Search results

The Cuban population is going through a process of demographic change and accelerated aging, which, together with a difficult economic situation, places the older adults in a complex economic reality, especially in the most vulnerable communities. This paper aims to analyze the housing situation of the older adults in a vulnerable community in Santiago de Cuba during a period of particular economic difficulty.

The study analyzes the housing situation of a sample of people over 60 years of age (n = 325) in a vulnerable community in the city of Santiago de Cuba. A structured interview was used for data collection.

The results show that most of the people over 60 years of age interviewed considered their homes to be in a poor state of repair. A significant part of the homes were built with precarious materials and had cracked walls, leaks, problems with the functioning of the toilet, broken pipes, etc. In addition, most of the houses were poorly equipped, with a large number of them lacking refrigerators, cell phones or computers or other electrical appliances (heater, shower, stove, etc.). Women, people with black skin and people over 75 years of age were in a particularly precarious housing situation.

Demographic changes and the expected aging of the population in Cuba mean that meeting the needs of the older adults is expected to become increasingly complex. The design of public policies and administrative management should take into consideration the housing needs of people over 60 years of age in vulnerable communities, with special attention to women, racialized people and older adults.

The research was conducted based on the information provided by a particularly vulnerable group in Cuba (older adults), about which there is limited information available, and the data were collected during a particularly challenging time for the Cuban economy: the post-COVID-19 pandemic period. The challenges of conducting research of this nature in Cuba and the period during which data collection took place form the basis of the originality of this manuscript.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of the intellectual capital (IC) on the competitiveness in the manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Mexico.

The approach of this investigation is developing a theoretical construct to determine the correlation between IC and competitiveness and find the most relevant factors that impact it, where IC is independent variable and the competitiveness is dependant variable. Using the Likert scale to determine the degree of agreement or disagreement, the survey was applied to 420 SMEs. The results were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis, Cronbach’s alpha and subsequently structural equation models.

The results show that the IC dimensions – the information obtained, IC developed and learning and feedback – have an effect on the competitiveness of SMEs. The paper presents the theoretical validation of the factors that impact on IC and competitiveness and hence they are the key elements that impact mostly on each analysed variable.

The results obtained measure the level of correlation between the variables in the study, helping to design strategies for the key factors needed to integrate the IC and to develop competitive synergies in the manufacturing SMEs.

This study shows the effects of the IC that are directly impacting the competitiveness of SMEs so that each factor of the dependent and independent variables should be analysed separately to propose improvements in implementing IC to seek higher level of competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a continuous improvement project (CIP) at a Mexican university designed to increase engineering graduate student loyalty.

A plan-do-check-act problem-solving methodology was implemented, and a SERVQUAL survey was conducted on 67 master’s engineering students.

Five factors were found to affect student loyalty: facility cleanliness; faculty teaching skills; evening student services; master’s degree student management roles at work; and master’s degree students’ ages. After the implementation of the improvement and control actions, there was a 7.7% increase in the engineering master’s degree students’ loyalty scores.

However, there were several research limitations: data availability (such as student loyalty, student satisfaction and a small master’s degree student population size) and factors outside the CIP’s scope (such as the country’s economic situation, university rankings, master’s programme accreditations and COVID-19).

The findings from this research study could be used by other higher education institutions (HEIs)to improve student loyalty and as a reference when conducting similar studies in other service organisations such as hospitals and hotels.

This research work took a different approach in assessing student satisfaction and student loyalty in a HEI by using the SERVQUAL survey as the data collection instrument for conducting CIP.

The objective of the study was to analyze the perception of knowledge and experience development in social entrepreneurship in students of a university certified by Ashoka as a Changemaker campus and to identify data that argue for equitable training among all students regardless of gender and discipline studied.

The authors evaluated the perception of knowledge about social entrepreneurship of a group of students from a university certified as Ashoka Changemaker Campus to check if there are differences by gender and disciplinary area. The population was 140 students, to whom a validated instrument was applied.

The results shed light on the few differences among students in the business, engineering and health sciences disciplines compared to those enrolled in the humanities and social sciences concerning knowledge and experience in social entrepreneurship. The findings also indicate gender equality in the perception of knowledge and experience of innovation and social entrepreneurship.

The sample size in the different disciplinary areas is a limitation of this research. However, the findings are valuable in terms of gender and the study being conducted in the first university certified as a Changemaker Campus in Latin America.

Underlying the statistics and the hypotheses is important in improving students' experience and expanding their equitable opportunities to learn about and implement innovative proposals for social entrepreneurship projects.

Training in equality and inclusion contributes to an equitable and socially just society, especially when this training aims to bring new possibilities to society. This study links with those that have been conducted in other institutions, where conscious efforts have been made to reduce the gender gap or differences by disciplinary area when undertaking social entrepreneurship projects that connect sectors for social benefit. This research also argues for the need to identify the impact of other cultural elements, in addition to the knowledge provided by universities, that reduce the gap among their students.

This study is original because of its hypotheses about university students' social entrepreneurship projects, being conducted in a special environment (Ashoka Changemaker campus) in Latin America. The data were analyzed under hypothesis testing, contrasting the empirical evidence with the theoretical assumptions.

