A Research Agenda to Understand Drivers of Digital Gullibility

Gullibility is a behavior set that includes insensitivity to cues signaling untrustworthiness, the propensity to accept false information, reject true information, or taking costly risks. It is a useful lens from which to view real-world adverse outcomes driven by the online behaviors of seemingly well-intentioned, or non-malicious, individuals. Though well established in pre-internet literature, gullibility has been largely sidestepped as a driver of adverse events in the digital era despite ample evidence for its existence. To better understand the drivers and contextual factors behind digital gullibility, we propose a comprehensive research agenda which aligns open research gaps with a set of research driven propositions. The agenda builds on existing models and discussions in related domains, structures open questions and provides guidance for IS researchers and practitioners in the face of ongoing digital gullibility

Wearable Computing for Health and Fitness: Exploring the Relationship between Data and Human Behaviour

Health and fitness wearable technology has recently advanced, making it easier for an individual to monitor their behaviours. Previously self generated data interacts with the user to motivate positive behaviour change, but issues arise when relating this to long term mention of wearable devices. Previous studies within this area are discussed. We also consider a new approach where data is used to support instead of motivate, through monitoring and logging to encourage reflection. Based on issues highlighted, we then make recommendations on the direction in which future work could be most beneficial

Gender, mental health and resilience in armed conflict: listening to life stories of internally displaced women in Colombia

For over 60 years, Colombia has endured violent civil conflict forcibly displacing more than 8 million people. Recent efforts have begun to explore mental health consequences of these contexts, with an emphasis on national surveys. To date few Colombian studies explore mental health and well-being from a lived experience perspective. Those that do, overlook processes that enable survival. In response to this gap, we conducted a life history study of seven internally displaced Colombian women in the Cundinamarca department, analysing 18 interview sessions and 36 hours of transcripts. A thematic network analysis, informed by Latin-American perspectives on gender and critical resilience frameworks, explored women’s coping strategies in response to conflict-driven hardships related to mental well-being. Analysis illuminated that: (1) the gendered impacts of the armed conflict on women’s emotional well-being work through exacerbating historical gendered violence and inequality, intensifying existing emotional health challenges, and (2) coping strategies reflect women’s ability to mobilise cognitive, bodied, social, material and symbolic power and resources. Our findings highlight that the sociopolitical contexts of women’s lives are inseparable from their efforts to achieve mental well-being, and the value of deep narrative and historical work to capturing the complexity of women’s experiences within conflict settings. We suggest the importance of social interventions to support the mental health of women in conflict settings, in order to centre the social and political contexts faced by such marginalised groups within efforts to improve mental health

Contextualising energy justice in low-income built environment: Towards data-driven policy interventions for addressing distributive injustices in slum rehabilitation housing of the Global South

Around a billion people live in slums today globally, and rehabilitating them to formal housing is a significant challenge. Slum rehabilitation housing is a policy effort to solve this crisis and alleviate urban poverty. However, the question of whether slum rehabilitation programmes are accomplishing more good than harm or whether they are creating a whole host of new problems remains unexplored in the literature. This thesis investigates the effect of slum rehabilitation on household energy demand in Brazil, India and Nigeria through the lens of distributive energy justice. Furthermore, this thesis makes methodological innovation to aid in just policy design by improving the objectivity of including local and contextual knowledge on how poor households live and use energy. Doing so makes novel theoretical and methodological contributions: a theoretical contribution to temporality and spatial energy justice studies on how to offer cross-sectional depictions of energy demand within the slum rehabilitation housing, which was evaluated through structural equation modelling, and a methodological contribution in developing a deep-narrative analysis framework using natural language processing and machine learning-based Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm to capture the grounded narratives of distributive injustices objectively. This research highlighted the significance of contextualisation in planning for energy justice in slum communities and the role of digital tools like natural language processing in objectively integrating grounded narratives in just policy design. The contextualisation was done through zoom-in and zoom-out of the grounded narratives enabled through the multi-method approach. Zooming-out view of distributed injustices in the study areas of Mumbai (India), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Abuja (Nigeria) revealed inefficiencies in the administration of electricity distribution companies, lumped billing periods and lack of people-centric built environment design considerations. Similarly, zooming-in the case studies revealed that the poor design of the slum rehabilitation-built environment influenced the increase in energy intensity in the Mumbai case, leading to energy poverty. Whereas created distinct poverty traps in the Brazilian and Nigerian cases through frequent power cuts, high cost of appliance repair, and poor housing design. Finally, policy implications were drawn as per the policy actors across municipal, state and national levels that suggested leveraging digital tools like the deep-narrative analysis and the heavy penetration of Information and Communication Technology devices in such low-income communities. Such tools can improve accountability in decision-making and improve the representation of the occupants through their narratives of injustices associated with living in such communities. Thus, this thesis uniquely forwarded a data-driven pathway for integrating local collective intelligence in just policy design.Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the Gates Cambridge Scholarship under the Grant Number OPP1144

