Baynoon Centre for Studies and Development (BCSD): OJS
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The Influence of Parental Ownership Strategies on the Management of Academic Performance in Secondary Schools in Imenti South Sub-County, Meru County, Kenya
Get PDFPurpose: The study examined the influence of parental ownership on the management of academic performance in Imenti South Sub County, Meru County, Kenya.
Approach/Methodology/Design: The study adopted a mixed methodology approach and concurrent triangulation design. The target population of the study was a total of 17568 respondents consisting of 16800 students, 48 principals, and 720 teachers. The researcher used stratified sampling to get the 8 principals and purposive sampling to get 720 teachers and 64 students. The researcher used questionnaires and interview schedules to collect data from principals, teachers, and students. Piloting of the research instruments was done in10% of the sample size in the neighboring Igembe Sub-County. Validity was measured by face and content validity, while the reliability of research instruments was checked through test and retest method. The reliability coefficient was computed using the Pearson Product correlation coefficient where a coefficient of less than 0.07 was deemed dependable. Qualitative data was analyzed using themes and presented using narratives, while quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS version 21.
Findings: The results indicate that students were not performing well in their academic performance is because many parents are not involved. The study, therefore, recommended that with increased parental engagement through volunteering, ownership, guidance and support, the learners would perform better.
Originality/value: This study has significant value in the sense that if the parents own the schools where their children study, then the academic performance would improve, and at the same time, there would be greater discipline among the learners
Fiscal Behaviour of Subnational Governments in Nigeria: An Augmented Autoregressive Distributed LAG (ARDL) Approach
Get PDFPurpose: The paper examined the determinants of fiscal behavior of subnational governments in Nigeria between 1981 and 2020.
Approach/Methodology/Design: An Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds test for cointegration which involves an extra F-test on the lagged level variables in the ARDL equation was employed.
Findings: The results reveal that finances of the lower level of governments in Nigeria have not been managed optimally as there appeared a misplaced priority in terms of government outlay.
Practical Implications: The implication presented in this paper is meant for the concerned authorities. The results indicate the need for the subnational governments in Nigeria to cut the overhead costs of governance by reducing the frivolous expenditures in order to curtail the incessant borrowing habit of these tiers of government locally and internationally.
Originality/value: Despite the fact that factors determining subnational fiscal behavior have been approached from diverse ideological and methodological perspectives, yet, the challenges linger on, the paper, therefore, employed sophisticated econometric technique to examine why the finances of the lower level of governments in Nigeria have not been managed optimally
Transatlantic Flirtation and Cultural Insecurity: A Postcolonial Reading of Cosmopolitanism in Henry James’s Daisy Miller
Get PDFThis article interrogates cosmopolitanism in Henry James’s ‘Daisy Miller’, arguing that transatlantic mobility and travel expose America’s residual postcolonial insecurity. Fear of transatlantic acculturation undermines the national ideology and identity of the American Adam, as incorruptible in his fundamental innocence. By tracing the language of contagion surrounding biological pollution, this analysis examines how anxieties surrounding transatlantic flirtation, acculturation, and sexual union, in James’s text, expose America’s post-revolutionary fear of cultural permeability and fragility. When cosmopolitanism reveals American culture to be porous, this threatens its ideological self-definition, attesting to the imaginary and mythologized nature of the founding Adamic belief. I argue that ‘Daisy Miller’, focuses on the question of what happens to Americans when they have lived too long in Europe and how acculturation affects self-knowledge. Told from the perspective of Europeanized Americans, these American expatriates in the cosmopolitan residences of Geneva and Rome appear unaware of the extent of their acculturation until the naïve all-American girl Daisy, through her unfamiliar and highly ambiguous manners of flirting, appears to disrupt codes of female propriety and the Europeanized Americans’ perceived nativist loyalty. The novel acts as provocations to American characters who have very fixed ideas about what national identity is, and this article will trace how transatlantic flirtation and the subsequent relationships it produces, become a disruptive force. This article will show how fear of cultural flirtations derives from fear of potential sexual contact and thus interbreeding
Sustainable Economic Development Routes in Sub-Sahara Africa: A Dynamic Long-Run Relationship Analysis of Fiscal Policy, Energy Consumption and Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Get PDFPurpose: This study investigates the relationship between fiscal policy, energy consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions in the sub-Saharan African region.
