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The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of gamifying brand storytelling on user immersion in the brand narrative, a concept referred to as “narrative transportation”. The aim is to comprehend how transportation influences users’ experience and their responses to the brand, with particular focus on brand attitude and WOM. The study also explores the role of interactivity in brand storytelling and its effects on transportation and user engagement.

Four experiments were conducted to sequentially test the proposed hypotheses. Each experiment involves ad hoc gamified brand stories for different product categories (wine, museum, glasses and frozen fruit).

Findings indicate that including gamification elements in brand stories heightens narrative transportation and enhances the information obtained by users as well as their entertainment. Users thus respond more positively to the brand in terms of attitude and WOM. The study also reveals that high levels of interactivity in the game may actually decrease narrative transportation in the story, although this is offset by the perception of greater entertainment.

This research contributes to current understanding of brand storytelling and its impact on branding. It highlights the importance of offering users a gamified experience that can provide them with information about the brand whilst also offering them entertainment. The results also hold implications for gamification literature by emphasizing the need to ensure a balance between game and story vis-à-vis enhancing the impact of gamified storytelling on brand response.

Students living in urban environments tend to have lower academic achievement and college- and career-readiness skills than students living in suburban environments, as well as tend to be more at-risk for social-emotional learning problems. Research indicates that several school and community variables are related to this education discrepancy, and aligning these variables to best meet the needs of students is the best way to improve educational outcomes. This chapter will describe a collective impact initiative designed to align school, community, and nonprofit resources in an urban environment to best address the needs of students and increase academic success.

As prison drug use continues to be a concern worldwide, harm reduction practices serve as an alternative approach to traditional abstinence-only or punishment-oriented methods to address substance use behind bars. The purpose of this study is to present a summary of research surrounding prison-based harm reduction programs.

This narrative review of the international literature summarizes the harms associated with prison drug use followed by an overview of the literature surrounding three prison-based harm reduction practices: opioid agonist therapy, syringe exchange programs and naloxone distribution.

A collection of international research has found that these three harm reduction programs are safe and feasible to implement in carceral settings. Additionally, these services can effectively reduce some of the harms associated with prison drug use (e.g. risky injection practices, needle sharing, fatal overdoses, etc.). However, these practices are underused in correctional settings in comparison to their use in the community.

Various policy recommendations are made based on the available literature, including addressing ethical concerns surrounding prison populations’ rights to the same standard of health care and services available in the community. By taking a public health approach to prison drug use, harm reduction practices can provide a marginalized, high-risk population of incarcerated individuals with life-saving services rather than punitive, punishment-oriented measures.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a questionnaire to assess the expectations of university teachers about the importance of generic competences in Higher Education Institutions of Ecuador (E-DUC, acronym in Spanish), based on the competences typology from the Tuning Latin America Project.

A questionnaire with Likert scales was administered to 458 university teachers from seven universities in Ecuador. Exploratory and confirmatory analyzes have been carried out to validate the theoretical model.

After the validation process, four groups of generic competences were confirmed and the measurement model showed high levels of reliability, as well as content and construct validity.

Since tuning project has an international scope, the research could be replicated in other Latin American countries for comparability purposes regarding teachers’ perceived importance of generic competences in teaching activity. In addition, further research can relate teachers’ expectations with teaching performance and other constructs, based on a broad theoretical framework.

These technical characteristics allow the use of E-DUC as an instrument to measure the expectations of teachers on the general competences that are worked on in higher education in Ecuador. Data about these perceptions are useful for the design of teachers’ training programs, curriculum reforms and other higher education policies.

It is the first research carried out in Ecuador and Latin America in order to validate a scale for measuring the expectations of teachers about the importance of the generic competences proposed in the Tuning Latin America Project.

