1,720,958 research outputs found
Determinants of electricity conservation in South African households : a social marketing perspective
Get PDFD.Phil. (Marketing Management)Abstract: Many developing countries, including South Africa, experience great challenges with regard to balancing electricity supply and increasing demand. For example, between 2008 and 2015, South Africa frequently experienced higher electricity demand over supply capacity. The high electricity demand emanates from the increase in business activities, industrialisation, rising population, and immigration. Households play a central role in the escalating electricity demand in South Africa and consume about 20% of the electricity and contribute to about 30% of peak period demand, which often leads to blackouts. A short-term solution to handle the high demand of electricity over supply available was to implement a rotational electricity load shedding program. This however left some areas without electricity for extended periods of time and often resulted in huge economic losses. For a more desirable and cost-effective way to reduce electricity demand, various media, including the country’s national TV are being widely used to create awareness about the electricity problem and to run campaigns promoting electricity conservation tips. A 2013 study by the South African Department of Energy (DoE) aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the campaigns revealed that public awareness of the problem and the electricity saving measures substantially increased, but the actual electricity conservation behaviour did not significantly change. The goal of a successful social marketing campaign is behaviour change. Achieving this change requires solid consumer research aimed at examining the major factors helping and hindering the adoption of the desired behaviour. The desired behaviour for this study is electricity conservation. For understanding of possible determinants of electricity conservation, extant literature around the topic was first reviewed. The review revealed that most energy conservation studies revolved around two streams of research. The first is the individualistic stream which is premised on the reasoned action approach generally explained by the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The second is the altruistic stream of research, which is derived from the norm activation approach developed in the Norm Activation Model (NAM). With the aim of holistically understanding the determinants of electricity conservation, this study combined the individualistic and altruism approaches, and added economic and socio-demographical moderators to propose an integrated conceptual model. The model encapsulated social, psychological, economic and demographic factors to help explain the decision to conserve electricity in households..
A critical analysis of smokers' behaviour in a designated non-smoking area : a case study of the MTB coffee shop, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Get PDFA constant exposure to Second-hand smoke (SHS) is a significant public health problem. The Howard College campus, one of the five campuses of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa, has been lethargic in pursuing compliance in designated non-smoking spaces. The single coffee shop serving all students in the Howard College Campus was not only one of the most crowded eating-places in this campus, but also amongst the areas where smoking occurred the most, notwithstanding the no-smoking signs. In addressing non-compliance, this thesis investigates smokers’ illegal behaviour at the coffee shop. This enquiry involved the following main questions: Why do faculty and students smoke at the coffee shop even though it is a designated non-smoking area? How should the University effectively proceed to tackle smokers’ behaviour in designated non-smoking areas? Participant observation enabled the researcher to examine and describe smoking behaviour. Semi-structured interviews with twenty smokers and nine non-smokers provided insight into forces upholding the smoking habit. The Social Ecological Model that incorporates intrapersonal, interpersonal, community, institutional and policy level of analysis was applied. Findings highlighted: i) the lack of law enforcement as the key reason for non-compliance; ii) peer-pressure exerted by smokers; iii) lack of designated smoking area; iv) claims that smoking and socialisation enable de-stressing and v) An urgent need to rethink how to provide places where students can socialise in an organic manner
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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