2,968 research outputs found
An embodied approach to informational interventions: using conceptual metaphors to promote sustainable healthy diets
Poor diet quality and environmental degradation are two major challenges of our times. Unhealthy and unsustainable dietary practices, such as the overconsumption of meat and consumer food waste behaviour, contribute greatly to both issues. Across seventeen online and field experiments, in two different cultures (US and China), this thesis investigates if the embodied cognition approach, and more specifically, research on conceptual metaphors, can be used to develop interventions to promote sustainable healthy diets. Interventions relying on conceptual metaphors have been shown to stimulate attitudinal and behavioural changes in other fields (e.g., marketing and political communications), but are rarely adopted to encourage sustainable healthy diets. To fill in this gap in the literature, I conducted five sets of experimental studies examining the effects of different metaphors on specific sustainable healthy dietary practices, each of which forms an independent empirical paper (Chapters 2-6 of the thesis). After introducing the current perspectives on embodied cognition and conceptual metaphors in the context of this research (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 looks into the conceptual metaphor “Healthy is Up”, demonstrating that US people implicitly associate healthiness with verticality, and offering recommendations for healthy eating guidelines. Chapter 3 extends this research to Chinese samples and partially replicates the results. Chapter 4 shows that the anthropomorphic metaphor “Animals are Friends” discourages meat consumption by inducing anticipatory guilt among US omnivores, whereas Chapter 5 reveals that Chinese omnivores are more responsive to another anthropomorphic metaphor, namely, “Animals are Family”. Bringing lab insights 6 to the real world, Chapter 6 demonstrates with a longitudinal field experiment that anthropomorphic metaphors together with environmental feedback result in a higher reduction in food waste as compared to other feedback interventions. The strengths, limitations and implications of those empirical papers are discussed in the conclusive part of the thesis
Exploring the perspectives of academic and senior management staff on the influence of global university rankings in the higher education context of Kazakhstan
Global university rankings (GURs) have gained popularity and practical importance in the last few decades as they are used as a proxy indicator of a university's reputation and quality by different stakeholders including governments, funders, and students. Deepening globalisation processes, competition between national university systems and demand for public organisations to be accountable and efficient have enhanced the role of GURs in higher education (HE). Although GURs are exposed to numerous critiques, including methodological limitations, they satisfy a demand for information about the quality of HE by making comparative assessments of thousands of universities globally and are becoming influential in decision-making pertaining to HE reforms and policymaking. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are eager to participate in GURs in building their global brand visibility and reputation, and in recruiting potential students.The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions and experiences of academic and senior management staff on the impact of GURs at a public university, one of the leading universities of Kazakhstan in major GURs. This study adopted a qualitative exploratory design that included interviews (N = 17) with academic and senior management staff. Institutional theory and a theory of academic imperialism guided the study and provided useful perspectives in explaining the behaviour of HEIs in response to GURs as well as the growinghegemony of GURs in HE, especially in developing countries.The findings suggest that participation in GURs has led to profound changes in the sampled university, especially in terms of the prioritisation of the research performance of HEIs. In particular, this study reveals that GURs play a significant role in Kazakhstan’s HEIs strategies to regulate research activities through accountability and incentivisation policies. The findings indicate that the university focused on improving its ranking position through pressure to publish and via performance-based incentives. However, these measures did not result inimproved research performance. The findings also revealed barriers to enhanced research performance, including limited English language proficiency, a tension between teaching and research, and insufficient funding of research. A major finding is that academics at the university under study employed various gaming techniques such as gift authorship, publishing in predatory journals and exploiting methodological limitations of GURs in order to raise “an impression” of research productivity. Institutional data indicated that HEIs in Kazakhstan mainly improved their ranking position through reputational indicators and the Faculty Student Ratio indicator while citation indicators, which could reflect research productivity, are consistently low across all HEIs. This study makes a timely contribution to understanding the impact of GURs on HEIs of Kazakhstan as a country with ambitious plans for developing its HE sector.<br/
Perceived Influence Of Career And Technical Student Organizations On Postsecondary Choices
The purpose of this basic qualitative research study was to explore the perceptions of former career and technical student organization (CTSO) members’ postsecondary choices relative to their involvement in CTSOs in a midsize city high school. The research question that guided this qualitative study was:
How do former participants in CTSOs describe the student organization’s influence on their postsecondary choices?
