Search results

Enforcing employee compliance with information systems security policies (ISSP) is a herculean task for organizations as security breaches due to non-compliance continue to soar. To improve this situation, researchers have employed fear appeals that are based on protection motivation theory (PMT) to induce compliance behavior. However, extant research on fear appeals has yielded mixed findings. To help explain these mixed findings, the authors contend that efficacy formation is a cognitive process that is impacted by the cognitive load exerted by the design of fear appeal messages.

The study draws on cognitive load theory (CLT) to examine the effects of intrinsic cognitive load, extraneous cognitive load and germane cognitive load on stimulating an individual’s efficacy and coping appraisals. The authors designed a survey to collect data from 359 respondents and tested the model using partial least squares.

The analysis showed significant relationships between cognitive load (intrinsic, extraneous, and germane) and fear, maladaptive rewards, response costs, self-efficacy and response efficacy.

This provides support for the assertion that fear appeals impact the cognitive processes of individuals that then in turn can potentially affect the efficacy of fear and coping appraisals. These findings demonstrate the need to further investigate how individual cognition is impacted by fear appeal design and the resulting effects on compliance intention and behavior.

This chapter discusses the challenges and opportunities of integrating big data generated by contemporary museums into data ecology and data fabrics of smart cities. First, it exposes that smart cities could enhance their global reputation, visibility and image by building on closer collaborations with museums. Second, it demonstrates that museums in the 21st century have transformed into hyper-connected cultural hubs, spreading their reach and impact beyond their immediate urban locations. Finally, this chapter discusses creative approaches to data-curation mechanisms that stress the role of museums and cultural heritage sites in supplying data for a more strategic and proactive smart city co-design and management. Specifically, this chapter offers a three-dimensional framework for integrating heritage data in the design of smart city data ecosystems, which includes such components as Data Resources, Data Republics and Data Impacts. Data Resources stresses museum collections’ data and meta-data as a strategic resource to empower creative public data-curation practices to tell meaningful stories about the city and enhance place-making. Data Republics focuses on big data generated by visitors online or on-site as a foundation for evidence-based urban research, design and management, empowering more sustainable, safe and enjoyable tourism. Data Impacts details data-driven methodologies that museums could employ to measure public sentiment and opinion to offer new human-centred indicators to understand the performance of smart cities. This chapter shares a conceptual framework for repurposing museum data within a smart city data ecology to translate the current data excess into data intelligence.

Evaluating emergency preparedness exercises is crucial for assessing enhanced knowledge, facilitating learning and implementing knowledge in organizations. The cognitive process of motivation for action is a precursor for action, coping behavior and individual learning. This study aims to focus on how guided evaluation of emergency preparedness exercises can enhance cognitive motivation and influence the mental readiness of exercise participants.

This is a conceptual paper with a model approach design. The main conceptual contribution is suggesting a model for guided evaluation in emergency preparedness exercises. We present a theoretical background for understanding the increase in motivation based on social cognitive learning theory. In particular, this study discusses how different evaluation steps contribute to enhanced motivation and learning for exercise participants.

Increased motivation and enhanced personal performance standards could be achieved through using processes that lead to self-efficacy in guided exercise evaluation. Specifically, sources of enhanced motivation, such as repeated coping experiences, self-regulation processes, mastery motivation and performance motivation, would proliferate the readiness of individual crisis managers and teams.

This article suggests an evaluation model for use in emergency preparedness exercises. This approach combines bottom-up and top-down processes for debriefing, reflection and feedback, both individually and in teams. This approach aims to enhance exercise participants’ motivation and utilize exercise evaluation for organizational learning.

The conceptual discussion leads to developing implications for evaluation practice, suggesting how to structure evaluation and why. This study is novel for its explanation of how to use evaluation in the learning process.

The paper aims at addressing the following research questions: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency? And which pillars of institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

By specifying a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method where GHG emissions are considered as the bad output and the GDP is referred as the desirable one, the work computes the environmental efficiency into the appraisal of a production function for the European countries over three decades.

According to the countries' performance, the findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries. In this environmental context, the role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries.

This article attempts to analyze the role of different dimensions of institutional quality in different European countries' performance – in terms of mitigating GHGs (undesirable output) – while trying to raise their economic performance through their GDP (desirable output).

