The Role of Gender in Preparedness and Response Behaviors towards Flood Risk in Serbia

Adverse outcomes from 2014 flooding in Serbia indicated problematic response phase management accentuated by a gender imbalance. For this reason, we investigated the risk perceptions and preparedness of women and men regarding these types of events in Serbia. Face-to-face interviews, administered to 2500 participants, were conducted across 19 of 191 municipalities. In light of the current findings, men seemed to be more confident in their abilities to cope with flooding, perceiving greater individual and household preparedness. By contrast, women displayed a deeper understanding of these events. Perhaps owing to a deeper level of understanding, women demonstrated more household-caring attitudes and behaviors and were more prone to report a willingness to help flood victims at reception centers. Emergency management agencies and land planners should account for these differences in gender awareness and preparedness. Based on these findings, doing so may increase citizen participation and shared responsibility under flood hazard scenarios

Public reactions to the disaster COVID-19: a comparative study in Italy, Lebanon, Portugal, and Serbia

A new coronavirus emerged in December 2019 and quickly spread globally, causing unprecedented social, psychological, and economic damage. This study aimed to investigate people's emotional reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. The dataset for this study consisted of 2,013 adults (962 males and 1,053 females) in four countries (Italy, Lebanon, Portugal, and Serbia). A snowball sampling technique that focused on recruiting the general public living in countries during the COVID-19 epidemic was utilized. An online survey was disseminated at the same time, in March-April 2020, when many countries were exposed to COVID-19. Results indicated that, with regard to gender, females had more psychological reactions to COVID-19 than did males. People who had one child were more stressed than people with no children. Extensive knowledge of COVID-19 was found to trigger more anxiety. Results showed that stress and overall emotional reactions increased with age. The findings can be used to develop psychological interventions to improve mental health and psychological resilience during the COVID-19 epidemic

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF TRUST AND POLICE PRESENCE IN SCHOOLS: IMPLICATIONS FOR SCHOOL SAFETY POLICY

The study aims to determine the trust and presence of police officers in schools in Serbia, as well as the perception of the principals and secretaries, teachers and staff, parents, and students on how successful the specific police units dedicated to schools were in fulfilling their tasks. The ex-post analysis was conducted through PEST/SWAT analysis, mapping the key actors and using batteries of online questionnaires, besides interviews with the MOI representatives, surveyed with personal interviewing, computer-aided surveying, desk analysis, and content analysis. The survey was conducted from September 2021 to June 2022. The research methods were implemented in 1140 schools in Serbia, and 8,617 people were included in surveys: police officers (308); principals and secretaries (1085); the team for protection against discrimination (982); teachers and staff (2988); parents (938) and students (2316). The relationships between the covariates and perception were investigated using the t-test, one-way ANOVA, multivariate linear regression, and binary regression. The results showed that a project of school police officers was not fully recognized as one of the strategically essential instruments for safe schools; trust is low, but presence is high. Besides that, the results suggest that the entire public believes that police are needed in schools and that it positively affects school safety. Regarding school safety policy, it is necessary to undertake three measures for the sustainable development of trust and the presence of police in school: regulatory, informative-educational, and institutional-organizational.

Connected Health in Europe: Where are we today?

This report, which has grown out of an ENJECT survey of 19 European countries, examines the situation of Connected Health in Europe today. It focuses on creating a clear understanding of the current and developing presence of Connected Health throughout European healthcare systems under five headings: The Policy Environment, Education, Business and Health Models, Interoperability, and The Perso

Integration of Information Patterns in the Modeling and Design of Mobility Management Services

24 pages, 11 FiguresOver the last decade, the rise of the mobile internet and the usage of mobile devices has enabled ubiquitous traffic information. With the increased adoption of specific smartphone applications, the number of users of routing applications has become large enough to disrupt traffic flow patterns in a significant manner. Similarly, but at a slightly slower pace, novel services for freight transportation and city logistics improve the efficiency of goods transportation and change the use of road infrastructure. The present article provides a general four-layer framework for modeling these new trends. The main motivation behind the development is to provide a unifying formal system description that can at the same time encompass system physics (flow and motion of vehicles) as well as coordination strategies under various information and cooperation structures. To showcase the framework, we apply it to the specific challenge of modeling and analyzing the integration of routing applications in today's transportation systems. In this framework, at the lowest layer (flow dynamics) we distinguish app users from non-app users. A distributed parameter model based on a non-local partial differential equation is introduced and analyzed. The second layer incorporates connected services (e.g., routing) and other applications used to optimize the local performance of the system. As inputs to those applications, we propose a third layer introducing the incentive design and global objectives, which are typically varying over the day depending on road and weather conditions, external events etc. The high-level planning is handled on the fourth layer taking social long-term objectives into account