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The purpose of this study is to examine levels of health research evidence in health policies in Malawi.

The study selected a typology of health policies in Malawi from 2002 to 2017. The study adopted the SPIRIT conceptual framework and assessed the levels of research evidence in health policy, systems and services research using the revised SAGE policy assessment tool. Documentary analysis was used to assess levels of health research evidence in health policies in Malawi.

In 29 (96.7 per cent) of the health policies, policy formulators including healthcare directors and managers used generic search engines such as Google or Google Scholar to look for heath research evidence. In 28 (93.3 per cent) of the health policies, they searched for grey literature and other government documents. In only 6 (20 per cent) of the heath policy documents, they used academic literature in a form of journal articles and randomised controlled trials. No systematic reviews or policy briefs were consulted. Overall, in 23 (76.7 per cent) of the health policy documents, health research evidence played a minimal role and had very little influence on the policy documents or decision-making.

The empirical evidence in the health policy documents are limited because of insufficient research citation, low retrievability of health research evidence in the policy documents and biased selectivity of what constitutes health research evidence.

The study indicates that unfiltered information (data from policy evaluations and registries) constitutes majority of the research evidence in health policies both in health policy, systems and services research. The study seeks to advocate for the use of filtered information (peer reviewed, clinical trials and data from systematic reviews) in formulating health policies.

There is dearth of literature on the levels of health research evidence in health policy-making both in health policy, systems and services research. This study seeks to bridge the gap with empirical evidence from a developing country perspective.

This chapter briefly explores selected English and general education policy documents, curricula, and textbooks within the context of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective and examines how they have changed pre- and post-21st century. First, a policy document related to education in KSA in general (pre-21st century) is analyzed along with an English language teaching (ELT) policy document of the same period. Next, two general policy documents post-21st century are explored, followed by one related to ELT policy. Finally, one post-21st century document related to higher education is discussed. The “network of practices” within which these documents are situated are first detailed, as well as the structural order of the discourse, and some linguistic analysis of the choice of vocabulary and grammatical structures (Meyer, 2001). Issues which might be problematic to the learning and teaching identities of the students and teachers interpreting these documents are also highlighted. Finally, we consider whether the network of practices at this institution and KSA in general “needs” the problems identified in the analysis and critically reflect on the analysis.

Government attention to women’s entrepreneurship has increased in the past two decades; however, there are few cross-cultural studies to inform policy development. This paper aims to draw on gender and institutional theory to report on the status of female-focused small and medium-sized enterprises/entrepreneurship policies and to ask how – and to what extent – do women’s entrepreneurship policies differ among countries?

A common methodological approach is used to identify gaps in the policy-practice nexus.

The study highlights countries where policy is weak but practice is strong, and vice versa.

The study’s data were restricted to policy documents and observations of practices and initiatives on the ground.

The findings have implications for policy makers in respect of support for women’s entrepreneurship. Recommendations for future research are advanced.

The paper contributes to extant knowledge and understanding about entrepreneurship policy, specifically in relation to women’s entrepreneurship. It is also one of the few studies to use a common methodological approach to explore and compare women’s entrepreneurship policies in 13 countries.

The objective of this chapter is to analyze educational leadership policy in New Jersey, US, and Ontario, Canada, focusing on the inclusion of the unique needs of systematically marginalized students, specifically refugees and forced immigrant (RFI) youth. Modes of inquiry are qualitative document analysis of New Jersey and Ontario leadership policies, preparation requirements, and standards. The objective of this paper is to present an extensive literature review of policies related to educational leadership and supporting RFI youth and their teachers as well as to reveal gaps in policies and examine pre- and in-service training requirements. Within the field of comparative and international education, this chapter highlights the institutionalization of trends in educational leadership at state or provincial levels and how these macro-level policies influence educators’ abilities to meet the needs of students from marginalized communities, such as refugees and immigrants.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the secure publishing of XML documents, where a single copy of an XML document is disseminated and a stated role‐based access control policy (RBACP) is enforced via selective encryption. It describes a more efficient solution over previously proposed approaches, in which both policy specification and key generation are performed once, at the schema‐level. In lieu of the commonly used super‐encryption technique, in which nodes residing in the intersection of multiple roles are encrypted with multiple keys, it describes a new approach called multi‐encryption that guarantees each node is encrypted at most once.

This paper describes two alternative algorithms for key generation and single‐pass algorithms for multi‐encrypting and decrypting a document. The solution typically results in a smaller number of keys being distributed to each user.

The paper proves the correctness of the presented algorithms, and provides experimental results indicating the superiority of multi‐encryption over super‐encryption, in terms of encryption and decryption time requirements. It also demonstrates the scalability of the approach as the size of the input document and complexity of the schema‐level RBACP are increased.

An extension of this work involves designing and implementing re‐usability of keyrings when a schema or ACP is modified. In addition, more flexible solutions for handling cycles in schema graphs are possible. The current solution encounters difficulty when schema graphs are particularly deep and broad.

The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is scalable, and is applicable to scenarios in which XML documents conforming to a common schema are to be securely published.

This paper contributes to the efficient implementation of secure XML publication systems.