Thirteen former CTSO members participated in this study through semistructured individual interviews. Four themes emerged from the data: (a) use of soft skills, (b) engagement with others, (c) participation in conferences, and (d) leadership preparation. Through data analysis, the themes indicated that former CTSO members believed that involvement in their CTSO influenced their postsecondary choice and their overall experience as a member was positive. Implications of this study include (a) that participation in a CTSO has a positive influence on members; (b) the more a member participates in a CTSO, the more benefits they receive; and (c) CTSOs create a “safe place” for students to share challenges, to learn from mentors, and to learn about community resources. From the findings, two areas for further study are (a) that a broader study should include former members of any high school student organization, not just those specific to former members of a high school CTSO and (b) that a broader study should include former CTSO members from more than one high school
Structuring the State’s Voice of Contention in Harmonious Society: How Party Newspapers Cover Social Protests in China
During the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) campaign of building a ‘harmonious society’, how do the official newspapers cover the instances of social contention on the ground? Answering this question will shed light not only on how the party press works but also on how the state and the society interact in today’s China. This thesis conceptualises this phenomenon with a multi-faceted and multi-levelled notion of ‘state-initiated contentious public sphere’ to capture the complexity of mediated relations between the state and social contention in the party press. Adopting a relational approach, this thesis analyses 1758 news reports of ‘mass incident’ in the People’s Daily and the Guangming Daily between 2004 and 2020, employing cluster analysis, qualitative comparative analysis, and social network analysis. The thesis finds significant differences in the patterns of contentious coverage in the party press at the level of event and province and an uneven distribution of attention to social contention across incidents and regions. For ‘reported regions’, the thesis distinguishes four types of coverage and presents how party press responds differently to social contention in different scenarios at the provincial level. For ‘identified incidents’, the thesis distinguishes a cumulative type of visibility based on the quantity of coverage from a relational visibility based on the structure emerging from coverage and explains how different news-making rationales determine whether instances receive similar amounts of coverage or occupy similar positions within coverage. Eventually, by demonstrating how the Chinese state strategically uses party press to respond to social contention and how social contention is journalistically placed in different positions in the state’s eyes, this thesis argues that what social contention leads to is the establishment of complex state-contention relations channelled through the party press
With the Participatory Consumer Audience in mind: exploring and developing professional brand identity designers reflexive practice
This PhD reflects upon first-hand unidirectional and passive consumer audience experience approaches prevalent in professional UK brand identity design. It explores: How brand identity designers might move towards an improved reflexive practice in the design of consumer audience experiences. This practice-led research focuses on the ideas generation stage of their design process.
An ongoing constructivist audience paradigm shift signals that when thinking about and using their positionality in relation to their consumer audience experiences, designers need reflexive practice to support critical reflection of themselves, their biases and assumptions. This research uncovered a lack of relevant theory regarding reflexive practice specific to the context of brand identity design. This insufficiency throws into doubt designers' relational, participatory and equitable approaches in their working practices and their abilities to address market imperatives, including client requirements connected to the ongoing audience paradigm shift.
Aligned with John Dewey's ethical pragmatism and drawing from Creswell, Tashakkori and Teddlie, my study adopts a mixed methods methodology. Alongside established qualitative and quantitative methods, this includes my practice via design visualisations, as discussed by Drucker, and builds upon Carl DiSalvo's approach of practice used to do inquiry and design as a method of inquiry. My practice enabled me to critically reflect, evaluate and construct reflexive practice knowledge, including the development of reflexive practice communications, to advance understanding of and improve other designers' reflexive practice, and to communicate my process of reflexive design practice research.
