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Unlike many other quantitative characteristics used to determine higher education rankings, opinion-based peer assessment scores and the factors that may influence them are not well understood. Using peer scores of US colleges of engineering as reported annually in US News and World Report (USNews) rankings, the purpose of this paper is to provide some insights into peer assessments by statistically identifying factors that influence them.

With highly detailed data, a random parameters linear regression is estimated to statistically identify the factors determining a college of engineering’s average USNews peer assessment score.

The findings show that a wide variety of college- and university-specific attributes influence average peer impressions of a university’s college of engineering including the size of the faculty, the quality of admitted students and the quality of the faculty measured by their citation data and other factors.

The paper demonstrates that average peer assessment scores can be readily and accurately predicted with observable data on the college of engineering and the university as a whole. In addition, the individual parameter estimates from the statistical modeling in this paper provide insights as to how specific college and university attributes can help guide policies to improve an individual college’s average peer assessment scores and its overall ranking.

This study aims to examine the factors shaping the intentions of people to visit a hostile outgroup.

An exploratory, qualitative research approach was followed. Specifically, 77 semi-structured interviews with citizens of the divided island of Cyprus were conducted.

This study identifies several categories of visitors and non-visitors, depicted along a continuum, and concludes that there is a multiplicity of factors in the socio-political environment which influence the travel intentions of people.

This study not only imparts insights into the way travel decision-making evolves in politically unstable situations but also serves as a stepping stone towards understanding the conditions under which reconciliation between hostile nations may be encouraged by travel.