1,720,957 research outputs found
Understanding household recycling for the sustainable management of urban waste: a mixed-method investigation
Full text linkIn recent years, the ever-increasing generation of urban waste is posing serious problems to developed countries and cities, highlighting the pressing need to transform their current recycling practices into more efficient and sustainable ones. This is not possible, however, without the involvement and active cooperation of citizens as key initiators and sustainers of the entire recycling process. During the last decades, the question of what makes people recycle or not has occupied researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and influence this behavior, resulting in a great number of publications examining recycling from a range of perspectives including psychology, economics, sociology, geography and marketing. Yet the comprehension of this phenomenon and of the most effective ways to promote its adoption among people is still far from being exhaustive.
The aim of the research presented here is thus to examine household recycling using a mixed-method approach, in order to overcome the limitations that characterize both quantitative and qualitative research and to provide new penetrating insights to comprehend this phenomenon and promote its adoption. The research work is composed of two main parts. The first, theoretical, consists of a systematic review of the existing recycling literature, offering an in-depth overview of the identified socio-psychological and situational determinants of household recycling (Chapter 1), as well as of the intervention strategies used to promote it, including a meta-analysis of their effectiveness (Chapter 2). Starting from here, the second part concerns the investigation in the Italian context of household recycling drivers and dynamics, as well as of the mechanisms underlying its adoption and maintenance over time. The mixed-method approach adopted to undertake the research is discussed in Chapter 3, pointing at the flexible use of quantitative and qualitative methods to gather different but complementary types of data. Study 1 consists indeed of an extensive online survey allowing to collect data across a large population sample, while Study 2 relies on qualitative and ethnographic methods, such as interviews, observations and home tours, to achieve a deeper comprehension of recycling dynamics in the setting of the home, exploring the experiences of participants and the meanings they attribute to them. Altogether the pieces of evidence obtained from the present thesis point at the relational and habitual nature of recycling, evidencing that various factors, such as knowledge and the perceived value of waste (Chapter 4), motivations to recycle and those used to justify defective episodes (Chapter 5), cooperation and distribution of tasks between family members, the organization of domestic spaces, as well as the responsibilities for recycling attributed to external actors (Chapter 6) interact with each other and become locally important in influencing recycling behavior.
A general discussion synthetizing the theoretical findings and the results obtained by the studies presented in this thesis is then offered in Chapter 7, with the twofold aim to extend the results of previous research on recycling and to delineate a set of practical recommendations for implementing effective interventions
Psychological strategies to promote household recycling. A systematic review with meta-analysis of validated field interventions
No full textRecycling urban waste is a priority to preserve natural resources and reduce pollution. However, the entire recycling process is not possible without the cooperation of citizens through primary separation of waste at home. Various psychological intervention strategies have been applied to promote household recycling, such as information, feedback, incentives, commitment, behavior modeling and environmental alterations. The purpose of this article is to systematically review and evaluate through a meta-analysis their effectiveness, investigating also existing connections between intervention-based research and research on recycling determinants. A random-effect meta-analysis with a sample of 36 studies reporting 70 interventions revealed that social modeling and environmental alterations were the most effective techniques. The examination of underlying factors considered in the interventions also showed that some of them are rarely accounted for when designing the interventions. The findings are discussed along with possible future directions for interventions aiming at promoting recycling
The Persuasive Effect of Social Network Feedback on Mediated Communication: A Case Study in a Real Organization
No full textThis study focuses on social feedback, namely on information on the outcome of users' online activity indirectly generated by other users, and investigates in a real setting whether it can affect subsequent activity and, if so, whether participants are aware of that. SkyPas, an application that calculates, transmits, and displays social feedback, was embedded in a common instant messaging service (Skype(TM)) and used during a 7-week trial by 24 office workers at a large business organization. The trial followed an ABA scheme in which the B phase was the feedback provision phase. Results show that social feedback affects users' communication activity (participation, inward communication, outward communication, and reciprocity), sometimes even after the feedback provision phase. At the same time, users were poorly aware of this effect, showing a discrepancy between self-reported and observational measures. These results are then discussed in terms of design transparency and task compatibility
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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
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