Thirty UK-based professional brand identity designers participated in this research: nineteen participants in Phase One, a questionnaire, and six in Phase Two semi-structured interviews. Phase One and Two findings identified a gap in that designers are not employing a reflexive design practice and lack the resources to do so. Seeking to improve these shortcomings, eighteen initial reflexive design practice principles were explored and tested in Phase Three, a workshop involving five design participants. Results showed that the principles facilitated participants to advance prior thinking and engage in a reflexive design practice.
Further reflections and insights from the same five Phase Three participants uncovered a need to refine and reduce the principles and communicate them in a guide. Eight revised overarching and eighteen sub-principles in a prototype guide were explored in Phase Four in applied practice by three brand identity designers involved in Phase Three. Results corroborated workshop findings and provided further recommendations.
Contributions of this research are three-fold. First, offering an advanced understanding of professional brand identity designers' reflexive practice and process knowledge. Second, it produced a reflexive design guide with eight overarching and eighteen sub-reflexive design principles and corresponding digital app, thereby offering a preliminary new design practice method. This method offers a way to improve designers' thinking about and operation of their relational positionality, participatory consumer audience experience approaches, and reflexive design practice actions. Third, it provides a contribution to knowledge via its methodology, which integrates design visualisation practice into a mixed methods approach
Protecting Privacy in Indian Schools: Regulating AI-based Technologies' Design, Development and Deployment
Education is one of the priority areas for the Indian government, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are touted to bring digital transformation. Several Indian states have also started deploying facial recognition-enabled CCTV cameras, emotion recognition technologies, fingerprint scanners, and Radio frequency identification tags in their schools to provide personalised recommendations, ensure student security, and predict the drop-out rate of students but also provide 360-degree information of a student. Further, Integrating Aadhaar (digital identity card that works on biometric data) across AI technologies and learning and management systems (LMS) renders schools a ‘panopticon’.
Certain technologies or systems like Aadhaar, CCTV cameras, GPS Systems, RFID tags, and learning management systems are used primarily for continuous data collection, storage, and retention purposes. Though they cannot be termed AI technologies per se, they are fundamental for designing and developing AI systems like facial, fingerprint, and emotion recognition technologies. The large amount of student data collected speedily through the former technologies is used to create an algorithm for the latter-stated AI systems. Once algorithms are processed using machine learning (ML) techniques, they learn correlations between multiple datasets predicting each student’s identity, decisions, grades, learning growth, tendency to drop out, and other behavioural characteristics. Such autonomous and repetitive collection, processing, storage, and retention of student data without effective data protection legislation endangers student privacy.
The algorithmic predictions by AI technologies are an avatar of the data fed into the system. An AI technology is as good as the person collecting the data, processing it for a relevant and valuable output, and regularly evaluating the inputs going inside an AI model. An AI model can produce inaccurate predictions if the person overlooks any relevant data. However, the state, school administrations and parents’ belief in AI technologies as a panacea to student security and educational development overlooks the context in which ‘data practices’ are conducted. A right to privacy in an AI age is inextricably connected to data practices where data gets ‘cooked’. Thus, data protection legislation operating without understanding and regulating such data practices will remain ineffective in safeguarding privacy.
The thesis undergoes interdisciplinary research that enables a better understanding of the interplay of data practices of AI technologies with social practices of an Indian school, which the present Indian data protection legislation overlooks, endangering students’ privacy from designing and developing to deploying stages of an AI model. The thesis recommends the Indian legislature frame better legislation equipped for the AI/ML age and the Indian judiciary on evaluating the legality and reasonability of designing, developing, and deploying such technologies in schools
"It's not a career": Platform work among young people aged 16-19
In the online gig economy, or platform work as it is sometimes known, work can be organised through websites and smartphone apps. People can drive for Uber or Deliveroo, sell items on eBay or Etsy, or rent their properties on Airbnb.
This research examines the views of young people between the ages of 16 and 19 in the United Kingdom to see whether they knew about the online gig economy, whether they were using it already to earn money, and whether they expected to use it for their careers. It discovers careers professionals’ levels of knowledge, and their ability (and desire) to include the gig economy in their professional practice.
