Search results

The purpose of this paper is to report data on social support elements and health status differences across three age groups of Kuwaiti elderly.

Examined for this study were 1,427 adults. Social support elements considered include total social support scale, frequency of contact (FOC) with relatives and friends, strength of these contacts, religiosity, number of children and number of children living with the elderly. This study evaluates health status in terms of systolic and diastolic blood pressure, glucose levels and self-reported somatic symptoms, satisfaction with current health and health over the last year.

The data show that there are important social support elements in all of the age groups. Social support, FOC, strength of relationships, number of children living with the elderly and religiosity are shown to influence the health and well-being of elders. Social support elements are shown to be higher in the oldest age group.

Elderly studies in Kuwait are rare. This is one of first studies done in Kuwait which show that there are differences in social support, FOC and strength of relation among all of the age groups.

This study aims to draw on elements of diffusion theory to understand leadership reform. Many diffusion studies examine the spread of an innovation across social units but the objective is to examine diffusion of a collective leadership model within school units. Specifically, the strength of reform diffusion is tested to account for differences in instructional capacity and to explain the spread of leadership reform within Title I elementary schools.

A mixed method design was used to understand how social factors facilitated the diffusion of leadership reform, and to test for a diffusion effect. Qualitative data were derived from interviews, field notes, observations, and documents using a grounded theory approach. Open and axial coding techniques were used to develop coherent categories of major and minor themes. Quantitative data were hierarchical, with teachers and students nested in schools. A random‐intercepts, means‐as‐outcomes model was used to test for a diffusion effect on instructional capacity.

Strong principal leadership, a commitment to collective responsibility and shared influence, frequent and open communication, and time to build capacity were conditions that supported diffusion of the leadership model. Diffusion of the leadership model mattered for instructional capacity. Each indicator of instructional capacity was more prevalent in schools that had diffused the leadership model to the mentoring and sustaining stages.

The study is limited to one type of reform and 36 Title I elementary schools from an urban and urban fringe district in a Southwestern state. Further, the study does not delve deeply into facilitative factors within various stages of the diffusion processes. It focuses on social factors that enable schools to bring the leadership reform to scale.

Framing reform as an intervention to be implemented in schools, rather than a social process that institutionalizes planned change, trivializes the actual complexity of transforming practice. Regular interactions among school members around the school's vision, coupled with leadership and time, contributed to reform diffusion and improved instructional capacity in this study. Reform diffusion, a process that takes time, strong leadership, and regular social interactions, needs to be given more consideration as a valuable process to improve school performance.

The findings suggest that facilitative factors of diffusion can advance reform and improve capacity simultaneously. Successful reforms, defined as ones that disrupt traditional cultures and achieve goals, evolve through developmental stages that eventually lead to a changed culture. The rate of this evolution may vary, but the temporal process of establishing a shared understanding; designing, experimenting, and developing new tools; fostering expertise; and forming strong social networks are foundational supports for authentic and sustainable reform.

Reform diffusion offers an alternative framework to better understand the institutionalization of planned change in schools. The findings, while limited to elementary schools engaged in leadership reform, provide support for studying reform as an holistic social process that encompasses the design, adoption, implementation, and institutionalization of planned change.

The use of supportive digital technology – the provision of supportive services and self-management health tools using digital platforms – by marketers is increasing alongside research interest in the topic. However, little is known about the motivations to use these tools and which tool features provide different forms of social support (informational, emotional, instrumental, network or esteem). The purpose of this paper is thus to explore consumer perceptions of supportive healthcare self-management and preferences for different levels of interactive features as social support in a health services context.

A qualitative approach involving 30 semi-structured interviews with consumers interested in two common preventative health services that use supportive digital tools (SDTs) (skin-cancer checks and sexually transmitted infection checks) was undertaken. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the verbatim transcripts.

This research identified there is a lack of motivation to initiate the search for SDTs; consumers are motivated by a desire to control and monitor health concerns and avoid overuse of the health system. The findings showed a preference for social support to go beyond informational support, with a need for interactivity that personalised support in a proactive manner.

SDTs are positively perceived by consumers as part of health services. The motivation to use these tools is complex, and the social support needed is multifaceted and preferably interactive.

This research assists service marketers to better design informational and instrumental support for preventative self-managed healthcare services.

This paper extends knowledge about the motivation and social support required from SDTs in a preventative health service context.