Given the growing importance of the relationship between customer value co-creation and customer satisfaction, it is essential to assess the implications of this connection from both a managerial and an academic perspective. The literature on this link has grown enormously in recent years. However, there lacks an integrative framework to improve its understanding. Based on the use of bibliometric techniques, the purpose of this article is threefold: firstly, to shed light on the relationship's knowledge structure by identifying the main clusters of topics; secondly, to propose an integrative conceptual framework and finally, to identify future avenues of research.

The authors analyze a database of 133 recent documents dealing with this pairing to address this gap. A bibliometric coupling methodology was used. Additionally, an in-depth analysis of centrality, density and citations for the different clusters identified in the last years was performed. The authors characterize each group in the knowledge map of the relationship.

This bibliometric analysis identified seven thematic clusters. Three of these, with a more transversal nature, have fostered the growth of this literature. The subsequent clusters used theoretical frameworks present in the first three clusters, adapting them to the specific circumstances analyzed, following different patterns of evolution. The authors present the behavior of the citations in each cluster over recent years, analyzing their intellectual base, trends and development potential.

Derived from their findings, an integrative conceptual framework for explaining the knowledge structure of research in value co-creation and the customer satisfaction literature is proposed. The authors identify main topics by clusters and then detect research gaps and propose new research avenues for the future.

This paper aims to identify psychosocial, demographic and health risk factors associated with depression in older people.

A correlational study with 281 independent and autonomous persons of the community over 60 years old from Bogotá was conducted. The three instruments used to measure the variables included in the data analyses were Demographic and Health Data Questionnaire, Short version of 15 items of Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test (MoCA).

Fifteen percent of the participants presented depression. Depression was associated with different demographic, low social support and health factors in this population group and was particularly high in women. Being a woman with poor social support networks and a previous history of depressive episodes should be considered as determining factors within a clinical risk profile for depression in older adulthood. It is essential to design prevention strategies focused on women and on the development of better social support in old age.

Depression is a prevalent and highly disabling disease, when it is suffered by an older person it is associated with higher mortality, functional dependence, poor physical health, worse quality of life indicators and psychological well-being. In the elderly, the clinical diagnosis of depression is difficult, as it has a high comorbidity and is often confused with other health conditions prevalent during older adulthood.

The study aims to assess students' perceived mastery of reasoning-for-complexity competency and its sub-competencies in a sample of students in a Latin American university. The intention was to identify statistically significant differences between a population of men and women with similar sociocultural characteristics, assessing whether gender could be a factor for educational institutions to consider when implementing strategies to develop this competency.

The eComplexity instrument was applied to 370 undergraduate students in their first to ninth semesters in a private university in Western Mexico. Descriptive statistics were analyzed to determine the mean and standard deviation indicators and were tested for statistical significance. The convenience sampling methodology ensured that there were students from all semesters and a diversity of majors. The sampling aimed for a balance of men and women, resulting in 189 women and 181 men.

The results confirmed no statistically significant evidence to indicate differences between men and women in their perceived mastery of the reasoning-for-complexity competency in general. However, statistically significant differences were found in the perceived achievements of the sub-competencies of systems, critical and scientific thinking, which comprise the overall competency. Women presented a higher average perception of systemic and critical thinking achievement, and men had a higher perception of scientific thinking. The authors concluded that social and cultural elements influence the perception of achievement that men and women develop in thinking and solving problems.

Governments and educational institutions must establish training programs that do not follow gender stereotypes and promote reasoning-for-complexity skills equitably in men and women. It is necessary to create more scientific and academic spaces and projects involving women in the sciences; countries must emphasize this to improve their scientific competency. Only in this way will it be possible to reverse the perception that men and women have of their problem-solving skills and abilities, which, as this study shows, are more a matter of culture than capabilities.

Unlike previous studies, which analyze the competency of complex thinking in a particular way among its sub-competencies, this research sought comprehensive measurement. Furthermore, beyond measuring competency development, this study aimed to measure the perception of achievement. The authors believe this is the first step towards identifying elements of the social imagination that limit the formation of scientific thinking among women in Latin America.

The current state of globalization is aggravating the inequalities within globalized cities and is generating a high degree of conflict. If we seek to find out to what extent ghettos, agents in conflict or if there is a situation of unsustainable imbalance caused by this degree of inequality, we should consider the objective data and the social consciousness of stratification enclosed in social interaction of the people living in neighborhoods in global cities. This chapter explains how we can study this topic with an example: a town in the Metropolitan Area of Madrid in 2012, with a theoretical perspective that asks about how the human space is today and how everybody builds his social identification, and a methodology that uses the problem-centered interview to collect data. From this perspective, it is discussed whether the new urban social structure tends to be dual or fragmented. When social awareness is studied, it may be understood that urban people tend to develop fragmented identities today based on leisure and family that bond everyone with other by small groups or weak bonds. However, into a poor urban area, there are other boundaries that a lot of people recognize based on class and ethnic differences that mean polarization and conflict, but these ones work only in particular problematic situations. So, the image of system of stratification in large cities appears to be a dynamic thing, under the influence of a series of different factors which are not only global but also local.