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This study aims to develop and empirically assess an instrument for measuring nutrition knowledge aligned to the North Carolina (NC) Healthful Living Essential Standards for teaching nutrition. The instrument was critically evaluated and used to assess nutrition knowledge in Eastern NC students.

Researchers evaluated 250 students in 16, eighth-grade classrooms using a 22-question researcher-developed nutrition knowledge questionnaire. Assessment questions were aligned with NC Healthful Living Essential Standards, which suggest students should be able to: apply tools to plan healthy nutrition, create strategies to improve dietary intake, create plans for lifelong health, and evaluate health information and products. Survey reliability and validity (face) were evaluated prior to study implementation. Descriptive statistics for individual items, total and individual standard scores were analyzed. Instrument efficacy was evaluated using item-difficulty and discrimination indexes.

The survey displayed appropriate levels of item difficulty with three exceptions: two questions were identified as too difficult, and one as too easy. The majority of items also displayed acceptable (>0.20) or excellent (>0.40) discrimination (17 out of 20). Average total nutrition knowledge score was 11.82-3.26 (53.7 per cent). Within aligned standards, students scored highest in creating plans for lifelong health (79 per cent) and lowest in evaluating health information (37.6 per cent).

Study findings suggest eighth-grade students may only possess half the nutrition knowledge standards expected in the eighth grade. More instrument development is needed to supply researchers with standard means of assessing nutrition knowledge.

This practice paper describes how leadership education faculty and students at Virginia Tech have facilitated change through the use of appreciative inquiry (Ai) at the departmental level, program level, and project level. Appreciative inquiry has been found to be a useful tool for leadership educators, as its foundation in social constructionist philosophy aligns with contemporary leadership and learning theories. This paper outlines (a) the philosophy of Ai as it applies to organizational development (b) illustrates Ai practices associated with a five-stage model, and (c) highlights three examples that can be used as models for leading change in a variety of organizational situations. The authors suggest that leadership educators are uniquely positioned to serve academic communities as facilitators of change by bridging theory and practice in pursuit of new ways of knowing and working together.

This paper aims to describe the transdisciplinary, multiphase, mixed methods, generative design research, participatory planning and social design activities developed and implemented by the West Virginia University Rural Tourism Design Team and associated outcomes.

The multiphase methodology included quantitative and qualitative research in initial stages of the study (key informant interviews, resident attitudes toward tourism survey, visitor preferences survey, economic impact analysis) which informed social design activities at latter stages (asset mapping, landscape design/visualization of opportunities and sites targeted for development and cultural identity design) using generative design tools facilitating co-design with the communities and helping the destination take sequential steps toward achieving their goals and objectives.

Opportunities and challenges identified through multiple methods were triangulated and pointed to the same conclusions including the need for long term planning and managed growth; protecting community values; underutilized natural, cultural and historic assets; the opportunity to develop nature-based, cultural and historical attractions; and the need for a common vision and collective identity.

This study makes a unique contribution to literature on sustainable tourism planning by incorporating social design activities to visualize findings of more traditional planning methods and provide tangible, visible outcomes of planning activities which can guide local stakeholders in rural destinations more directly to funding for planning recommendations and project implementation.

The transdisciplinary and social/generative/participatory approach provided a scaffolding of outputs to the community with citizen control and active involvement throughout the planning and design process. The incorporation of social design provided tangible outcomes including site designs and a cultural identity. Generative design research gives people a language with which they can imagine and express their ideas and dreams for future experiences.

This paper investigates the role of social design in a transdisciplinary, multiphase project to support sustainable tourism planning.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of product image at three stages of the consumer decision process for apparel products: alternative evaluation, purchase and post‐purchase stages. The three specific objectives of the study were to examine at the alternative evaluation stage the effect of product image on perceived quality and performance expectation, at the purchase stage the effect of product image on purchase intention and the price the consumer was willing to pay, and at the post‐purchase stage the effect of product image on consumer satisfaction and the effect of product image with product consumption performance on consumer satisfaction. The experimental design was used to determine the cause‐and‐effect relationships between the treatment variables (independent variables) and the dependent variables. Sweatshirts were used as the sample product category and 120 university students were recruited as participants. Results showed that at the alternative evaluation stage, product image significantly and positively influenced perceived quality and performance expectation. At the purchase stage, product image was not a determinant of purchase intention, but significantly and positively influenced the price participants were willing to pay for the product. At the post‐purchase stage, product image did not directly influence participants’ satisfaction, but product image with product consumption performance significantly affected satisfaction. When consumption performance was good, product image significantly and positively influenced satisfaction. When consumption performance was poor, product image significantly and negatively influenced satisfaction.