Mobile fitness apps (MFAs) are increasingly popular for people to promote physical activity (PA) and further enhance health status via behavioral change techniques (BCTs), but the phenomenon of users abandoning MFAs is still common. For improving users' PA and decreasing dropout rates of MFAs, this study intends to gain insights into the effects of major BCTs-based incentive factors on users' PA under MFAs context and the gender differences in their effects.

Based on self-determination theory, three major incentive factors were chosen from the perspective of self-peer-platform incentives, i.e. self-monitoring (SM), social support (SS) and platform rewards (PR). A dataset of 4,530 users from a popular mobile fitness app was collected and was analyzed using fixed effects models.

The results show that all three types of incentive factors are positively associated with users' PA. The estimated effect sizes can be ordered as: SM > PR > SS. Moreover, social support has a stronger positive impact on PA of females than males, whereas platform rewards have a weaker positive effect on PA of females than males. In addition, the results also indicate there are no significant gender differences in the effect of self-monitoring.

There is insufficient research on systematically examining the effects of different types of incentive factors of MFAs on users' PA in one study. This study extends the current understanding of incentive factors by simultaneously examining different incentive factors and the role of gender. The findings can also provide insightful guidance for the design of MFAs.

This study analyses the scope of social and environmental reporting from the perspective of integrating it in financial reporting and comments on a new approach regarding the presentation of social and environmental information in the annual reports from Romanian companies’ perspective.

A literature review introduces and justifies the second part of the research. The latter is organised as an exploratory study based on interviews. It presents the current state of Romanian companies’ availability for reconsidering financial reporting from the perspective of corporate social responsibility.

While social and environmental involvement of Romanian companies is at an early stage, there is a basis for future development of corporate reporting by addressing social and environmental aspects. We noticed that companies have the tendency of responding rather to a mandatory framework than a voluntary one.

The limitations of the research are linked to the study population. The small number of Romanian companies that publicly manifest interest for social responsibility determined the choice of a qualitative instead of a quantitative research.

The exploratory study based on the case of Romania accompanies the present state of non-financial versus financial reporting in order to highlight measurable and non-measurable, but relevant, information to be considered in a future reporting framework.

The study advances new lines in accounting research by confronting the national and international perspectives of social and environmental reporting. Debates and arguments on the research results add value and utility to the research.

It has been suggested that “space and artifacts constitute systems of communication which organizations build up within themselves” (Gagliardi, 1992a, b, p. vi) and reflect the cultural life within that organization. This is a study of how the “landscape” of a public library (“Library X”), as an information retrieval system, relates to the values of the people who created it. The efforts here are geared towards understanding the physical instantiation of institutional culture and, more specifically, institutional values as they are reflected through the artifact.

This study aims to empirically investigate the pathway to value co-creation intentions through social media marketing, social support and COVID-19 perception in the tourism context with a specific focus on Couchsurfing community.

A survey was conducted from foreign and domestic travellers who used Couchsurfing platform for their recent travel, and were approached using an online survey (n = 229) and structural equation modelling used for hypothesis testing.

The findings indicate that value co-creation intentions follow a pathway through social media marketing and social support. Moreover, Couchsurfing community social support mechanisms play a crucial role in value co-creation intentions.

This study significantly contributes by taking Couchsurfing as a social networking application that provides both informational and functional support to the hardcore and active tourism and hospitality community.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the psychological safety, organisation support and emotion in the workplace during the transition from office to home working during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Past studies on emotion in the workplace mostly focus on types of discreet emotion, in relation to positive and negative emotions (e.g. Connelly and Torrence, 2018; Rubino et al., 2013). Other studies reported that emotions are derived from social comparison processes (Matta and Dyne, 2020). During a crisis, the emotional responses of the workers and organisational support to the different group of employees differ due to the social exchange relationship. Hence, this study contributes to the field of organisational support by examining the organisational support as the investment of both physical and psychological resources, and the emotional responses of employees to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis during transition from office to work-from-home setting. Through thick descriptions of the workers' emotion responses to this transition, the research examined how organisational support potentially impacts the worker's experience of psychological safety.

The study was conducted in the Singapore context. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Singapore Government imposed regulatory restrictions, the “Circuit Breaker” from April 7 2020 to curb the spread of the virus infections. Most workplaces from the public service agencies to the private enterprises implemented work from home arrangements for most of the employees. The data were generated from an online survey that included self-reported text-based narratives in response to open-ended questions. Open-ended questions effectively allowed respondents to define the real-world situation in their perspectives. Salaried workers from both the public and private organisations were invited to take part in this research. Respondents comprise full-time, part-time and contracted employees from the diverse sectors. The final sample size of 131 respondents was used. A qualitative data analysis was employed to gain deeper insight into the workers' emotional reactions, including their personal experiences of organisational support and psychological safety, during the transition from office to work from home setting.

