Search results

Poor health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is one of the important issues in the health sector. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL in Tehran city, Iran.

In total, 562 adults were included in this cross-sectional study. The cluster sampling method was used for data collection from May to June, 2016 in Tehran city, Iran. Data on HRQoL, using EuroQol 5-dimensions questionnaire, and data on socio-economic and demographic variables were gathered. Convenience regression method was performed to measure the concentration index (CI). Decomposition analysis was performed to determine the contribution of variables on socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL. All analyses were performed by Stata v.14.

The prevalence of poor HRQoL was 28.3 percent. The value of CI for “poor HRQoL” was −0.299 (95% confidence interval: −0.402 to −0.195). Socio-economic status (SES) was the largest contributor to socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL (69.44 percent of inequality was explained by SES). Age, obesity and race had a positive contribution to socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL among the participants. Nonetheless, sex and smoking intensity had a negative contribution to inequality in poor HRQoL.

There is little evidence about the prevalence of poor HRQoL in insured people. This study provided new evidence in this area through the investigation of socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL and its determinants among people with health insurance in Iran using decomposition analysis.

Cost overruns have been identified as the most significant challenge for construction sector stakeholders. Like many developing countries, the Iranian construction industry suffers from poor cost performance. So, the current research aims to investigate the causes of cost overrun in Iranian construction projects. This paper also reviews the findings of similar studies conducted in several Asian countries.

This paper includes a literature review and a quantitative method with a questionnaire survey. The review is limited to the studies investigating the causes of cost overrun in an Asian country in the last decade. Moreover, the current research was conducted through a questionnaire prepared based on 43 common factors identified through the literature review. The required data were gathered from the representatives involved in handling construction activities in Iran. The collected data were analyzed based on relative importance index (RII), using the SPSS software package.

The results showed that poor site management, improper planning, fluctuation of prices of materials, lack of experience, and poor economic condition are the critical reasons for cost overrun in Iranian construction projects. The findings also indicated that among the studies conducted in Asian countries, the first three factors have the highest frequency.

This paper highlighted most studies concerning the cost overrun factors in construction projects in different Asian countries in recent years. Up-to-date knowledge helps to understand the complexity of this field in various periods and therefore minimizes the risk of cost overrun. This research can also be used as a benchmark for further studies to clarify similar issues in other developing countries.

The available literature demonstrates that green human resource management (GHRM) practices enhance the firm's green performance. However, the studies fail to show how GHRM practices give rise to green culture and how such green culture influences the green competitiveness of a firm. Anchored on the Ability Motivation Opportunity (AMO) theory, this study investigates how firms can build green competitive advantage from GHRM. The study focuses on four enablers of green culture (EGC): leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement and employee empowerment. The study tests the mediating role of each EGC in the relationship between GHRM and green competitive advantage (GCA). The study findings provide managers with a deeper understanding of how GHRM supports the development of the EGC and how they explain the firm's GCA.

Data was collected from a large-scale survey of Malaysia's manufacturing firm. We managed to collect 96 valid and useable questionnaires.

We find that GHRM practices give rise to EGC and the EGC mediate the relationship between GHRM and GCA.

The study presents the EGC in the green competitiveness context and goes further to test its mediating role in the GHRM–GCA relationship. We also develop a novel conceptual framework that manufacturing firms can deploy to attain green competitive advantage.

Drawing on the Ability–Motivation–Opportunity (AMO) theory, this study aims to test the effect of green human resource management (G-HRM) on green organizational citizenship behavior (G-OCB) taking into consideration green culture as the mediator and green values as the moderator.

Valid data from 240 entities collected in Taiwan were analyzed to test the five hypotheses. The valid data were analyzed using confirmatory factor model, correlation analysis, structural equation modeling and bootstrapping analysis.

The results for all relationships show significant associations. G-HRM is significantly associated with G-OCB and green culture, while green culture is significantly related to G-OCB. The mediating effect of green culture on the G-HRM-G-OCB relationship is significant. The moderating effect of green values on the green culture–G-OCB relationship is significant.

The originality of this study lies in being one of the first study in an advanced emerging economy utilizing the AMO theory.

The study examines how the interactions among three prominent institutional logics—state, market and religion—fundamentally shape the patterns of individuals’ engagement in social entrepreneurship (SE).

The study develops a configurational theoretical framework and uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to test the hypotheses by gathering data on social ventures from 35 countries from the World Values Survey and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

The results show that the prevalence of social entrepreneurial ventures is enabled by different combinations of logics of action, governance mechanisms, strength of religious beliefs and religious pluralism.

This research reveals that the relationship between institutional logic profiles and SE is contingent on the coherence between different institutional logics.

In the past three decades, remote sensing-based models for estimating crop yield have addressed critical problems of general food security, as the unavailability of grains such as rice creates serious worldwide food insecurity problems. The main purpose of this study was to compare the potential of time-series Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 data to predict rice yield several weeks before harvest on a regional scale.