1. The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

2. We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

3. The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

4. The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

Adolescence and emerging adulthood are key developmental stages with high risk for trauma exposure and the development of mental and substance-use disorders (SUDs). This study aims to compare the clinical profiles of adolescents (aged 12–17 years) and emerging adults (aged 18–25 years) presenting for treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and SUD.

Data was collected from the baseline assessment of individuals (n = 55) taking part in a randomized controlled trial examining the efficacy of an integrated psychological therapy for co-occurring PTSD and SUDs (PTSD+SUD) in young people.

Both age groups demonstrated complex and severe clinical profiles, including high-frequency trauma exposure, and very poor mental health reflected on measures of PTSD, SUD, suicidality and domains of social, emotional, behavioral and family functioning. There were few differences in clinical characteristics between the two groups.

Similarity between the two groups suggests that the complex problems seen in emerging adults with PTSD + SUD are likely to have had their onset in adolescence or earlier and to have been present for several years by the time individuals present for treatment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to compare the demographic and clinical profiles of adolescents and emerging adults with PTSD + SUD. These findings yield important implications for practice and policy for this vulnerable group. Evidence-based prevention and early intervention approaches and access to care are critical. Alongside trauma-focused treatment, there is a critical need for integrated, trauma-informed approaches specifically tailored to young people with PTSD + SUD.

The purpose of this paper is to review cases of artificial reefs built through additive manufacturing (AM) technologies and analyse their ecological goals, fabrication process, materials, structural design features and implementation location to determine predominant parameters, environmental impacts, advantages, and limitations.

The review analysed 16 cases of artificial reefs from both temperate and tropical regions. These were categorised based on the AM process used, the mortar material used (crucial for biological applications), the structural design features and the location of implementation. These parameters are assessed to determine how effectively the designs meet the stipulated ecological goals, how AM technologies demonstrate their potential in comparison to conventional methods and the preference locations of these implementations.

The overview revealed that the dominant artificial reef implementation occurs in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Seas, both accounting for 24%. The remaining cases were in the Australian Sea (20%), the South Asia Sea (12%), the Persian Gulf and the Pacific Ocean, both with 8%, and the Indian Sea with 4% of all the cases studied. It was concluded that fused filament fabrication, binder jetting and material extrusion represent the main AM processes used to build artificial reefs. Cementitious materials, ceramics, polymers and geopolymer formulations were used, incorporating aggregates from mineral residues, biological wastes and pozzolan materials, to reduce environmental impacts, promote the circular economy and be more beneficial for marine ecosystems. The evaluation ranking assessed how well their design and materials align with their ecological goals, demonstrating that five cases were ranked with high effectiveness, ten projects with moderate effectiveness and one case with low effectiveness.

AM represents an innovative method for marine restoration and management. It offers a rapid prototyping technique for design validation and enables the creation of highly complex shapes for habitat diversification while incorporating a diverse range of materials to benefit environmental and marine species’ habitats.

This study examined the characteristics, motivations and satisfaction of volunteers for the Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon Weekend across a 10-year period. The purpose was to enhance our understanding of sport event volunteers, especially in the long term. This information and insight may be useful in light of ongoing challenges with volunteer recruitment and retention, which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors developed and implemented an online survey, based primarily on the Special Event Volunteer Motivation Scale (SEVMS) and the Volunteer Motivations Scale for International Sporting Events (VMS-ISE). The sample included a total of 2,038 respondents – 1,086 in 2012 and 952 in 2022. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests; qualitative data provided additional insight.

About two-thirds of 2022 survey respondents were “repeat volunteers.” Volunteer characteristics, motivations and satisfaction remained relatively consistent across the 10-year period. These volunteers were motivated by a set of multiple, interrelated factors which the authors call “community-based altruism” – that is, the desire to help others driven by a sense of community involvement and pride. In both years, more than 90% were satisfied with their volunteer experience. Satisfaction was higher for individuals with certain characteristics such as being a repeat volunteer and volunteering with a group.

This may be the first scholarly article to assess volunteer characteristics, motivations and satisfaction for a major sport event in the same location across multiple years. While it focused on a three-day running event in a midwestern city in the United States, the approach and findings may be applicable to sport event volunteers in other contexts.

This paper presents a 10-year systematic review of research on the visual framing of crises to identify the priorities, theories applied and trends in the scholarship of visual framing during crises. The gaps are analyzed to provide evidence-based recommendations for advancing future research.