Approach/Methodology/Design: The cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag, common correlated effect means group, and the augmented mean group were used to analyze the long-run effect of fiscal policy, and energy consumption on carbon dioxide emissions for the period 1990–2018.
Findings: The findings of this study indicate that expansionary fiscal policy drives carbon dioxide emissions, while contractionary fiscal policy mitigates carbon dioxide emissions for the sub-Sahara African region. The study's findings also indicate that an increase in renewable energy consumption help reduce carbon dioxide emissions, while non-renewable energy consumption causes carbon emissions to rise. Similar results were obtained for the various income-based economies except upper-middle-income economies that recorded insignificant long-run effect of fiscal policy, renewable energy and non-renewable energy consumption on carbon emissions.
Practical Implications: The significant role of expansionary and contractionary fiscal policies established from this study’s results indicate the possibility of economic managers of various nations to promote sustainable development through fiscal policy implementations. Thus, governments of various economies could use fiscal policy especially expenditure as a tool to ensure sustainable development.
Originality/value: This study innovates by employing econometric tools that deal with the problem of cross-sectional dependence that may exist among the study variables. This study innovatively considers the income levels of the selected countries to ascertain the role of income levels in the dynamic relationships between fiscal policy and carbon emissions, which is novel in this area of study within the Sub-Saharan African region
Applying an Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach to Detect Dietary Habits of Breast Cancer Patients in Bangladesh
Get PDFPurpose: The study aims to examine the association between food habits/lifestyle and breast cancer using an unsupervised machine approach.
Method: The dataset was collected from the hospitals of eight divisional cities in Bangladesh using a semi-structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistical tools and an unsupervised machine learning approach- Factor Analysis were used to analyze the data.
Results: The highest numbers of breast cancer patients were observed in the Sylhet division, followed by the Dhaka and Khulna divisions. It is noted that, overall, left breast cancer patients outnumber right breast cancer patients. We found that betel nuts, beverages, beef/mutton, etc. are high commonalities, which indicates that these food habits are highly associated with breast cancer. Moreover, most of the patients can’t bear the cost of treatment.
Conclusions: It is concluded that most breast cancer patients are used to taking betel nuts and beverages that may cause this disease. Therefore, we should avoid unhealthy and junk foods
Beyond Public Management Theories: The Creation of Public Value Through Co-Production
Get PDFPurpose: This paper presents a review of the role of co-production in the public sector and discusses how co-production can help public administrations to create better public value for contemporary society.
Approach/Methodology/Design: Employing a qualitative approach, this study builds on the strategic triangle which depicts public value generation in the public sector. This framework shows how and why co-production is more valuable than classical management theories when public value generation is concerned. Data for this study has been collected through databases searches. The study follows a disciplined process in conducting a literature review as suggested by Webster and Watson (2002)—using keyword searches in ProQuest and Google Scholar.
Findings: The paper argues that co-production can help to overcome the many limitations linked to traditional administration theories regarding public value creation. The results from the review indicate that co-production aim at improving the performance of the existing public services by actively involving service users in co-designing and improvement of public services. It shows how service experience can be integrated with the overall life experience of citizens.
Practical Implications: The study has both practical and theoretical implications. It contributes by identifying co-production as an alternative means for value creation in the public sector. This is significant for theory development and empirical research. For practitioners, co-production helps to evaluate the performance of their organizations effectively.
