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Debate: what guidance is needed by academics who collaborate with digital companies to improve youth mental health?
No full textIn a recent debate piece, Livingstone, Orben and Odgers (Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2023, 28, 150) asked whether and when it is advisable for academics researching youth mental health to collaborate with digital companies. Such collaborations arise when researchers seek to identify risks and opportunities associated with youth digital engagement or to develop research‐based interventions that leverage digital technologies to improve young people's mental health. However, young people's digital experiences, the associated data records and the prospects of testing interventions in situ are often under the control of digital providers and inaccessible to researchers. There is growing optimism that collaboration with companies may allow independent researchers access to proprietary resources along with opportunities to test and scale up beneficial digital interventions. Understandably, such optimism is tempered by scepticism about the processes, trust, and interests at stake during collaboration between researchers and companies. Given these often opposed positions, it is clear that professional guidance is required for academics so they understand the potential costs and benefits of choosing to enter into such collaborations and the terms on which this is advisable. This article highlights what information already exists for researchers and what guidance is needed to ensure that youth mental health researchers can successfully collaborate with digital companies
Digital futures definition (what), importance (why) and methods (how)
No full text“Digital futures” as a research field that examines diverse, long-term future(s) scenarios influenced by digital technologies has been proposed in information systems. Here, based on the emerging literature on digital futures, we define what this term means, delineate it from related concepts such as digital transformation, articulate why the information systems field should take note and consider the study of digital futures, and provide an overview of approaches
A multisector perspective on wage stagnation
No full textLow-skill workers are concentrated in sectors experiencing fast productivity growth, yet their real wages have stagnated and lagged behind aggregate productivity. We provide evidence demonstrating the importance of a multisector perspective. Central to our mechanism is the decline in the relative price of the low-skill intensive sector driven by its faster productivity growth. This dampens wage gains for low-skill workers by lowering the price of their output relative to their consumption basket, which is further reinforced by shifting them into the sector where less weight is placed on their labor. We calibrate the two-sector model to the 1980–2010 U.S. economy and find this mechanism to be quantitatively important. Our counterfactual analysis reveals that low-skill real wage growth would have nearly doubled if the observed aggregate productivity growth had been evenly distributed across sectors
Woes of job burnout: the role of recovery experiences and organization-based self-esteem
No full textDespite previous research has proposed self-regulatory remedies for job burnout, burnout remains a contemporary issue, and employees find it difficult to overcome. Based on the conservation of resources theory and selected the classical self-regulation remedy — job crafting, we developed a framework to explain why employees fail to handle with burnout alone by linking job burnout to job crafting, and identify contingencies that can ameliorate the adverse effects of job burnout. Using a sample of 339 bank employees and collecting data in three waves, we found that job burnout negatively affects employees’ job crafting through lower levels of recovery experiences. Organization-based self-esteem as a vital resource that employees obtain from organizations and transform into personal resources, alleviates the negative relationship between job burnout and recovery experiences, as well as the mediating effect of recovery experiences on the relationship between job burnout and job crafting. The theoretical and practical implications as well as opportunities for future research are discussed
A conceptual review of emission trading schemes: lessons for Iran’s energy market
No full textCompanies often prioritize maximizing profits without considering environmental costs, leading to significant ecological damage. This is the rationale behind carbon pricing policies, like carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes, which hold emitters accountable for greenhouse gas emissions by internalizing the costs of climate change. In energy-rich countries like Iran, where energy production is inexpensive, firms are similarly disinclined to improve energy efficiency. This neglect of long-term resource scarcity, social costs, and environmental impacts has contributed to Iran’s energy imbalance, with the government relying on short-term solutions like electricity and natural gas rationing. Despite the substantial potential for energy efficiency and renewable energy development, the availability of cheap fossil fuels continues to hinder progress. Both corporate neglect of environmental harm and Iran's energy inefficiency stem from the same root problem: external costs are not internalised in decision-making. Readily available resources and environmental services are undervalued, while long-term threats like climate change and resource depletion are overlooked. In this context, Iran's energy sector can learn from the global expansion of Emissions Trading Schemes, which limit greenhouse gas emissions through cap-and-trade mechanisms. These schemes encourage firms to either reduce emissions or face penalties, aligning business interests with environmental goals. This paper reviews Iran’s energy sector and examines both market and non-market approaches to reform. We conceptualize designs for revolving funds, energy efficiency and environment market, feed-in tariffs, direct government investment, and the implementation of cap-and-trade mechanism to regulate energy intensity and promote renewable energy. These strategies provide a roadmap for addressing Iran's energy challenges and advancing toward a more sustainable future
More personalient people are happier
No full textThe general factor of personality (GFP) has been proposed as the personality equivalent of the general factor of intelligence (g). Because GFP is likely an indicator of social effectiveness and emotional intelligence, conducive to smoother social and interpersonal relations, and because humans evolved to be profoundly social, the savanna theory of happiness predicts that more personalient individuals (with higher GFP) are happier. The analyses of the National Child Development Study in the UK (Study 1) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health in the US (Study 2) confirm the prediction. In both studies, the effect size ranged from small to medium. Additional analyses suggest that more personalient individuals are happier, not for genetic reasons, but because of the smoother social and interpersonal relations in everyday experiences. The current analyses add further evidence to the psychometric validity of GFP
