Search results

In this case study, we offer an analysis of feedback from a student experience survey completed by Black undergraduate students who received proactive, targeted coaching and mentoring support during 2021–2022. All the students were studying at a large higher education institution in the United Kingdom which offers a broad range of degree courses by distance learning.

This paper reports on the intervention delivered and analyses the student experience of being offered, and receiving, proactive coaching and mentoring. It is based on the responses of 102 students who engaged with the experience survey after having self-selected to receive the intervention. What follows is an analysis of their experiences using a qualitative in vivo approach based on word frequency in students’ free-text comments.

The findings presented are that, in this intervention, students who self-select to receive coaching and mentoring support experience tangible (self-reported) behaviour changes with potentially longer term benefits for their studies. These include improved self-confidence and self-efficacy, increased proactive help-seeking behaviour, greater recognition of strengths and achievement and personal growth and self-awareness.

In presenting this case study, we aim to contribute to the growing corpus of practitioner case studies and research papers that show the benefits of coaching and mentoring in higher education and – more specifically – why coaching and mentoring can be a worthwhile targeted intervention for students from underrepresented backgrounds. This lends support to the growing consensus that students with positive, proactive help-seeking behaviours perform better than students not able to access support (Byrne et al., 2014). We conclude the case study with some practical implications for providers looking to provide targeted support to students.

The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss evidence of good practice in respecting care home residents’ right to privacy. The right to privacy is a fundamental human right as enshrined in international and domestic law and standards. In the context of increasing interest in using a human rights approach to social care in care homes for older people, this literature review summarises research evidence on what respecting the human right to privacy of care home residents entails in practice.

This literature review followed a rigorous systematic approach to the scoping review, inspired by the Joanna Biggs Institute’s guidelines for conducting systematic reviews. A total of 12 articles were included in the review.

The research took a multidimensional understanding of privacy in their studies. The dimensions can be categorised as physical, inter-relational or related to personal data. The review highlights three good practice points. First, it is good privacy practice in care homes to make available single-occupancy bedrooms to residents since this offers the opportunity to personalising this physical space with furniture and web belongings, adding a sense of ownership over the space. Second, residents appreciate being able to choose when and how they spend their time in their own bedrooms. Third, it is good practice to respect residents’ private physical space and private choices, for example by knocking on doors before entering or agreeing with the resident when it is permissible to enter. The review also found that in some studies privacy considerations were relevant to communal living areas within care homes, including the use of surveillance cameras and the sharing of personal data.

This literature review adds to the body of academic literature on human rights and social care in practice. It also highlights areas for future research relating to the right to privacy in care homes.

This paper scrutinizes the nexus between firms’ board characteristics; environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and industry sensitivity, with the aim of examining how the impact of board diversity on ESG performance would vary among sensitive versus non-sensitive industries and identify which board characteristics are more influential on ESG performance in these industries.

A large sample of 31,255 firm-year observations in 5,471 companies listed in the G-7 countries from 2010 to 2022 is examined using a Heckman two-stage least squares (2SLS) approach to address the potential endogeneity concerns within our proposed relationships.

The findings show that the positive influence of diverse boards on a firm’s ESG performance is particularly amplified in sensitive industries and may be attributed to the greater need of these industries to address stakeholder concerns (as posited by the stakeholder and resource-dependence theories) and mitigate agency conflicts (supporting agency theory). Interestingly, the impact of diversity in board gender and education qualifications appears to be particularly influential and remains robust across a series of regression analyses.

This study has important implications for policymakers and legislators as it provides guidelines pertaining to the composition of boards operating in sensitive industries. For practitioners and firms, the results allow for better understanding of firms’ tendency towards sustainability practices, particularly in the context of sensitive industries.

This study has important implications for policymakers and legislators as it provides guidelines pertaining to the composition of boards operating in sensitive industries.

This study contributes to the increasingly growing literature that investigates the nexus between industry sensitivity, board characteristics and ESG performance.

This study aims to understand whether board diversity has a direct effect on “corporate social responsibility (CSR)” performance of companies or not. In addition, this study also aims to examine the moderation effect of age and education level of female board members on the relationship between board gender diversity and CSR performance.

A “corporate social performance (CSP)” measurement instrument was designed to conduct a content analysis that analyzes the CSR disclosure in the annual reports of Turkish companies listed on the “500 biggest Turkish companies” report of “Istanbul Chamber of Industry (ISO)” in 2015. The data coming from content analysis of 117 company reports were analyzed by using hierarchical regression analysis.

Despite of supporting the increase in CSR performance when there is a greater presence of independent board members in an organization, evidence supports that ratios of female and foreign board members do not have any significant effect on CSR performance.

The study contributes to previous literature on board diversity and CSR performance as follows. First, this paper contributes to previous literature by examining and testing independent, female and foreign board members as a new antecedent of CSR performance in research on Turkey; second, by examining a sample of the “500 biggest Turkish companies” and providing some tips about both Turkey and other developing countries; third, by reopening the debate about the positive impact of a greater presence of independent directors on board on CSR performance and the non-effect of female and foreign board members. Finally, it also offers a partially new CSP measurement instrument based on content analysis.