Decades of innovation in designing usable (and unusable) interfaces have resulted in a plethora of guidelines, usability methods, and other design tools. The purpose of this research is to develop ways for novice developers to effectively leverage and contribute to the large and growing body of usability knowledge and methods.

This work presents the first extensive usage evaluation of an integrated design environment and knowledge management system, LINK‐UP. Key to this effort is the central design record (CDR), a design representation meant to prevent breakdowns occurring between design and evaluation phases.

The case study results show that a design knowledge IDE centered on the CDR can help novices make connections between requirements data, design representations and evaluation data and better understand how to leverage that information to improve designs.

Future efforts are focusing on exploring the utility of this approach for practitioners—especially agile developers.

A useful process and toolset for teaching usability design to novice developers and students.

The CDR makes designs coherent and understandable, thus supporting a principled, guided development process critical for student developers.

Public relations practitioners worldwide are attempting to enhance the overall organization–stakeholder relationships by applying strategic communication techniques and skills to corporate social responsibility (CSR) management and communications. In this light, drawing on the prosocial motivation literature, this paper aims to investigate consumers’ implicit and explicit motivations for prosocial behavior, and how these two motivations interact to affect consumers’ willingness to contribute to CSR activities. Second, through the lens of sensemaking theory, this study evaluates the influence of successful prosocial behavior engagement on consumers’ perceptions of both self and companies’ prosocial identities, CSR authenticity and company evaluations.

This study adopts a dictator game experiment with 2 × 2 factorial design to gauge consumers’ prosocial behavioral response toward companies’ CSR communication with implicit and explicit motivations and to examine its effect on company evaluation.

In all, the results of this study suggest that implicit motivation, i.e. self-affirmation intervention, in CSR communication will cause consumers to donate more money to CSR programs; whereas explicit motivation does not exert an effect on consumers’ prosocial behavior. In addition, such donation will trigger consumers’ prosocial sensemaking process and lead to strong identification with the company, positive attitudes and behavioral intentions toward the company.

This study aims to build a consumer- and social cause-oriented CSR communication model, which maximizes the impact of CSR investments on consumer relationship building, business bottom line and social causes.

This paper uses two complementary approaches to estimate the effect of right-to-work (RTW) laws on wages and unionization rates. The first approach uses an event study design to analyze the impact of the adoption of RTW laws in five US states since 2011. The second approach relies on a differential exposure design that exploits the differential impact of RTW laws on industries with high unionization rates relative to industries with low unionization rates. Both approaches indicate that RTW laws lower wages and unionization rates. Under the assumption that RTW laws only affect wages by lowering the unionization rate, RTW can be used as an instrumental variable (IV) to estimate the causal effect of unions on wages. In our preferred specification based on the differential exposure design, the IV estimate of the effect of unions on log wages is 0.35, which substantially exceeds the corresponding OLS estimate of 0.16. This large wage effect suggests that RTW may also directly affect wages due to a reduced union threat effect.

Examines the tenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed many challenges in almost all sectors around the globe. Because of the pandemic, government entities responsible for managing health-care resources face challenges in managing and distributing their limited and valuable health resources. In addition, severe outbreaks may occur in a small or large geographical area. Therefore, county-level preparation is crucial for officials and organizations who manage such disease outbreaks. However, most COVID-19-related research projects have focused on either state- or country-level. Only a few studies have considered county-level preparations, such as identifying high-risk counties of a particular state to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to prioritize counties in a state based on their COVID-19-related risks to manage the COVID outbreak effectively.

In this research, the authors use a systematic hybrid approach that uses a clustering technique to group counties that share similar COVID conditions and use a multi-criteria decision-making approach – the analytic hierarchy process – to rank clusters with respect to the severity of the pandemic. The clustering was performed using two methods, k-means and fuzzy c-means, but only one of them was used at a time during the experiment.

The results of this study indicate that the proposed approach can effectively identify and rank the most vulnerable counties in a particular state. Hence, state health resources managing entities can identify counties in desperate need of more attention before they allocate their resources and better prepare those counties before another surge.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to use both an unsupervised learning approach and the analytic hierarchy process to identify and rank state counties in accordance with the severity of COVID-19.

In this paper, some strategies taken to improve the reliability of solder joints on power devices in single device and multi‐chip packages are presented. A strategy for improving solder joint reliability by adjusting solder joint geometry, underfilling and utilization of flexible substrates is discussed with emphasis on triple‐stacked solder joints that resemble the shape of an hourglass. The hourglass shape relocates the highest inelastic strain away from the weaker interface with the chip to the bulk region of the joint, while the underfill provides a load transfer from the joints. Thermal cycling data show significant improvements in reliability when these techniques are used. The design, testing and finite‐element analyses of an interconnection structure, termed the Dimple‐Array Interconnect, for improving the solder joint reliability is also presented.