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This research proposes a framework to guide the development and analysis of digital interventions, namely, through mobile applications, regarding labor and birth. By complying with current scientific evidence, this paper aims to contribute to the safeness and completeness of perinatal health education targeting expectant parents.

A content analysis was conducted on a document containing World Health Organization guidelines for intra-partum, considering the following categories: timeframe, care options, category of recommendation, to create a data set clearly distinguishing between recommendations and non-recommendations. Context-specific and research-context recommendations, details from dosages, measurements and timings, infant care and non-immediate postpartum topics were considered out of the scope of this study.

The results were summarized in a table, ready to be used as a data set, including the following 16 care options ranging from health, well-being and/or rights: respect, communication, companionship, pregnant person’s monitoring, status, fetal monitoring, pain relief, pain management, amenities, labor delay prevention, progress, freedom of choice, facilitation of birth, prevention of postpartum hemorrhage, umbilical cord care and recovery. These were distributed across six timeframes: always, admission, first, second and third stage of labor and immediate postpartum. In addition, recommendations and non-recommendations are displayed in different columns.

This transdisciplinary research intends to contribute to: future research on perinatal education; the creation of digital interventions, namely, m-health ones, targeting expectant parents by providing a framework of content coverage; the endorsement of the rights to Information and to decision-making. Ultimately, when put into practice, the framework can impact self-care through access to perinatal education.

Inspired by the debates on participatory methods and drawing from research on “digital childhoods” in Portugal, this chapter aims to address the methodological innovations and challenges in collecting visual and digital data with children at their homes. As one of the stages of a research project on internet use, children were asked to take photos of their favorite objects at home and to collect screenshots of their most used webpages, followed by a conversation with the researcher. The use of photography allowed children greater expression and autonomy and gave researchers access to the children’s own perspectives on their home environment. It also provided unique information about the arrangement of digital objects at home and their different appropriations by girls and boys. Screenshots showed creative uses of the internet by children and gender differences. Ethical concerns were raised, due to the specific nature of working with children and with visual material (anonymization and dissemination). Entering the domestic setting provided a privileged access to children’s private sphere and to the in situ observation of their use of technology. However, the home is not a neutral place for a researcher and crossing the border into the private domain involves risks. These findings, illustrated by empirical examples from the research field, stress the importance of reflecting on and discussing the potentials, limitations, and ethical considerations of different methodologies, as well as their suitability to specific research objects, subjects, and contexts.

This study aims to explore the alignment between strategic plans of the Portuguese public higher education institutions (HEIs) and their perception of the integration of sustainability in education and curricula.

The strategic plans from 15 institutions were selected for content analysis; data about the integration of sustainability in education and curricula, from these HEI, were collected with an online questionnaire (self-report survey). Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed.

Strategic plans of the Portuguese public HEIs seem to not be sufficiently aligned with self-assessment integration of sustainability in education and curricula.

The classifications used in the content analysis were constructed and revised by the authors to reduce coder interpretation issues and subsequent bias in the results. However, some subjectivity could remain. The analysis of strategic plans and self-report surveys answered by top management, or a technician, does not assess the practices and sustainability implementation in education and curricula.

This study allows the self-report of already-implemented practices to be compared to the planned strategy of HEI governance in Portugal as stated in their strategic plans.

An analysis and respective insights on the lack of connection between strategic planning and self-report practices about sustainability implementation, using Portugal as a case study.

This paper aims to analyse residents’ perceptions of tourism growth in Porto prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to determine the most appropriate strategies to mitigate negative tourism impacts. Studies on resident perceptions of tourism impacts are still scarce, particularly the ones addressing the topic in the context of Portuguese urban tourism areas.

Data was collected through an online survey, focusing on three categories of impacts: (i) economic, (ii) sociocultural (iii) and spatial-environmental, and the respective mitigation strategies, analysed from the perspective of Porto’s residents. Descriptive and bivariate statistics – T-test and Eta correlation – were used to analyse the collected data.

Respondents who live in the city centre experience specific tourism impacts more negatively, when compared to those living outside the inner-city area. Furthermore, no strong correlation is found between the said impacts and the respective mitigation strategies. However, creating awareness among tourists about acceptable behaviour in shared spaces is the strategy that stands out, as it has a medium correlation with all three impact categories. Most impact-strategy associations are weak, meaning that the defined strategies are not the most case-appropriate, which is something that policymakers should address.

To the best of the author’s/authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to adopt this approach in tackling the negative impacts of rapid tourism growth in Porto.

Despite all recent changes in families, and maybe because of them, the birth of a child remains an event of intense expectation, investment, and symbolic meaning. In this chapter, we offer a simultaneously new, innovative, and contemporary perspective on the social construction of the family through the lens of family rituals, specifically directed to the postnatal hospital visit following the birth of a child. The raw data were collected through episodic interviews carried out to Portuguese middle-class men and women. A qualitative content analysis of their detailed descriptions was then conducted making use of software NVivo (©QSR International). The sociological perspective we used allows us to conclude that the moment of the birth of a child is a quintessential time–space for the social construction of the family. Around the baby, for the task of rocking the cradle, men and women join and take on their old and new roles. While the postnatal hospital visit allows the presentation of the newborn family member for the extended family and friends, it strongly underlies the strategies and senses of belonging to one particular family, thereby serving the purpose of its social construction.

The objective of this study was to analyze the evolution of tourism competitiveness over the years, ascertaining the state of the art and the degree of consensus among scholars on its constituent elements to propose an integrative and updated concept.

A set of 130 definitions on tourism competitiveness formulated between 1999–2018 was analyzed and segmented into three periods, allowing its historical evolution to be ascertained. It is a qualitative and quantitative exploratory research that uses a combination of techniques, namely, content analysis, analysis of co-words and consensus analysis.

The results indicated a low use of elements such as the quality of life and the environment in the authors' definitions during 1999–2018, although these elements were present in the first concept of tourism competitiveness by Crouch and Ritchie (1999, 2003). Another finding of this study shows a reduction in the analysis of tourism competitiveness based on the supply and demand side. Nowadays, the research tends to turn on the basis of the population directly affected. It also reveals the enrichment of the theoretical corpus with new lines of research arising and new groups of scholars of the subject, consequently a new frontier in tourism competitiveness.

The authors recommend deepening the analysis in each category of conceptual elements of tourism competitiveness to identify the origins of the low consensus. The authors also suggest conducting further research on the largest invisible schools of thought on this subject to understand their relations and perspectives, and thus to advance in the theoretical streams of the field. Finally, it is imperative to develop research on new models and monitors of tourism competitiveness that meet its renewed concept and integrate dimensions to consider the perspective of supply, demand, tourists and residents, as well as not excluding the economic bias but including the social side.

Owing to the fact that monitors of tourism competitiveness have practically no variables related to the social, most of the surveys are carried out from the supply or demand perspective, leaving the resident distant from the process. In this way, the results allow authors to indicate that new models of competitiveness measurement should be formulated based on the vision of the community impacted by tourism, i.e. a new version of tourism competitiveness not based on productivity but rather on the social aspect.

The findings of this study contribute to the field literature by offering an integrative concept of tourism competitiveness based on the elements with a higher level of consensus among researchers. Furthermore, the results accentuate a worrying fact regarding the operationalization of this concept, as the theoretical basis is not expressed in the monitors of competitiveness. Thus, nor it is possible in the management of the tourism industry.