Originality/Value: Despite the significance of public value, few scholars pay attention to co-production as a means to generate public value. Co-production accounts for the need of the citizen in the production process of public value
Romantic Narrative in the Film The Battle at Lake Changjin
Get PDFChen Kaige, a famous Chinese “scholar-type director”, usually contains rich cultural connotations in his films and his works are always full of Chen Kaige-style romanticism. Although he is good at narrative, making The Battle of Changjin Lake a pure war film is a challenge. Therefore, this article takes the film as the research focus. The analysis of aesthetic elements, such as scenes and scope, picture composition, color and so on, expounds into detail the narrative style of romanticism displayed by Chen Kaige in the film
The Preliminary Studies on the Phytochemical Constituents and Antioxidant Properties of Four Medicinal Plants in Nigeria: Phytoconstituents
No full textAbstract
Purpose: The innumerability of un-researched medicinal plants has occasioned their exceptional and unlimited study. Without a continuous study, the importance and use of many medicinal plants will be spuriously occluded and hence marshal untold limitations to their medicinal value. This research therefore was conducted to unravel the phytochemical constituents and antioxidant activities of Petiveria alliacea L, Hoslundia opposita Vahl, Alternanthera brasiliana (L.) Kuntze, and Solanum erianthum D. Don.
Methods: Standard laboratory procedures were dutifully followed and ensued data were analyzed using SPSS, version 23, 32 and 64 bit.
Results: The four analyzed plants were rich sources of major phytochemicals like: tannins, terpenoids, steroids, saponins, phenolics, flavonoids and cardiac glycosides. All the plants also demonstrated high antioxidant activity in DPPH, Fe2+ Chelation, FRAP and Peroxides assays. The best antioxidant activity and IC50 values were obtained from S. erianthum which may be attributed to the highest quantity of phenols and flavonoids it contained in comparison to the rest evaluated plant samples.
Conclusion: It was inferred that the observed high antioxidant activity of all the plant samples may be predicable to their plentious quantified phytochemicals. The plants were thenceforth recommended for further study on their acute toxicity (LD50) and with special emphasis on S. erianthum
The Uprooting in the Narrative Language of Foreign Land by Jonathan Raban
Get PDFThe language and narrative style of Jonathan Raban, a contemporary English writer author of the novel Foreign Land (1985), seem to find in the themes of uprooting and self-searching a metaphorical and existential interpretation that in the search for identity alternates the desire to return to the origins, recovering lost affections and beloved places, with the attraction to the unknown. In this oscillation, masterfully rendered by the metaphorical and figurative language of the novel, Raban tells the awareness that the return to the origins is not always a point of arrival but a further turning point in life. The article focuses on some particularly effective linguistic and semantic aspects through which the author renews and personalizes the travel novel, making it an existential, intimate tale in which the sense of estrangement and the desire to take root are intertwined with a compelling story rich in landscape descriptions and philosophical reflections
Quality of Respectful Maternal Care Practices in Delivery Room at AL- Zahra Teaching Hospital
Get PDFBackground: The concept of respectful maternity care respectful maternity care acknowledges that women’s experiences of childbirth are vital components of health care quality and that their “autonomy, dignity, feelings, choices, and preferences must be respected.
Methodology: A cross-sectional descriptive to Assess quality of respectful maternal care in delivery room and to find out relationship between quality of respectful maternal care in delivery room with their demographic data (, the period of the study is from December, 1st, 2022 to May, 23th, 2023. A non-probability (Purposive sample) sample of one hundred fourteen (114) women who are attended Zahra teaching hospital. Data analysis by using descriptive statistics (percentage, frequency & mean of score) and inferential statistics (Chi-Square).
Results: The study show majority of study subjects from urban area and housewife and there was a significant association between number of children and abuse free care domains
Conclusion: The researcher can conclude that responses of postpartum women related to abuse and discrimination were disagree.
Recommendations: Recommendations about care of episiotomy and put them in the delivery rooms of hospitals, emphasizing audio-visual mass media to publishing information about perineal care after episiotomy and Health providers in hospitals and health centers should educate women about perineal care after episiotomy during antenatal visit