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At the Resins and Pigments Exhibition in Amsterdam this month, Degussa will feature especially colour blacks for coatings and printing inks as well as Aerosil fumed silica with its many functions as a thixotropy and viscosity control and its anti‐sag and anti‐settle properties. Further highlights will be on Degussa's range of matting agents for a variety of coating systems, extender silicates for various applications and iron blue for printing inks.

To conduct a systematic review of public relations ethics (PRE) research and scholarship in the 21st century and suggest future research directions. The study is prompted by macro-level phenomena that have impacted societies since the beginning of the 21st century—notably globalisation 4.0 and the fourth industrial revolution.

A systematic review was used to search academic literature. Articles discussing PRE in nine leading English-language public relations and business ethics journals between 2000 and 2019 were reviewed. A code-frame facilitated data extraction and subsequent quantitative analysis; qualitative analysis identified key themes.

The review identified 288 articles, with discussions involving PRE increasing over time. Most works approached the topic generally, rather than from a specific sub-disciplinary perspective, and drew from professional settings. Works were dominated by authors from North American institutions and North American samples. Research became increasingly empirical and intra-disciplinary and discussion about ethics was broadly categorised as part of public relations practice or from the perspective of the “academy”. Overall, the field can be described as of notable size, maturing, yet unbalanced in some regards.

The review helps to identify whether PRE research reflects major changes in the 21st century and augments the sparse recent reviews of PRE research.

In the evaluation of most interventions in criminal justice settings, evaluators have no control over assignment to treatment and control/comparison conditions, which means that the treated and comparison groups may have differences that lead to biased conclusions regarding treatment effectiveness. Propensity score analysis can be used to balance the differences in the groups, which can be used in a number of ways to reduce biased conclusions regarding effectiveness. A review of propensity scoring studies was conducted for this chapter, where the limited number of evaluations of criminal justice interventions using these methods was identified. Due to the small number of these studies, research was also reviewed if propensity scoring had been employed to evaluate interventions that are similar to those in criminal justice systems. These studies are used as examples to demonstrate how the methods can be used to evaluate criminal justice interventions, the different ways propensity scores can be used to analyse treatment and comparison group differences, and the strengths and limitations of this approach. It is concluded that, while not appropriate for all interventions/settings, propensity score analysis can be useful in criminal justice arenas, at least to investigate the comparability of treatment and comparison groups, with suspected non-comparability being a common weakness of traditional quasi-experimental studies and frequently cited limitation in terms of drawing efficacy conclusions from such evaluations.

Extant consumer behavior research has alluded to consumer learning; however, little research exists regarding situated learning and its relation to coping with respect to stressful consumption experiences. The purpose of this research is to study situated or in situ learning in two cultural contexts – that of the USA and China.

Online data were collected from non-students in both the USA and China, and structural equations modeling was used to analyze data.

Results demonstrated that situated learning helped cope better with stressful episodes for both cultures. Psychological closeness to the problem mediated the relationship between the antecedents and situated learning for US consumers more than for Chinese consumers.

Since US consumers tend to be psychologically close to the stressor during the consumption process, firms should preemptively inform and educate them about potential stressors to help them learn and cope. However, as Chinese consumers tend not to be psychologically close to the problem, they need to be dealt differently.

This research provides a holistic view of situated learning and coping as a process involving consumers, firms and situations and examines their underlying factors in stressful consumption encounters. It establishes the mediating role of psychological closeness between antecedents and consumers’ situated learning and explores the differences of psychological closeness in two different cultures, that of the USA and China.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the significance and relevance of social and habitual behaviours of home occupants to the building design process. It argues that introducing quantitative measures such as daylight level alone may not result in a “healthy and functional” kitchen without appreciating or factoring‐in the impacts of the social roles and user expectations of kitchens in high‐rise and compact urban situations.

The study investigated three common types of apartment buildings in Hong Kong. Case studies suggested that it is crucial to include in a design process proper considerations of human behaviours by way of preferred approaches and modes of living, space usage, and weightings of end‐user responses that would influence architectural design in a direct and crucial way.

The study noted that daylight quality of a kitchen is perceived by most families to be not as important as building control officials and designers thought it would. Instead, it is found that social and cultural factors are more important parameters for users. The study observed that designers rely on physical and quantitative approaches such as daylight factor, window size and window‐to‐room area ratio to qualify a design solution and ignore the socio‐cultural parameters.

The paper calls for designers and building control officials to incorporate the study of functionality and socio‐cultural preferences of users groups in the building design process. The study envisages that an integrated design methodology would enhance the living environment.

Viscous dampers are commonly used in large span cable-stayed bridges to mitigate seismic effects and have achieved great success.

However, the nonlinear analysis on damper parameters is usually computational intensive and nonobjective. To address these issues, this paper proposes a simplified method to determine the viscous damper parameters for double-tower cable-stayed bridges. An empirical formula of the equivalent damping ratio of viscous dampers is established through decoupling nonclassical damping structures and linearization of nonlinear viscous dampers. Shaking table tests are conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. Moreover, this simplified method has been proved in long-span cable-stayed bridges.

