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Demographic variation in physical pain across 22 countries: A cross-national analysis
Get PDFBackground: Recent work has explored the sociocultural aspects of pain. However, global evidence is scarce, and little is known about how levels of pain differ across cultures and across demographic groups within those different cultures.
Methods: Using a nationally representative dataset of 202,898 individuals from 22 countries and a random effects meta-analysis, we examine the proportion of people in pain across key demographic groups (age, gender, marital status, employment status, education, immigration status, religious service attendance, race/ethnicity) and across countries.
Results: We find substantial variation in pain across countries and demographic groups. Unadjusted proportions tests show that Egypt (0.60), Brazil (0.59), Australia (0.56), and Turkey (0.53) have the greatest proportion of people in pain whereas Israel (0.25), South Africa (0.29), Poland (0.32), and Japan (0.33) have the lowest proportion. The random effects meta-analysis shows that, across countries, the proportion of people in pain is highest in older age groups, among women and other gender groups, the widowed, those who were retired, those who had low level of education, and those who attended a religious service more than once a week. The analysis shows no difference in the proportion of people in pain regarding immigration status.
Conclusions: Pain varies substantially across countries and key demographic groups. This work provides valuable foundational insights for future research on the sociocultural factors
of pain.
Plain Language Summary
Understanding how the proportion of people in pain varies across key demographic groups and across countries is a crucial foundation for the relatively new literature on the social factors of pain. Here, we used rigorous statistical techniques to uncover how pain varies across demographic groups and across 22 countries from all over the world. We found that the proportion of people in pain is highest in older age groups, among women and other gender groups, the widowed, those who were retired, those who had low level of education, and those who attended a religious service more than once a week. Substantial country-specific
variation was also found
Future directions for early career researchers in planetary health equity
Get PDFAchieving social and health equity on a healthy planet requires attending to the structural drivers of intersecting crises of global environmental change, social inequities, and health inequities. A diverse group of early career researchers have formed a new network aligned in advancing work that promotes planetary health equity. This Perspective articulates proposed future research directions emerging from shared understandings of intersecting governance and policy challenges, including sections on transdisciplinary and co-productive knowledge paradigms; political economy and governance; policy integration; and opportunities to advance planetary health equity. We present this agenda with reference to a range of substantive environmental- and health-related domains, including food systems governance, trade policy, energy policy, urban planning, and education. As early career researchers in the emerging field of planetary health equity, these future directions for research are intended to offer novel avenues towards the goals of social and health equity in a stable Earth system
Chinese older adults' social media use: a study of WeChat from a social practice perspective
Get PDFPurpose
Research into older adults' use of social media remains limited. Driven by increasing digitalisation in China, the authors focus on Chinese older adults (aged 60–75)’ use of WeChat.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used a qualitative interpretive approach and interviewed Chinese older adults to uncover their social practices of WeChat use in everyday life.
Findings
By using social practice theory (SPT), the paper unfolds Chinese older adults' social practices of WeChat use in everyday life and reveals how they adopt and resist the drastic changes in Chinese society.
Originality/value
The study contributes to new understandings of SPT from technology use by emphasising the dynamic characteristics of its three elements. The authors synthesise both adoptions and resistance in SPT and highlight the importance of understanding three elements interdependently within specific contexts, which are conditioned by structure and agency
Target Firm Advertising and Firm Value
Get PDFConsistent with hypotheses underlying firm advertising, we find that targets with pretakeover advertising obtain higher premiums, whereas their acquirers earn lower announcement returns. These economically significant effects suggest that through advertising, targets increase their profile and negotiating power. Further, targets that advertise are more likely to initiate their takeovers, attract multiple bidders, receive enhanced bids, capture more merger rents, and even in failed acquisitions, experience a 1% permanent revaluation. The latter result differentiates between information asymmetry and behavioral explanations for the target advertising. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that management advertises to transmit information to investors and potential acquirers
Visually-supported topic modeling for understanding behavioral patterns from spatio–temporal events
Get PDFSpatio-temporal event sequences consist of activities or occurrences involving various interconnected elements in space and time. We show how topic modeling—typically used in text analysis—can be adapted to abstract and conceptualize such data. We propose an overall analytical workflow that combines computational and visual analytics methods to support some tasks, enabling the transformation of raw event data into meaningful insights. We apply our workflow to football matches as an example of important yet under-explored spatio-temporal event data. A key step in topic modeling is determining the appropriate number of topics; to address this, we introduce a visual method that organizes multiple modeling runs into a similarity-based layout, helping analysts identify patterns that balance interpretability and granularity.