This study examined and traced the relationship between, and the influence of, the official standards documents of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the related day-to-day lesson planning and implementation of a pair of co-teachers. Using a case study methodology alongside a conventional content analysis we traced the processes of how these policy texts (the Standards of Learning [SOLs] for World History) were connected to and activated within the daily routines of these teachers who taught struggling students in a high-stakes testing context. The findings illustrated how the policy texts and discursive practices emerging from the State’s SOLs constituted a level of pedagogical governance that saw these teachers organize instruction clearly designed to support student recall on the end of year multiple choice test. Our work recognized the power of policy texts as they interact with teachers. The significance of unpacking policy documents in order to examine issues of power, symmetry and potential areas of negotiation in the planning and implementation of instruction for teacher educators is discussed.

To provide guidance to investment companies on document retention policies based on Section 802 of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002, codified as Section 1519 of the United States Code.

Reviews the conviction of Arthur Andersen for obstruction of justice based on the way the firm implemented its document retention/destruction policy as Enron was collapsing, and the Supreme Court reversal of that conviction. Explains why the Supreme Court decision should no longer guide an investment company's document retention/destruction policy in light of more recently enacted Section 1519, which imposes stiff penalties on anyone who knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, or covers up any record or document with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence any federal investigation, or in contemplation of such a proceeding.

Suggests a few straightforward rules for an investment company's document retention/destruction policy with a warning to err on the side of caution.

In light of Section 1519, every investment company needs to review its document retention/destruction policy. This article provides useful guidelines for doing so.

Studying Chinese higher education internationalization policy-making requires paying attention to the political ontology of China's top-designed policy-making system before proceeding to methodological approaches. The ontology is two-fold: a fixed reality grounded in the structure and agency of the one-party state, and an emergent reality that derives from the pervasive practice of using policy documents to govern. A two-pronged epistemology is proposed to uncover these realities: interpretative and poststructural problematization. Interpretative problematization helps discern how policy-makers frame a problem–solution discourse in policy documents to achieve predetermined strategic objectives. Contrastingly, poststructural problematization views policy documents as prescriptive texts that offer rules on how to behave. The potential methodologies drawn from the tradition of critical policy sociology can be employed to study these two problematizations, thereby unpacking the fixed and emergent realities.

The overarching purpose of this paper is to explore the transformation of intercultural education in Cyprus in the context of European integration. More specifically, it indicates the ways in which intercultural policy has been formed by complex and often counteractive influences. The analysis draws upon policy documents collected from the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) and interviews carried out with Cypriot policy-makers. Europe has come to play an important role in the development of Cypriot intercultural policy by becoming a mechanism of pressure for educational change. Through monitoring processes, Europe has indicated problems deriving from the culturally pluralistic character of the Cypriot society that should be addressed by national policies. In this context, Cyprus has initiated an educational reform, including a reform of the national curriculum towards a more intercultural orientation. Nonetheless, the findings of this research assert that there is a gap between policy rhetoric and practice.

This study reports on an analysis of the policy dynamics influencing intercultural education in the Greek–Cypriot context. The authors aim to examine the context and content of educational policies and directives which have been initiated and/or developed at the Greek–Cypriot level. To this end, the authors drew upon policy documentary and data derived from interviews conducted with Greek–Cypriot policy-makers and education officers.

It appears that intercultural education became an important part of the state’s rhetoric. Cyprus has initiated an educational reform, including a reform of the national curriculum towards a more intercultural orientation. Therefore, since 2008, the state and particularly the MEC have replaced the previously used term of multicultural education with the rhetoric of intercultural education and inclusion as the preferable educational responses to immigration.

The findings of this study suggest that the development of intercultural education requires the re-conceptualisation and re-structuring of the Cypriot educational system and schooling. The state should adopt a balanced governance model between school autonomy and centralised management.

This paper can help schools and teachers to improve their intercultural education approach.

The findings could be helpful for improving the intercultural education policy in Cyprus.

These research finding are the first that deal with intercultural education policy in Cyprus.

Colleges and universities across the USA have seen data breaches and intellectual property theft rise at a heightened rate over the past several years. An integral step in the first line of defense against various forms of attacks are (written) security policies designed to prescribe the construction and function of a technical system, while simultaneously guiding the actions of individuals operating within said system. Unfortunately, policy analysis is an insufficiently discussed topic in many academic communities with very little research being conducted in this space.

This work aims to assess the current state of information security policies by analyzing in-use policies from 200 universities and colleges in the USA with the goal of identifying important features and general attributes of these documents. The authors accomplish this through a series of analyzes designed to examine the language and construction of these policies.

To summarize high-level results, the authors found that only 54 per cent of the top 200 universities had publicly accessible information security policies, and the policies that were examined lacked consistency with little shared source material. The authors also found that the tonal makeup of these policies lacked a great deal of emotion, but contained a high amount of tentative or ambiguous language leading toward policies that could be viewed as “unclear.”

This work is an extension of a paper that was presented at ECIS 2018. The authors have added additional analyzes including a cross-policy content and tonal analysis to strengthen the findings and implications of this work for the wider research audience.