In this chapter, the authors present a theoretical model useful for analyzing people’s perceptions of what they should do, should not do, and should be allowed to do at work. These perceptions create powerful motivational forces that shape workplace behavior. The authors describe various aspects of this model – a deonance perspective – as it relates to rights (permissible behavior) and responsibilities (behavioral prescriptions and proscriptions). The authors demonstrate how it offers new insights beyond those available from existing theoretical models, and the authors outline its implications for research and the practice of human resource management.

In the presence of limited financial resources, developing countries such as Lebanon often allocate small budgets to the sports sector. Even more, the Lebanese Government lacks a strategic approach that is necessary for any nation to achieve elite sport success. This study aims to assess the motivations and barriers that impact Lebanese athletes’ achievements at the Olympics by addressing the factors that affect such participation. Two main aspects were put into the study: lack of governmental support and sponsorship.

This study examines the barriers that hinder achievement by Lebanese Olympians in their International participation with an emphasis on the factors that affect their performance whether positively or negatively. The methodology consisted of a set of survey questions filled by 50 Lebanese athletes and 4 interviews conducted with Lebanese Olympians to make use of their experience and insight regarding such barriers and how to best boost motivation among young and potential talent.

The findings shed light on the limited Lebanese Olympic participation; out of the 17 participation (226 Olympians in total), only 4 Olympians won medals for the country; the past victory was 38 years ago. The reasons as reached are mainly due to the lack of government support and the inability of athletes to secure-related sponsors. Specifically, a lack of governmental support has a negative correlation with athletes’ achievements in international contests. Moreover, the inability of athletes to secure the financial support, in the form of sponsorship, necessary for the training, preparation and all the way to participation.

The study revealed a lack of active participation from the government in nurturing skill and elevating talented athletes’ chance to achieve in the Olympics. The main factor that this study was able to identify is the lack of an official body to manage the nurturing, training, financial support up to participation of the athletes in the international events.

The study highlighted the importance of training camps and consistent improvement to performance. While these two require extensive investment and devotion, athletes on their own cannot afford to fulfill the requirements without the support of the government; the latter being almost absent.

The insights provided through this study address the importance of sponsorship and government support in athletes’ achievements. It shed light on areas that are nonexistent for the Lebanese case and provided practical recommendations that if applied, would increase the chances of Lebanon in competing effectively in the international arena.

This work presents a review of the state of the art of the present century on academic and scientific production in Latin America related to the concept of Social Innovation. The analysis is based on articles published in indexed journals, which makes it possible to understand the existing asymmetry between the conceptual and theoretical veins, of the case studies, as well as of good social innovation practices that have been published in recent years. These debates have in some cases transcended public policies, as well as business and social realities where social innovation is a mechanism and strategy for personal, social, and territorial development. Finally, a Latin American community of researchers and academics around social innovation must be consolidated, who choose to continue building theoretical-empirical bodies following the Latin American reality.

Service quality is an elusive and abstract construct, so that particular effort is required to establish a valid measure. Patients' perceptions of health services seem to have been largely ignored by health care providers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a modified approach to the measurement of service quality in a primary health care setting.

Through the use of the HEALTHQUAL scale adapted from the SERVQUAL scale to the context of primary health care centres, the authors measure the perceptions of service quality reported by both users and health centre managers in Spain. Taking service quality to be a construct of a formative nature, the authors propose a modification for its measurement using partial least squares (PLS) path modelling, as recommended in the literature for the modeling of formative constructs.

It is found that the model provides health centre managers with a tool for the measurement of functional quality in their organization. The results reveal the importance of health staff attributes and efficiency measures for the perception of health centre quality.

The model can also be used to measure how health care centre managers believe that patients perceive the quality of their service. This allows the potential gap between the provider's view and the customer's view to be assessed and monitored.

The paper extends the previous literature in two directions. First, based on SERVQUAL, it presents a general framework for measuring primary health care service quality as a construct of a formative nature. Second, it is the first application of PLS path modeling to the simultaneous examination of both users' and health centre managers' perceptions in a European context.