We demonstrate how our workflow, which integrates visual analytics, supports five core analysis tasks: identifying common behavioral patterns, tracking their distribution across individuals or groups, observing progression at different temporal scales, comparing behavior under varied conditions, and detecting deviations from typical behavior.
Using real-world football data, we illustrate how our end-to-end process enables deeper insights into both tactical details and broader trends — from single match analyses to season wide perspectives. While our case study focuses on football, the proposed workflow is domain-agnostic and can be readily applied to other spatio-temporal event datasets, offering a flexible foundation for extracting and interpreting complex behavioral patterns
Effectiveness of UK-based support interventions and services aimed at adults who have experienced or used domestic and sexual violence and abuse: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Get PDFBackground: Domestic and sexual violence and abuse (DSVA) is prevalent and harmful. There are a range of support services and interventions available to those affected by it, but evidence of their effectiveness is uncertain. We synthesised evidence on the effectiveness of UK-based interventions and services for DSVA.
Methods: We conducted a systematic review and, where possible, meta-analysis. We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Social Policy and Practice, ASSIA, IBSS, Sociological abstracts, SSCI and grey literature sources for publications published from inception to July 2023. We included randomised controlled trials, non-randomised comparative studies, pre-post studies, and service evaluations of support interventions or services for adults who had experienced or perpetrated DSVA. The intervention typology and selection of outcomes was determined based on co-production with stakeholders. The quality of the studies was assessed independently by two reviewers. Where meta-analysis was not possible, we synthesized studies with vote counting based on the direction of effect.
Results: Twenty-nine UK-based studies were included: 11 on advocacy, five on outreach, six on psychological interventions or services for victims-survivors, and six on perpetrator programmes. Meta-analyses showed benefits, with 58.7% (95% CI 53.6, 63.8) of advocacy and 46.2% (95% CI 39.1, 53.3) of outreach intervention and service participants reporting cessation of abuse at case closure. Vote counting was performed for psychological support interventions and perpetrator programmes, and showed positive effects on self-esteem and attitudes towards sexual offending. Most studies had a high risk of bias.
Conclusions: There appear to be benefits of UK-based advocacy and outreach services, psychological support interventions, and perpetrator programmes. However, risk of bias and methodological heterogeneity means that there is uncertainty regarding the estimated effects. There is need for more robust research, and a co-produced core-outcome set to facilitate future research in this field
Shared exposures or management fashions? Antecedents of convergence in the insurance and banking industries
Get PDFWe study convergence in the attention of decision‐makers across the insurance and banking industries. Our analysis is based on textual risk disclosures (10‐K reports, 2006–2018), providing a snapshot of corporate priorities and contexts. We theoretically link convergence with decision‐making contexts via the Attention‐Based View. Leveraging strategic management theory, we identify antecedents of convergence in attention and, therefore, potentially, risk contagion. These include common trends in the macro‐environment, substitution threats, and management fashions. We combine this theoretical framework with machine learning tools to create quantitative measures of convergence in attention and its antecedents. We find that the proposed measure of convergence is predictive of inter‐ and intra‐industry stock correlations. Finally, based on regression and sensitivity analyses, we identify the relative importance of different antecedents, showing that shared risk management fashions largely drive Inter‐industry convergence in attention. This highlights challenges when interpreting regulatory text data in the context of predicting contagion risk
User-Generated Content in Gaming: Legal Challenges and Narrative Frameworks
Get PDFThe video gaming landscape is experiencing transformational change with a massive growth in user-generated content (UGC), where players actively contribute to the gaming experience by creating and sharing their own content in a virtual world. This article seeks to investigate the complex interplay between user-generated content, the legal challenges it presents and the narrative frameworks that shape legal responses within the dynamic realm of the gaming industry. The advent of user-generated content has redefined the traditional boundaries of video gaming, giving players unprecedented opportunities for creativity and self-expression; however, the process is not without legal challenges. For example, one should examine the copyright issues and analyse the legal intricacies when players generate and share content within video games and explore the tensions between user creativity on one hand and intellectual property protection on the other. It is vitally important to investigate how legal frameworks and prevailing narratives surrounding UGC influence incentives for game developers to foster player creativity and examine the role of narratives in shaping approaches in their end-user licence agreement. The aim of this article is to examine the legal challenges of UGC in video games, with a focus on the processes influencing policy decisions and framing intellectual property protection
The Biodiversity Moonshot: A Spark for a Transformative Change or a New Business‐Case Facade?