The feasibility of this method is verified by the simplified model shaking table test. This simplified method for determining the parameters of viscous dampers is verified in cable-stayed bridges with different spans.

This simplified method has been validated in cable-stayed bridges with various spans.

A number of over‐lapping terms have been applied to coding techniques used in association with post‐co‐ordinate indexing. These include subcodes, which can be interpreted as the generic term; superimposed, graphic and random coding and Zatocoding, which are nearly synonymous; and partial or derived coding: the last named may be considered as a bridge between the second group (superimposed, etc.) and direct coding techniques. For the sake of consistency, the terms graphic coding and partial coding will be employed wherever possible. The general principles of coding have been adequately reviewed in C. P. Bourne's Methods of Information Handling and have been subjected to detailed analysis in J. L. Jolley's Data Study. Graphic codes have been studied in considerable depth in the above; therefore, a brief introduction will suffice.

The present study examined the status of globalization of the public relations (PR) agency industry and its environmental factors by analyzing 101 countries.

Data were constructed from content analysis and multiple archival sources. Cluster analysis and multiple regressions were used for data analysis.

The present study identified the four distinctive groups of countries in the number of global PR agencies per country. These groups are (1) globalized top countries, (2) globalized major countries, (3) globalizing countries and (4) peripheral countries. The study also found that the degree of globalization of the PR agency industry in a country was associated with its democracy, economic system (gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign direct investment inflow), legal system (rule of law), cultural system (power distance and long-term orientation) and media system (Internet penetration rate) factors.

The previous studies on the global PR agency industry was limited to investigating a few leading agencies, but this study analyzed 114 global PR agencies and their diffusion in 101 countries and explored the influence of each country's characteristics (i.e. political, economic, legal, cultural and media factors) identified as the global PR environment factors.

The paper aims to analyze the contribution of young academics to the field of public relations (PR) and shows which authors exert most influence on them. The study thereby contributes to the assessment of the state of the art of theory building in the field. The authors analyzed the study data against the background of two approaches on progress in the field: Nothhaft et al.’s (2018) idea of strategic communication as an elusive concept and Winkler et al.’s (2021) narrative approach.

The study comprises two parts. First, the authors conducted a survey among participants of the EUPRERA PhD-workshops between 2007 and 2019, asking respondents about their perception of the state of the field. Second, the authors performed a bibliometric (co-)citation analysis of the young scholars’ most important works.

Results indicate that though the field has progressed in terms of quantity and diversified with regard to established paradigms, it has not matured in a sense that it has settled on a generally accepted theoretical underpinning. However, the data show how the dominant paradigms in the field map onto the co-citation networks that emerged out of the works of young scholars. The authors’ findings imply that this new generation might signal their allegiance to a paradigm by citing the works of its emblematic authors.

Unlike most bibliometric studies, this one uses an author-centered approach, thus studying works that matter most to young academics themselves. Not only do the authors thereby contribute to the analysis of the state of theory building in PR research, but also expand the scope in looking at research as a social system, in which young researchers need to position themselves.

This study examined the causes of academic stress amongst undergraduate students in the Department of Quantity Surveying to ascertain whether stress has an influence on their academic performance.

This research explores the relationships between these constructs: academic stress, non-academic stress, coping strategies and academic performance, using a survey questionnaire to collect data from 190 undergraduate students in the Quantity Survey department. Descriptive statistics have been used to analyse the data and a path analytical approach has been adopted to evaluate the relationship between the constructs discussed in the paper.

Significant linear associations have been established between all the proposed paths and the outcome factor (p < 0.00). Coping strategies were an important mediator (p = 0.000), as they explained 32.9% of the association between academic stress and non-academic stress. However, the findings have shown that the stress faced by students is an optimal degree of stress that improves learning capabilities.

Explanation and clarification of the effects of academic and non-academic stress and coping mechanisms on the academic performance of university undergraduate students could help to reduce the risk of suicide amongst the teeming youths. It will also afford the university administration the opportunity to engender stress-free environment that is conducive for learning through the formulation of appropriate policies that promote “balanced learning” for the students. The outcome of this study may provide a launch pad for researchers who are interested in knowing how the possible causes of stress may impact on the health of university students.

The findings will be of great importance to the academic advisers and university administration in developing a flexible academic calendar and adopt policies that will eliminate academic stress and promote strategies to cope with non-academic stress. The study is the first attempt to examine academic stress, non-academic stress, coping strategies and academic performance in a single research in the Nigerian context due to limited literature found. This study has pedagogical implications to education practice by offering tertiary institutions the opportunity to appraise and device a means of managing students' stress by identifying their needs and increase students' coping skills based on prevailing modalities that give students' opportunities to strengthen the strategies of coping.