Liveable for whom? Prospects of urban liveability to address health inequities

The aspiration of liveable cities, underpinned by the New Urban Agenda, is gaining popularity as a mechanism to enhance population health and wellbeing. However, less attention has been given to understanding how urban liveability may provide an opportunity to redress health inequities. Using an environmental justice lens, this paper investigates whether urban liveability poses an opportunity or threat to reducing health inequities and outlines a future research agenda. Selected urban liveability attributes, being: education; employment; food, alcohol, and tobacco; green space; housing; transport; and walkability, were investigated to understand how they can serve to widen or narrow inequities. Some domains showed consistent evidence, others suggested context-specific associations that made it difficult to draw general conclusions, and some showed a reverse patterning with the social gradient, but with poorer outcomes. This suggests urban liveability attributes have equigenic potential, but operate within a complex system. We conclude more disadvantaged neighbourhoods and their residents likely have additional policy and design considerations for optimising outcomes, especially as changes to the contextual environment may impact neighbourhood composition through displacement and/or pulling up effects. Future research needs to continue to explore downstream associations using longitudinal and natural experiments, and also seek to gain a deeper understanding of the urban liveability system, including interactions, feedback loops, and non-linear and linear responses. There is a need to monitor neighbourhood population changes over time to understand how liveability impacts the most vulnerable. Other areas worthy of further investigation include applying a life course approach and understanding liveability within the context of other adversities and contextual settings

How do parents manage irritability, challenging behavior, non-compliance and anxiety in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders? A meta-synthesis

Although there is increasing research interest in the parenting of children with ASD, at present, little is known about everyday strategies used to manage problem behaviour. We conducted a meta-synthesis to explore what strategies parents use to manage irritability, non-compliance, challenging behaviour and anxiety in their children with ASD. Approaches included: (1) accommodating the child; (2) modifying the environment; (3) providing structure, routine and occupation; (4) supervision and monitoring; (5) managing non-compliance with everyday tasks; (6) responding to problem behaviour; (7) managing distress; (8) maintaining safety and (9) analysing and planning. Results suggest complex parenting demands in children with ASD and problem behaviour. Findings will inform the development of a new measure to quantify parenting strategies relevant to ASD

Sensorial pedagogies, hungry fat cells and the limits of nutritional health education

International audienceThis article examines the way the category of 'the sensorial' is mobilised across obesity research and care practices for overweight persons in France. The 'natural' body is understood to have developed mechanisms that motivate eaters to seek out energy-dense foods, a hardwiring that is maladaptive in today's plethoric food environment. The article analyses the feedback models mobilised in scientific literature on the neuroendocrine processes regulating appetite. The analysis of how 'the sensorial' is studied and used to treat patients provides a vantage point onto the ways foods and bodies transform each other. Recent findings show that fat cells influence metabolism by secreting hormones, revealing that eaters are affected by the materiality of the foods they ingest. 'The sensorial' functions as a regulator in the feedback mechanisms where social norms regulating foodscapes become enfolded in the molecular processes that control appetite regulation. The article traces the work that the category of 'the sensorial' does as it flows through the loops and feedbacks between scientific evidence, policy and care. It examines the way pleasure and the sensations of eaters are increasingly foregrounded in French nutritional health promotion strategies in a context where informing eaters is increasingly deemed ineffective

To scale or not to scale : contextualising women entrepreneurs perceptions of value and success

All entrepreneurship takes place in specific contexts. Successful entrepreneurs are associated with financial wealth and economic value. Research into the success of women entrepreneurs has centred around explaining why male entrepreneurs outperform their female counterparts. This fails to recognise the contextually embedded nature of women’s entrepreneurship and the contextual embedded assumptions about gender. This study aims to establish how women entrepreneurs perceive success and value creation for themselves and how these perceptions shape their decisions to scale their businesses. A qualitative, exploratory research method was adopted to gain new insights into how women entrepreneurs perceive success. Thirteen semi-structure, in-depth interviews were conducted with women entrepreneurs who had owned their own businesses for more than four years. Interviews were analysed using thematic content analysis. The key findings supported the literature that women entrepreneurship is contextually embedded. It found that women view personal fulfilment in their work as their key measure for success. It also found that the external context intersects with the individual entrepreneur and her internal context. These contextual dimensions influenced women with respect to their decisions to scale or not to scale their businesses. An additional dimension of context, being the internal context of ‘Self’, emerged as being critical to understanding the contextually embedded nature of women’s entrepreneurship. A conceptual framework was developed to show the intersectionality between the external and individual context of the entrepreneur. Findings build on the extant literature on the contextual embeddedness of women entrepreneursMini Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2019.pt2020Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS)MB