This research contributes to discussions about what constitutes decent work, and whether it can be found within the online gig economy. The results point to ways in which careers practice could include platform work as a means of extending young people’s knowledge about alternative forms of work. This study also makes a theoretical contribution to literature, bringing together elements of careership, cognitive schema theory, and motivational theory and psychology of working theory, in a novel combination, to explain how young people were thinking about platform work in the context of their careers
ADDRESSING LITERACY RATES AMONG STUDENTS IN GRADES 3-5 WHO ARE ELIGIBLE FOR FREE AND REDUCED LUNCH IN DURHAM COUNTY THROUGH THE READ AND FEED PROGRAM
Improving literacy among children in Durham County warrants immediate public health action. On a national, state, and county level, research shows that students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) show significantly lower reading proficiency compared to students who are not eligible. Children with low literacy rates have a higher risk of dropping out of school, not attending university, and having lower job prospects compared to their peers that read at a higher literacy level. Taking this data into consideration, we plan to implement a nutrition-supported literacy-based initiative within Durham County Public Schools. The Read and Feed program will serve students in grades 3, 4, and 5 who read at a “not-proficient” literacy level and are enrolled in NSLP. The program’s mission is to impact under-served elementary students by strengthening their reading skills and providing nutritious meals.Master of Public Healt
Engagement from the Community Perspective: Understanding the Role Community Associations Play in Planning and Development in Calgary
Change, through urban planning, is inevitable and necessary because it responds to growth, community needs, and the ever-changing economy. To steer change, planning projects benefit when effective community engagement programs are applied. Community associations have long been advocating on behalf of their communities, however the level of influence they have on decision-making is unclear in part to their level of authority being unclear. Interviews helped answer two connected research questions. The first question focuses on community associations by asking: What is the role community associations play when an urban planning project is proposed within their community? The second question focuses on authority: Should the level of engagement vary based on the level of impact the planning project may have on the community, as identified by the community association? Community voices from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, shared their experiences with engagement on planning and development projects. Three overarching themes emerged through inductive and deductive analysis of the interview data: constraints community associations experience with community engagement; opportunities of community engagement; and frustrations felt by community associations in regard to community engagement opportunities. The study results suggest that community associations are limited to instill change through engagement, despite their perceived role. Based on the research data, three recommendations to support community associations are proposed: extending timelines and enforcing engagement on complex planning projects, redefining the role of a community association, and developing community engagement profiles. The impact of these recommendations presents three opportunities to evolve community engagement in planning at a community level
Barriers to and Opportunities for Intergovernmental Conflict Resolution: A Case Study of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion
Federalism can exacerbate tensions around the uneven geographical distribution of natural resources. Related conflicts recur in Canada, a federal state with an uneven distribution of petroleum products across its provinces and territories. A salient example of intergovernmental conflict over petroleum products is the dispute over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project. This research examines the conflict among the Governments of Canada, British Columbia, and Alberta around Trans Mountain, focusing on the barriers to intergovernmental conflict resolution and mitigation in Canada and the requirements any policy options must fulfill to overcome these barriers. A mainly qualitative approach addresses these issues. Specifically, this research combines global energy governance and John L. Campbell’s typology of ideas to create a new approach. Campbell is more central to this research. This approach is applied to a secondary statistical analysis of public opinion polling, a thematic analysis of key actors’ public documents, and an analysis of interviews I conducted with key actors.
This research finds that together, competitive federalism and the joint decision trap prevent conflict resolution. Accordingly, this research produces a list of barriers to resolving this intergovernmental conflict and requirements for mitigating this conflict. By identifying these requirements, I create and apply an original approach that future studies can use to test the likelihood of success for policy options to mitigate similar intergovernmental conflicts over natural resources. This research’s evaluation of potential mitigation tools suggests that 1) federal and provincial teams dedicated to large projects help bureaucrats complete these projects; 2) policies protecting the environment decrease tensions among actors; and 3) leveraging communication through partisan affiliations decreases tension
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