Although employee race has been an actively investigated area of scientific inquiry for decades, a thorough and informed understanding of the role of race in the organizational sciences has eluded us for a number of reasons. The relationship of race and stress in organizations is a prime example of this neglect and deficiency in our knowledge base, as little work has been done in this area. We attempt to address this limitation in the literature by proposing an inductively derived, review-centric framework that attempts to articulate the multiple intermediate linkages that explain the process dynamics taking place in the relationship between employee race and health and well-being in organizations. We argue that socialization processes, social networks, information and resource access, and mentoring contribute to distance and differences between racial minorities and nonminorities concerning control, reputation, performance, and political understanding and skill, which in turn, creates barriers to success, and increased stress and strain for racial minorities. The implications of this framework along with directions for future theory and research are discussed in this chapter.

This study aims to compare the impact of board characteristics on the performance of listed non-financial firms to the impact of board characteristics on the performance of listed financial firms (commercial banks) in Ghana.

The fixed and random effects models with generalized least square specifications are used in estimating regressions to correct for heteroscedasticity and serial correlation. Additionally, this study uses lagged models of the board variables to address the possibility of the presence of endogeneity and to generate robust estimates.

The empirical results show some similarities and differences on the impact of board characteristics on the performance of listed non-financial firms and banks. On similarities, for both non-financial firms and banks, board size is seen to have a significant non-linear impact on Tobin’s q. Also, the proportion of foreign board members shows a positively significant relationship with firm performance for both listed non-financial firms and banks. The effect of the proportion of board members with higher educational qualifications on firm performance appears to be negative and statistically significant for both sample of firms. On the other hand, the impact of board composition and board gender diversity on firm performance differs from listed banks and non-financial firms.

The panel regressions for the listed banks were run on 63 observations because of the small sample size for the listed banks. Though enough for estimation purposes, inferences from results should be made with caution.

This paper, unlike most corporate governance – firm performance studies, focuses not only on listed non-financial firms but also on listed banks. From a multi-theoretical perspective, this paper provides a comparative analysis on the impact of board characteristics on financial performance of listed non-financial firms and banks.

No studies have evaluated the relationship between cognitive impairment and alcohol treatment outcomes amongst older drinkers. This study aims to explore the extent of cognitive impairment amongst older adults seeking alcohol treatment and examine the relationship between cognitive impairment, treatment retention and alcohol use following treatment.

The study used data from the Drink Wise Age Well programme; an alcohol intervention service for older adults (aged 50+). The Montreal Cognitive Assessment was used to screen for cognitive impairment; alcohol use was assessed using the alcohol use disorders identification test.

In total, 531 participants completed the assessment at treatment entry. Over half the sample were male (57%), with a mean age of 60 years (Standard deviation: 7.09). Almost half (48.4%) had cognitive impairment at the entry to treatment: 51.6% had a normal cognitive function, 41.4% had mild cognitive impairment, 5.8% had moderate cognitive impairment and 1.1% had severe cognitive impairment. Cognitive impairment was not associated with increased treatment drop-out and was not predictive of alcohol use following treatment. Alcohol treatment was associated with a significant improvement in cognitive functioning.

This study suggests there may be a significant amount of unidentified cognitive impairment amongst older adults attending alcohol treatment. Assessment and routine screening for cognitive impairment in drug and alcohol services may help in care planning and setting treatment goals; in the absence of routine screening opportunities for treatment planning and intervention may be missed.

Contemporary poetry is a rich landscape of voices and visions. With more than 1,300 new poetry titles to choose from each year, how can librarians make the best acquisitions for their communities? The following resource materials from Poets House ‐ a 35,000 volume poetry library and literary center ‐ offer a starting point. Highlights a wide variety of selections from Poets House’s annual exhibit of all of the year’s new poetry books. The Directory of American Poetry Books provides complete bibliographic information and capsule reviews for more than 6,000 books published since 1991. These materials were originally distributed at the 1998 American Library Association Conference, where Poets House exhibited the entire 1998 showcase and presented poetry readings and a discussion entitled: “Live at the library: poets and librarians panel”.

This chapter explores food culture in social media. It focuses in particular on the affordances offered by social media platforms to create, develop and negotiate individual digital identities, which mediate personal, social and professional relationships with and investment in food, nurture and wellbeing. It examines the adoption of specific social media platforms for commercial and societal use, as well as the significant impact that the digitally curated food culture identities of influential others such as celebrity chefs, food bloggers, lifestyle gurus and self-styled ‘experts’ can have on their followers. There is, for example, Twitter’s role as a monitor of food choice decisions and a data source for food-related consumer behaviour research, and the use of Instagram by brands and companies in contrast to Facebook’s deployment as a community‑building social media tool where interest groups can share information, views and mutual support. The photogenic, young female lifestyle guru is the object of special scrutiny in which the apparent effortlessness with which they have achieved the self they present and their legitimacy to pronounce on health and nutrition is called into question. Finally, the chapter does not offer comprehensive nor conclusive findings on the experiences and exchanges depicted here which develop an overview of social media food cultures. Rather, it presents a flavour of the complex nexus of issues surrounding engagement with the topic in terms of reflections on society itself and on the role such interactions play in the creation of self-identity.