A conceptual framework to assess the health, socioeconomic and environmental burden of chronic kidney disease
Get PDFChronic kidney disease (CKD) is a global health challenge that affects patients, caregivers, healthcare systems, the environment and national economies. Despite its far-reaching impact, there is no framework to systematically evaluate national CKD prevention and management programmes or evaluate the societal burden of disease. This paper has two objectives: first, to introduce a comprehensive framework to assess national programmes, which recognises gaps and weaknesses and identifies feasible policy interventions to reduce overall CKD burden; second, to present some key challenges and success stories in delivering CKD services delivered in eight different country settings. A literature review informed an initial version of the framework, which was further developed and refined via collaboration with a panel of UK experts across relevant disciplines. This framework was then presented to seven other country expert panels (Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA) that made further refinements based on their country perspective. The resultant framework covers all health system levels, from preventive public health measures to primary, secondary and tertiary care, including dialysis, transplantation and palliative care. Furthermore, it evaluates the disease burden from economic, social and environmental perspectives. Each panel also discussed challenges regarding providing CKD services in their country and provided success stories, generating valuable insights into areas where policy initiatives could have positive impact on the various components of burden of disease
Explaining ethno-regional favouritism in Sub-Saharan Africa
Get PDFA burgeoning literature on ethno-regional favouritism in Sub-Saharan Africa has found that Presidents favour their co-ethnic kin in the provision of public and private goods. However, this scholarship has largely remained empirically narrow in focus, inasmuch as it preponderantly examines only one outcome and/or country at a time and can be contrasted with a separate set of literature which finds a null or even negative relationship between co-ethnicity and goods provision. As such we conduct the largest examination to date of ethno-regional favouritism in Sub-Saharan Africa using data from the Afrobarometer and DHS across both public and private goods and at both the individual and district level. We confirm the positive effects of individual-level co-ethnicity on a variety of outcomes, but also find that these benefits only accrue to the few co-ethnics living in non-co-ethnic areas and decline as the district-level proportion of co-ethnics increases. The positive effects of individual-level co-ethnicity are weaker for objective outcomes like access to infrastructure, asset ownership and employment but are stronger for subjective measures such as self-assessed living conditions and the quality of government services. We also find that the positive effects of co-ethnicity do not decline with the proportion of local co-ethnics for subjective perceptions of presidential and ruling party performance. This relationship does not hold, however, for perceptions of other non-political institutions like the courts or police, or for local governments. These results are consistent with the argument that co-ethnics derive non-material “psychic goods” from having a co-ethnic in power, rather than the standard “quid-pro-quo” theory common in the literature, and thus complicate the idea that ethnic favouritism in the provision of public and private goods is widespread in contemporary Africa. We supplement our quantitative findings with anecdotal evidence from Nigeria which supports our argument
The Saudi savior—justifying Operation Decisive Storm
Get PDFThis paper argues that despite the success of Saudi Arabia's use of discourse to legitimize Operation Decisive Storm, their initial bombing and blockade of Yemen, to the United States, ultimately these discourses were problematic. Via analyzing speeches from Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Adel Al-Jubeir, and articles from Saudi news website Arab News, this paper traces Saudi propaganda, showing the way in which it was used to justify the extraordinary bombing of Yemen and blockade of Yemeni ports. The paper meaningfully assesses the resonance of their narratives with US audiences through informed analysis. US discourse created a nexus of reciprocal positionality, in which Washington's discourse began to merge with Riyadh's, justifying it yet further. The US had its own reasons for lending support to KSA's war efforts, which encouraged them to adopt core Saudi narratives. This served to justify the two actors' involvement in the Saudi-led intervention. These propagandized narratives had profound humanitarian consequences for the people of Yemen
Did COVID-19 reduce the digital divide? A systematic review
No full textAim: This research paper aims synthesise literature evaluating how the increased use of digital health during the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted equitable access to healthcare in the United Kingdom (UK). Methods: A systematic literature review was adopted to get a broad overview of the impact of digital exclusion in the UK. To enable a structured analytical approach a three-domain framework was adopted ((1) digital access, digital literacy, and digital assimilation), and two specific groups were selected to investigate (older people and people with a lower socioeconomic status (SES)). Results: This review identified 17 relevant papers, of which 5 considered SES and 16 age, concerning equitable healthcare access via digital health in the UK. Three-domain framework analysis found that increased use of digital health during the COVID-19 pandemic had digitally excluded some groups, particularly people with a lower SES. 25 % of included studies identified negative outcomes associated with equitable access for older people, a figure which increased to 60 % in the lower SES analysis. Digital access and literacy were identified as key issues in the lower SES population, meanwhile behavioural factors, such as bounded learning and hassle costs, were identified as a key barrier in older adults. Notably, this review identified some studies where these barriers were effectively overcome, meaning that digital health was able to improve care access and experience for some older adults. This study also identified some cases where the use of digital health supported care to be effectively prioritised. Conclusion: Digital inclusion must become a higher policy priority in the UK. In the meantime, health systems should be mindful of potentially digitally excluded groups and ensure alternate modes of care (e.g. in-person and telephone) are effectively prioritised for those that need it most