in the literature, by providing empirical evidence on how HEI can implement innovative educational strategies such as participatory approach and experiential learning in their programmes towards teaching sustainability. A conceptual model for HEI interested in developing similar programmes is also proposed. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first studies focusing on the context of Indian HEI.

This study aims to explore the impact of board size, board gender diversity and federation age on the likelihood of having a female chair in National Sports Federations (NSF).

A quantitative methodology compares 300 sports boards in five countries (Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the UK), using data collected from NSF’s websites.

The board size and federation age have no significant impact on having a female board chair when the countries and the percentage of female directors are included in the model. When the number of women is measured in absolute value rather than in relative terms, the only variable that predicts a woman chair is the country. When the model does not include country differences, the percentage of female directors is key in predicting a chairwoman, and when the number of women is used as a variable instead of the percentage, a board’s smaller size increases the odds of having a chairwoman.

There are some limitations to this study which we believe provide useful directions for future research. Firstly, the authors have not considered the role of gender typing in sports activities which explains the extent that women participate in specific sports (Sobal and Milgrim, 2019) and the related perception of such sports in society. The social representation of sports activities classified as masculine, feminine or gender-neutral can hypothetically influence women’s access to that specific federations’s leadership. The authors included the country factor only partially, as a control variable, as the social representation of sports usually goes beyond national boundaries.

This study has implications for sport policymakers and stakeholders, and for institutions such as the IOC or the European Union that implement equality policies. If the aim is to increase female presence in the highest position of a sports board and to achieve gender equality more generally, other policies need to be implemented alongside gender quotas for the sports boards, namely, those specifically related to the recruitment and selection of the sports board chairs (Mikkonen et al., 2021). For example, given the implications of critical mass and its ability to increase more female’s engagement then the role of existing chairs acting as mentors and taking initiative in this objective may be warranted. Furthermore, attention should be paid to the existing gender portfolio of each board and its subsequent influence on recruiting a female chair, regardless of the organization’s age. Knoppers et al. (2021) concluded that resistance to gender balance by board members is often related to discriminatory discourses against women. The normalization of the discourses of meritocracy, neoliberalism, silence/passivity about the responsibility of structures and an artificial defence of diversity emphasise that equality should not only be determined by women (Knoppers et al., 2021).

When countries are included in the model, the results suggest that the social representation of a female board member is different from that of a female board chair.

The originality of the study is that it shows the factors that constrain women taking up a chair position on NSFs. Theoretically, it contributes to existing literature by demonstrating how a critical mass of females on boards may also extend to the higher and most powerful position of chair.

This study elucidates the interactive relationship of sustainability assurance (SA) quality with corporate environmental sustainability performance (CESP) and firm value and explores the moderating impact of CESP on the SA quality–firm value relationship.

The sample comprises 320 firm-year observations of 40 companies listed on the Cotation Assistée en Continu (CAC 40) from 2010 to 2019. The authors use the simultaneous equations model to capture the CESP and SA quality–firm value relationship and apply the three-stage regression and generalised method of moments approaches to address possible endogeneity.

The results show that CESP, as assessed by International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 14001 certification, has a significant positive effect on firm value, the relevance of which implies that in the case of good environmental performance, society's perception of a firm is much more favourable; consequently, the firm is likely to be rewarded with a premium value in capital markets. In addition, environmental performance has a stronger interaction with SA quality, acting as a moderator variable; thus, greater SA quality signals credibility owing to increased eco-efficiency. The authors interpret their findings within a multi-theoretical framework that draws insights from legitimacy, stakeholders and signalling theoretical perspectives.

This study contributes to the literature by re-examining the relationship between SA quality and firm value. It also provides new evidence of the moderating effect of CESP on the SA quality–firm value nexus. Specifically, this study explores the joint effects of credibility and eco-efficiency on market confidence in sustainability information. The authors use a simultaneous equation model to capture the reciprocal association between SA quality and firm value, whereas prior studies on SA quality and market performance have frequently used single-equation regression. The authors also find that CESP positively moderates the relationship between SA quality and firm value. Including CESP and exploring the moderating impact of eco-efficiency on the SA quality–firm value relationship is a novel approach.

The purpose of this study is to look at the structure of the interactions between the board of directors’ chairman qualities such as chairman independence, tenure, ethnicity, age- and impression management (IM).

The research population consists of non-financial Malaysian companies listed on Bursa Malaysia’s Main Market, using data gathered via annual reports and DataStream. The study relies on the ordinary least square regression to test the direct relationships between the directors’ chairman characteristics and IM. Moreover, robustness and sensitivity tests were used to examine the effectiveness of chairman characteristics with IM. Furthermore, the results rely on the FGLS regression as an additional test. The study found that chairman independence, chairman ethnicity and chairman age have a significant impact on IM.

The results reveal that chairman independence has a negative association with qualitative IM (IMSC1). Moreover, chairman ethnicity has a positively significant relationship with qualitative IM (IMSC1) and quantitative IM (IMSC2). Also, the effectiveness of chairman characteristics has a negative and significant association with IMSC1.

The primary goal of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature and to open up opportunities for more in-depth research on the subject. So far, there has been no research into the impact of the board chairman’s (BC) personality on IM. This study serves as a warning to policymakers, businesses and their stakeholders, as well as researchers, about the importance of BC characteristics, which may impede the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms. The paper provides a framework for investigating these characteristics in the context of IM.