The qualitative examination, through thematic coding, reveals the phenomenon of emotion triggered by social comparison emotion and critical socio-emotional resources (i.e. task, flexibility, communication, health and safety and social support) during a health crisis. Specifically, the employees' emotional reactions were elicited from the perceived organisational support, in how organisation cares for their well-being and work contributions and, in turn, influence the psychological safety. For example, the approach of the online communication (as a form of organisation support) practised by the managers has implications on the different levels of psychological safety experienced by the employee. In addition, emotional resources can be interpreted as organisation support. The findings revealed that emotions such as anxiety, stress, unfairness, inferiority and vulnerability are triggered by perceived inequity and comparison with the decisions or resources of the referent others of higher level such as the management (upward social comparison emotion). On the other hand, the emotions of pride, empathy, shared goals and support are generated by the care, collective interest and comparison of the referent others of lower level such as the subordinate (downward social comparison emotion). This study adds theoretical depth to the phenomenon of socio-emotional resources and the implications of psychological safety and organisational support of different work groups in the organisation.

The practical implications contribute to human resource management practices to understanding the socio-emotional resources of the core and periphery groups. It is imperative for organisation to exercise equity in the allocation of resources and treatment between different groups (core and periphery). The implications of this study show the phenomenon of emotional responses arise from comparison within groups linking with perceived fairness. The managerial decisions and supervisor management style are key factors in promoting healthy emotion and psychological safety. Management style such as micromanagement and control were not favourable among employees, and autonomy, trust and empathy resonate with employees. During a crisis and major workplace changes, demonstrating employee care through feedback, timely and specific information sharing and participatory form of communication contribute to the positive perception of procedural and interactional fairness. In the initial phase of workplace change amid crisis, some element of control is inevitable. Supervisor support may come in the form of open communication in conveying the rationale for the need to exercise control in one process and flexibility may be accorded in another task. The empowerment of workplace decisions, open communication in shared goals and assurance and trust are critical in enhancing a high psychological safety.

This study examines the roles of emotion, psychological safety and organisational support among different groups of workers (full-time, part-time and contracted employees) in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. There has been scant study in examining the core and periphery groups relating to these research topics. The findings in this study reveal the phenomenon of emotions triggered by social comparison during the workplace changes and the display of different socio-emotional resources within groups. This qualitative research supported the past studies that autonomy in decision-making, supervisor support, employee care and trust affect psychological safety.

This study aimed at examining the influence of two important elements of social supports, namely supervisor support and coworker support, on work engagement among employees in the university setting. The study also further examined the mediating potentials of meaningful work on the relationships between the former and the latter.

The sample study comprised academic and managerial staff members from a public-sector university in Malaysia. Out of the 420 distributed questionnaires, 216 were received back from which 177 were found useable and hence were taken further for final data analysis. Statistical software of SPSS and Smart PLS 2.0 M3 were used to perform data analysis.

Supervisor support and coworker support were found to be significant predictors of work engagement. Further, meaningful work was found mediating these relationships.

The findings enrich literature of social support, work engagement, and meaningful work. The study is one of the foremost empirical works examining the mediating potential of meaningful work on the relationships between two social resources (supervisor support and coworker support) and work engagement. The issue of work engagement is evident in several mainstream work sectors alongside the education sector. Hence, the research findings are worthy to help understand work engagement issues and how to tackle it in the education setting.

This research aimed to investigate the impacts of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble Prison Project (QSEPP) on the health and wellbeing of participants, specifically with regard to social support.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with prisoners participating in the project to gain insight into perceived sense of support within the QSEPP and across the prison context more broadly.

The QSEPP encouraged participants to foster a range of support networks through the development of relationships built on trust, respect and shared experiences. Participants also developed communication skills which may assist with establishing and maintaining supportive relationships inside and outside of prison.

This research highlights the inevitable challenges for researchers working within the prison context, including: correctional services’ limitations, time and space restrictions and small sample sizes. This research offers some potentially innovative ways to combat such challenges.

The study highlights the potential of theatre-based interventions in the prison context and their role in fostering social support and enhancing wellbeing.

The research explores the potential role theatre may play in improving the health and wellbeing of a disadvantaged and marginalised group, providing skills to enhance access to supportive networks inside and outside prison.

To the best of our knowledge this is the first research of its kind and provides valuable insights into the role that theatre may play in fostering social support in the prison context.