Get PDFBiodiversity has recently gained increased attention in sustainability management research. It sustains the ecosystems on which organizations depend, while simultaneously being threatened by organizational activities. By highlighting this dynamic of impact and dependence, the integration of biodiversity into management discourse offers an opportunity to foster a more holistic understanding of the business–nature relationship, grounded in a systems perspective. At the same time, however, there is a risk that biodiversity will be reduced to yet another environmental variable subsumed within the prevailing business‐case logic that views nature primarily as a source of economic value. This approach has proven inadequate to drive the transformative change needed to address the environmental crisis. Drawing on a discussion among scholars, this essay outlines six critical challenges—measurement, strategic decision making, innovation, public policy, interdisciplinary approaches, and dominant ontologies—which, depending on how they are addressed, may either catalyze a rethinking of the business–nature relationship or merely perpetuate existing paradigms
Vendors’ perspectives on AI implementation in medical imaging and oncology: a cross-sectional survey
Get PDFObjectives
To explore the perspectives of AI vendors on the integration of AI in medical imaging and oncology clinical practice.
Materials and methods
An online survey was created on Qualtrics, comprising 23 closed and 5 open-ended questions. This was administered through social media, personalised emails, and the channels of the European Society of Medical Imaging Informatics and Health AI Register, to all those working at a company developing or selling accredited AI solutions for medical imaging and oncology. Quantitative data were analysed using SPSS software, version 28.0. Qualitative data were summarised using content analysis on NVivo, version 14.
Results
In total, 83 valid responses were received, with participants having a global distribution and diverse roles and professional backgrounds (business/management/clinical practitioners/engineers/IT, etc). The respondents mentioned the top enablers (practitioner acceptance, business case of AI applications, explainability) and challenges (new regulations, practitioner acceptance, business case) of AI implementation. Co-production with end-users was confirmed as a key practice by most (52.9%). The respondents recognised infrastructure issues within clinical settings (64.1%), lack of clinician engagement (54.7%), and lack of financial resources (42.2%) as key challenges in meeting customer expectations. They called for appropriate reimbursement, robust IT support, clinician acceptance, rigorous regulation, and adequate user training to ensure the successful integration of AI into clinical practice.
Conclusion
This study highlights that people, infrastructure, and funding are fundamentals of AI implementation. AI vendors wish to work closely with regulators, patients, clinical practitioners, and other key stakeholders, to ensure a smooth transition of AI into daily practice.
Key Points
Question - AI vendors’ perspectives on unmet needs, challenges, and opportunities for AI adoption in medical imaging are largely underrepresented in recent research.
Findings - Provision of consistent funding, optimised infrastructure, and user acceptance were highlighted by vendors as key enablers of AI implementation.
Clinical relevance - Vendors’ input and collaboration with clinical practitioners are necessary to clinically implement AI. This study highlights real-world challenges that AI vendors face and opportunities they value during AI implementation. Keeping the dialogue channels open is key to these collaborations
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