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In 2014, the Health Service Executive (HSE) in Ireland published its Safeguarding National Policy and Procedures (HSE, 2014). Under this policy, all agencies providing services through the social care directorate must ensure a robust culture of safeguarding is in place. Concurrent to this has been a move in social policy, practice and research to include the voice of the service user, both in terms of planning and reviewing services. (e.g. HIQA, 2012; Flanagan, 2020) This article examines whether service users with intellectual disabilities want to be involved in safeguarding plans and, if so, how that can be supported. Using focus groups service users demonstrated their knowledge of safeguarding as a concept, how they felt about the issues raised, and, crucially what they felt they would like to see happen next in addressing a safeguarding incident or concern. The focus groups took place in a large organisation providing residential services, day services, independent living supports and clinical supports. Engaging service users in planning and responding to safeguarding concerns is a fundamental principle of human rights legislation, both nationally and internationally. This study aims to highlight that it is both possible and desirable to engage fully with service users using a range of simple communication tools. For this to be implemented as routine practice in services providing support for people with intellectual disabilities, authentic leadership is required. Services will need to devote time, human resources and will need champions to get on board with the necessary culture shift.

Qualitative research examined peoples’ “lived experiences” and knowledge of safeguarding. Focus groups were used with thematic analysis highlighting common themes throughout, as guided by Braun and Clarke (2006). There were two objectives: Objective 1: measuring participant’s understanding of the safeguarding process. Objective 2: compare the potential differences between safeguarding plans devised by the participants in the focus groups, versus plans devised by trained designated officers responsible for safeguarding within the service.

Four principal themes emerged – 1. participants understanding of safeguarding; 2. restorative justice; 3. consent; and 4. high levels of emotional intelligence and compassion. Participants demonstrated that they could and did want to be involved in safeguarding planning and showed little variation in the plans compared to those completed by trained staff.

The study was completed with a small sample size in a single service in one area. It may not represent the lived experiences and knowledge of safeguarding in other services and indeed other countries. The video may have led to some priming; for instance, the Gardai in the footage being called may have resulted in the participants stating that contacting Gardai should be part of the plan. After the video was shown, there was a heightened awareness of safeguarding. This may indicate that participants are aware of safeguarding but unsure of the terminology or how to discuss it out of context.

For this to be implemented as routine practice in services providing support for people with intellectual disabilities, authentic leadership is required. Services will need to devote time and human resources and will need champions in the safeguarding arena to get on board with the shift in culture required.

While there did not appear to be many barriers to listening to participants, to progress this as a standard practice a very real shift in culture will be needed. It is important for practitioners to ask: Is the vulnerable person aware that this concern has been raised? What is known of the vulnerable person’s wishes in relation to the concern? To truly engage with service users in safeguarding plans these questions need to be more than a “tick box” exercise. This process needs to be fully embedded into a culture that promotes a person-centred, rights-based, inclusive approach as a standard rather than a one-off project. Some structural changes will be needed regarding the time given to designated officers, and what resources they can access (such as speech and language therapy). However, the real difference will be made by services operating authentic leadership that champions engagement on this scale, to fully answer the question posed by the researchers at the beginning of this report, “Whose safeguarding is it anyway?”

There appears to be little evidence of service user engagement in terms of planning and processing safeguarding responses, either in research or anecdotally.

Artificial intelligence (AI) used in service has sparked fundamental changes in how enterprises engage their customers. AI specifically designed for customer service is denoted as service-oriented AI. Through the lens of social information processing theory and the pleasure-arousal-dominance (PAD) emotional state model, this study aims to examine the underlying mechanisms for service-oriented AI anthropomorphism to influence customers' propensity for value co-creation.

Our data were collected from hotel customers who had experienced interactions with service-oriented AI. Through purposive sampling, 350 survey responses were collected. We analyzed the survey data using covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM).