To this end, the sum of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)-based models created the best agreement with actual yield data at the golden time window of six weeks before harvest when rice grains were in milky and mature growth stages. The application of nine other vegetation indicators was also investigated in the golden time window in comparison to NDVI.

The findings of this study demonstrate the viability of identifying locations with poor and superior performance in terms of production management approaches through a rapid and economical solution for early rice grain yield assessment. Results indicated that while some of those, such as enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and optimized soil adjusted vegetation index, were able to estimate rice yield with high accuracy, NDVI is still the best indicator to predict rice yield before harvest. However, experiments can be conducted in different regions in future studies to evaluate the generalizability of the approach.

To achieve this objective, the authors considered the following purposes: using Sentinel-2 time-series data, determining the appropriate growth stage for estimating rice yield and evaluating different vegetation indices for estimating rice yield.

Virtual gifts have emerged as a common feature of online communities, social gaming and social networks. This paper aims to examine how network-related variables and gift-seeding impact virtual gift sales. The network variables include gift-giver centrality and gift-giving dispersion, capturing, respectively, the relative importance of gift-givers in a network and their tendency to give gifts to a greater or lesser number of network peers. Gift-seeding tactics capture social network firms’ attempts to stimulate virtual gift purchases by awarding virtual gifts to network members.

This study develops and estimates a fixed-effects panel data regression model to analyze virtual gift purchase data for a large social network service.

Gift-giver centrality, gift-giving dispersion and gift-seeding increase virtual gift purchases. Increases in consumers’ receipt of seed gifts from social network firms (“direct seeding”) and from other consumers (“indirect seeding”) increases virtual gift purchases. However, the extent to which consumers give seed gifts to their friends in the social network (“seed mediation”) does not affect sales. Greater gift-giver centrality amplifies (attenuates) the positive effects of direct (indirect) seeding. At greater levels of gift-giving dispersion, the effects of indirect seeding and seed mediation become negative. Furthermore, gift-seeding has spillover effects on virtual good (non-gift) purchases.

This study’s data, drawn from a South Korean social network service, offer unique and valuable social network information on actual virtual gift purchases and their seeding. Future research should replicate the results of the study outside the South Korean context.

Given the effects reported in this study, social network firms can facilitate the purchases of virtual gifts by improving the targeting of consumers in social networks and gift-seeding tactics.

This study uniquely examines the individual and interactive effects of network-related variables and gift-seeding on virtual gift sales. The study is seminal in its examination of how gift-seeding can be used as a marketing tactic to increase virtual gift purchases.

Economic growth, without distributional measures and policies, engenders inequality and concentration. National income may be distributed either through the establishment of a proper welfare system, or by the encouragement of and incentive for economic activities and policies with built‐in distributional factors. The prerequisites for sustainable income distribution are fair distribution of assets, investments and power. The main outcome of the growth‐based developing theories and activities are concentration of production, people and financial and political power. These concentrations are the sources of many problems of both developing and industrialised countries. Although there have been countless studies about development, few have made an attempt to investigate the social and economic interactions of small business with sustainable development. Small business’ contributions to the process of development, in terms of distribution of economic and non‐economic resources, are substantial. This article will explore the economic and political distributional power of small business and their roles in the process of socio‐economic development.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of gender differences in the perception of civil engineers and construction (CEC) students toward resilience to natural hazards and extreme events in a changing climate. This study also explores to what extent CEC students perceive the status of the US infrastructure systems similar to an external evaluation model (i.e. American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Report Card).

An empirical study was conducted to examine the perception of resilience among 103 females and 279 male CEC students from 15 universities across the USA. The obtained data were quantified, and different statistical methods were used to explore the similarities and differences in the gender group responses.

The results indicated a significant mean difference (disagreement) between male and female groups in the importance of community resilience, management and handling of natural hazards. In addition, while there was no meaningful difference between female and male students in their content knowledge, female students showed a more accurate perception about impacting factors involved.

The findings of this study offer new insight into the impacts of gender differences in the perception of resilience, which can be used to enhance the educational experience of CEC female students in areas related to community and infrastructure resilience.

Geotechnologies have a long tradition in several areas of society and research. The recent development of the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies opened several doors to the contribution of tourism. Emergent technologies contributions to tourism and planning such as web mapping, augmented reality (AR), crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are relatively recent, and there is a lack of research around their potential for Creative Tourism enhancement. For example, combining web mapping with AR or storytelling can be an excellent contribution to operators, planners and tourists. For research purposes, new opportunities are open, particularly by integrating community-shared data. It is well known for the popularity of social networks, the exponential growth of photo sharing, but few studies have been implemented to understand their contribution to research. This chapter focuses on emerging geotechnologies concerning cultural mapping, Creative Tourism and sustainability. Since it is a new growing niche, more research is needed to develop and understand the potential of new approaches. Besides traditional techniques such as quantitative (e.g. surveys) and qualitative ones (e.g. interviews, focus groups and world café), it revises the role of geotechnologies on Creative Tourism development and growing activities. Results from case studies from Europe are analysed.