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This application brief describes the exploratory assessment of a mentoring program between current students and alumni of a leadership studies minor program. We connect leadership education research and practice in two ways: first, we describe a process of qualitative program evaluation to inform program best practices and improvement. In doing so, we also highlight the value of an alumni mentoring program as a strategic component of leadership education. Our findings demonstrate the mentoring program supported students’ leadership development in the areas of career transition, personal growth, and application to “real-life.” Recommendations are offered for creating formal and informal mentoring opportunities.

Positive youth development (PYD) among ethnic minorities is important to building a socially inclusive and rapidly aging Hong Kong. There are very limited empirically driven with evaluation among ethnic minorities in Hong Kong and in the region. This study aims to fill the research-to-practice gap by examining the implementation process and impacts of a school-based PYD school program for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong developed empirically based on the data of the larger sequential mixed-methods research project.

Along with a non-governmental organization the authors co-developed, implemented and evaluated an eight-week pilot PYD program for youth from South Asia and newly arrival mainland Chinese backgrounds. Although a quasi-experimental mixed-methods research design was adopted and included 18 young people in the intervention group and 12 young people in the control group, this paper reported the qualitative interviews of three students, two of their teachers and two PYD interventionalists who commented about the content and process to further improve future PYD programs for ethnic minorities young people in Hong Kong.

Students stated their positive experience about the program while other participants (interventionalists and teachers) provided insights for further program effectiveness enhancement. This includes organizing social activities in the program, such as basketball or football matches would enhance the level of engagement of the participants. Teachers and interventionists suggested to develop age-appropriate programs as younger groups may have different needs or interests compared to their older counterparts.

This study provides insight into how to improve the implementation process, effectiveness and quality of evidence based PYD education research and practices from a culturally appropriate perspective, particularly for South Asian youth residing in Hong Kong and beyond.

Considering the role of higher education in preparing the next generation of leaders for social change, leadership education is challenged to consider how best to prepare young adults for socially responsible leadership. Service-learning and professional internships, separately, have been identified as vehicles for preparing young adults for leadership roles. The purpose of this Application Brief is to describe a hybrid of service-learning and professional internships, called “Serviceship,” which employs undergraduate students as interns for a community rather than a company. Now in its fifth year at a Midwestern, four-year land-grant institution, the “Serviceship” program has placed 21 interns in 11 rural communities. Utilizing an asset-based community development framework, undergraduate students are matched with rural communities whose local leaders have self-identified a community development project.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the entrepreneurial learning and support needs of older unemployed, highlighting the barriers that need to be addressed, and to explore the impact of a tailored entrepreneurship training programme.

An interpretivist philosophical standpoint is adopted with an action research approach to engage key informants to design, implement and evaluate the programme. Focus groups and interviews with 132 older unemployed individuals and 50 stakeholders across six countries were conducted as well as pre- and post-programme evaluations and surveys with 55 programme participants across three countries.

This research provides a deeper understanding of the entrepreneurial learning and support needs of older unemployed.

The small sample size of participants measured using a hybrid measure of ESE is a limitation.

For entrepreneurship educators, the components of designing and delivering an entrepreneurship programme for older unemployed are identified. For enterprise and unemployment support agencies, it provides evidence of the initial and ongoing support needs for starting and running a business in later life.

A framework specific to older unemployed individuals turning towards self-employment or entrepreneurship is proposed and tested in this paper. The framework proposes that individual and contextual antecedents influence the decision to become self-employed in later life and that the training, support and entrepreneurial experience helps to overcome barriers and shapes individual and societal outcomes.

Partnerships with parents are an essential strategy for promoting children's healthy development. Partnerships, themselves, also comprise a context for promoting and sustaining mental health among adults and communities at large. We must foster parents' own development in order to support their role as fully participating partners in mental health promotion; such development guides their abilities and propensity to create and sustain growth‐enhancing environments. The Listening Partners Program is an example of a program that pursued such a goal.