A total of 269 articles published in 156 peer-reviewed communication journals between January 2014 to December 2023 were reviewed. Data were analyzed using open and axial qualitative coding. A codebook was developed for the quantitative coding and data were analyzed in SPSS descriptive statistics and chi-square tests to answer the research questions.

The proportion of visual framing of crises has remained the same in the last 10 years – there is significantly more research on the visual framing of non-crises. Overall, research on the visual framing of crises is largely exploratory/descriptive and could benefit from a research agenda that is more theory driven. Additionally, there is a skewed focus for research on North America compared to other regions, and for political communication and climate compared to other themes. Environmental sciences and engineering are the most widely investigated journal fields, while disaster is the most common typology studied when looking at the visual framing of crises.

The systematic literature review has some limitations – most particularly that the sample was drawn from a single publisher, which may not be exhaustive enough to represent the full population of articles in the field of visual communication. However, it is a systematic review of the publications that are officially aligned with three of the major communication organizations – the International Communication Association, National Communication Association and World Communication Association. However, future research considering the inclusion of an additional publishers, like Emerald, would further enrich scholarship in visual framing during crises. Second, manual coding of the articles could present potential differences in analysis and interpretation by other researchers. Despite the limitations, the study also provides some important insights into the present and future of the visual framing of crises.

Addressing gaps in the internationalization of visual crisis communication would expand studies for visual framing among underrepresented communities such as populations with low reading literacy, gender minorities and displaced communities and inform visual framing strategies for government and relevant institutions as primary information disseminators during crises.

Addressing the gaps identified in this systematic literature review on the visual framing of crises is important for extending theory in this relatively nascent field and guiding crisis visual framing strategies to mitigate uncertainty and panic, threats to stakeholder relationships, social vulnerabilities and the visual framing of stakeholder-centric crisis responses.

Based on available literature, this is the first systematic literature review investigating the use of all types of visuals used during all crisis typologies, reflecting the ubiquity of crises and the increased focus on the use of visuals in crisis communication in the last decade.

The effects of climate change have been contributing to coral reef degradation. Artificial reefs are one method being used to counteract this destruction. However, the most common artificial approaches, such as sunken vehicles and prefabricated cement reefs, do not allow adequate coral development. This paper aims to demonstrate how designers, using additive manufacturing and computational design techniques, can create artificial reefs that better mimic natural reef structures.

This research focuses on developing three-dimensional matrices through computational design using additive manufacturing to achieve better coral settlement. A “Nature Centered Design” approach was followed, with the corals at the center of the design project. Samples with different geometries and roughness, produced using paste-based extrusion with porcelain and porcelain with oyster shell, were tested in a controlled environment to investigate the settlement preference of soft corals.

The rapid prototyping of samples confirmed the preference of corals to settle to complex surfaces compared to smooth surfaces. Porcelain showed comparable results to Portland cement, suggesting further testing potential. A closer resemblance to the natural and intricate forms found in coral reefs was achieved through computational design.

This paper proposes a new approach combining rapid prototyping with coral’s biological responses to enhance the understanding of their surface settlement preference. The Nature Centered Design approach, with additive manufacturing and computational design, made it possible to create an innovative working model that could be customized depending on the implementation area or intended coral species, validating the design approach as a method to support environmental conservation.

The study aims to explore how fashion visual symbols influence consumers' inclination for repurchasing. It attempts to investigate the intricate interplay among three essential variables (social presence, collective excitement and cultural identification) from the perspective of Interaction Ritual Chains theory. Meanwhile, an attempt is made to reveal the underlying patterns in these relationships, fully harnessing the positive impact of fashion brand visual symbols in brand marketing.

This study employs a quantitative research methodology, administering an online survey in China, from which 381 valid responses were collected by simple random sampling. The acquired data were subjected to structural equation model and hypotheses testing.

The analysis reveals that heightened visual symbol perception significantly strengthens consumers' social presence, consequently elevating the probability of collective excitement. This establishes a mediated chain model, reinforcing repurchase intention. Additionally, the moderation effect analysis indicates that cultural identification negatively moderates both direct paths in the mediated chain model, with particularly pronounced effects for low cultural identification.

This study establishes a closed-loop system in fashion brand product marketing, continuously enhancing the intimacy and interactive willingness between consumers, as well as between consumers and the brand. The objective is to increase brand repurchase rates. Additionally, the research provides valuable recommendations and strategies for fashion brands to adapt to Chinese consumer demands, strengthen emotional attachment between consumers and the brand, and achieve sustainable development in the realm of fashion consumption.