This study has two key findings. Firstly, customers' propensity for value co-creation is favorably facilitated by the anthropomorphism of service-oriented AI. Secondly, the anthropomorphism of service-oriented AI can strengthen customers' perceptions of cuteness and service capacity, elicit a sense of novelty, and enhance customers' propensity to collaborate with service-oriented AI to create value. These findings address the research gaps by focusing on customer engagement through service-oriented AI and provide a theoretical basis for subsequent practical endeavors in the field.

Integrating the PAD emotional state model with the social information processing theory, this study explores the effects of service-oriented AI's anthropomorphism on customers' propensity for value co-creation.

Social psychology has focused on an individual’s reaction to emergencies and witnessing a crime, which has developed theories of bystander intervention and bystander apathy. The purpose of this study is to explore why people choose to intervene when they are a bystander to intimate partner violence (IPV) and the psychological processes that underpin this. Decision-making was explored drawing on literature from the whistleblowing field.

Through a mixed methods epistemology, this study explored factors that explained intervening behaviour concerning IPV. In total, 212 participants who had known someone who was a victim of IPV were recruited from the general population.

A logistic regression model indicated that conscientiousness and fairness were found to predict intervening behaviour. Being a child witness was found to predict non-intervening behaviour. Qualitative analysis revealed three types of bystander apathy: those who lacked capability as they were children; those who were indifferent and did not see it as their place to intervene; and those who wanted to intervene but did not as they were frightened of exacerbating the situation.

IPV has significant physical and psychological effects on victims. However, the choice to intervene is complex, and bystander intervention in this study was also associated in some cases with not only a continuation of the IPV behaviour towards the victim but also aggression and physical violence towards the bystander (whistleblower retaliation). Based on the findings of this study, recommendations are made for how to support bystanders and victims of IPV.

This study involved participants with real-life experience of being a bystander to IPV. The mixed methodology provided an insight into the psychological processes, which underpin bystander experiences of IPV and maps onto the literature in relation to whistleblowing.

The present article encourages urban tourism researchers use pre-recorded (like YouTube, TikTok and security camera footage) and self-recorded video data in research. The author highlighted the benefits of doing so for urban tourism scholars, as well as ways in which these investigators can use the observational video analysis technique to produce convincing findings and advance their field.

To accomplish the purpose, the author reviewed 25 scholarly articles on the topic from several fields.

One benefit of observational video analysis research (OVAR), the author highlighted, was the ability of scholars in different locations to simultaneously observe interactions, the focus of the study, in their natural setting and discuss them. This practice is not possible with traditional ethnographic research. Also, one way the author mentioned researchers can accomplish rigor in their OVAR project is through multimodal transcription. With multimodal transcription, verbal and non-verbal happenings in videos are transliterated and later analyzed.

It is hoped because of the present article, increased use of the technique in urban tourism research will be seen.

The present article is the first, to the best of the author’s knowledge, to detail how rigor can be accomplished in OVAR in urban tourism.

Climate change requires the reduction of direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, a task that seems to clash with increasing supply chain complexity. This study aims to analyse the upstream supply chain complexity dimensions suggesting the importance of understanding the information processing that these may entail. Reducing equivocality can be an issue in some dimensions, requiring the introduction of written guidelines to moderate the effects of supply chain complexity dimensions on GHG emissions at the firm and supply chain level.

A three-year panel data was built with information obtained from Bloomberg, Trucost and Compustat. Hypotheses were tested using random effect regressions with robust standard errors on a sample of 394 SP500 companies, addressing endogeneity through the control function approach.

Horizontal complexity reduces GHG emissions at the firm level, whereas vertical and spatial complexity dimensions increase GHG emissions at the firm and supply chain level. Although the introduction of written guidelines neutralises the negative effects of vertical complexity on firm and supply chain GHG emissions, it is not sufficient in the presence of spatial complexity.

This paper offers novel insights by suggesting that managers need to reconcile the potential trade-off effects on GHG emissions that horizontally complex supply chain structures can present. Their priority in vertically and spatially complex supply chain structures should be to reduce equivocality.