Canada’s primary care system has been described as “a culture of pilot projects” with little evidence of converting successful initiatives into funded, permanent programs or sharing project outcomes and insights across jurisdictions. Health services pilot projects are advocated as an effective strategy for identifying promising models of care and building integrated care partnerships in local settings. In the qualitative study reported here, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the strengths and challenges of this approach.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 primary care physicians who discussed their experiences as pilot project leads. Following thematic analysis methods, broad system issues were captured as well as individual project information.

While participants often portrayed themselves as advocates for vulnerable patients, mobilizing healthcare organizations and providers to support new models of care was discussed as challenging. Competition between local healthcare providers and initiatives could impact pilot project success. Participants also reported tensions between their clinical, project management and research roles with additional time demands and skill requirements interfering with the work of implementing and evaluating service innovations.

Study findings highlight the complexity of pilot project implementation, which encompasses physician commitment to addressing care for vulnerable populations through to the need for additional skill set requirements and the impact of local project environments. The current pilot project approach could be strengthened by including more multidisciplinary collaboration and providing infrastructure supports to enhance the design, implementation and evaluation of health services improvement initiatives.

Despite the growing pressure to encourage new ways of thinking about research methodology, only recently have interview methodologists begun to realize that “we cannot lift the results of interviewing out of the contexts in which they were gathered and claim them as objective data with no strings attached”. The purpose of this paper is to provide additional insight based on a critical reflection of the interview as a research method drawing upon Alvesson's discussion from the neopositivist, romanticist and localist interview perspectives. Specifically, the authors focus on critical reflections of three broad categories of a continuum of interview methods: structured, semi‐structured and unstructured interviews.

The authors adopt a critical and reflexive approach to understanding the literature on interviews to develop alternative insights about the use of interviews as a qualitative research method.

After examining the neopositivist (interview as a “tool”) and romanticist (interview as “human encounter”) perspectives on the use of the research interview, the authors adopt a localist perspective towards interviews and argue that the localist approach opens up alternative understanding of the interview process and the accounts produced provide additional insights. The insights are used to outline the skills researchers need to develop in applying the localist perspective to interviews.

The paper provides an alternative perspective on the practice of conducting interviews, recognizing interviews as complex social and organizational phenomena rather than just a research method.

Aims to examine medical involvement in hospital management processes, and to consider the implications of current experience for the next generation of clinical directors. Doctors who move into a formal management role often find themselves unprepared for their new responsibilities. Research has thus concentrated on identifying the management competences which doctors lack, and with designing ways to remedy the deficit. Seeks to move beyond this deficit model by adopting a perspective which focuses on the engagement of doctors in the management process. Draws data from in‐depth interviews with six clinical directors and 19 other members of the hospital management team at Leicester General Hospital NHS Trust (LGH). Content analysis of interviews suggests that the engagement of clinical directors in the hospital management process at this site can be described as reluctant, transient, service‐driven, power‐pulled and pressured. This negative portrayal of the role, however, must be set in the context of the “management expectation” held of clinical directors by other hospital managers and staff ‐ an expectation that is not currently fulfilled.

The paper seeks to examine the role of corporate identity in UK clothing retail organisations, focusing on the “fast fashion” sector. The aim is to analyse the “gap” between desired identity and perceived identity within the sector.

An instrumental case study approach was adopted for this research. Companies' web sites and press releases were reviewed to find out the desired identity of organisations, while semi‐structured interviews were carried out with customers to elicit the perceived corporate identity. Themes developed from the cases will form the basis of further research.

This study has shown that although there are similarities, considerable “gaps” are present between the desired and perceived corporate identity of organisations, the latter being more important in understanding the research questions addressed which relate to corporate identity and the gap between desired and perceived identities. A number of propositions have emerged from the findings, which when investigated empirically will be useful for forming corporate identity constructs in the fashion retail sector.

This research provides some useful insights into the role of corporate identity within the fast fashion retail sector; however, it is not sufficient to make generalisable claims outside the cases examined. Further research is required to test some of the conceptual issues and propositions raised by this work.

The paper gives practitioners better insights into the gap between desired and perceived identity with a view to improving strategic interventions to close the gap.

The research makes a contribution to retail identity literature by emphasising the importance of perceived identity. The work is unique in being the first research to explore further the relationship between desired and perceived identity from a fashion retailing perspective. As a consequence the strategic implications from this work for desired identity are highlighted.