1,720,957 research outputs found
Towards a sustainability facts panel? Life Cycle Assessment data outperforms simplified communication styles in terms of consumer comprehension
No full textTo make environment-friendly decisions, consumers need reliable and easy-to understand information. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data addresses the first, but with multiple impact categories displayed in technical units, it struggles to deliver the second. This work investigates strategies to render LCA data more comprehensible, testing in an online experiment how consumers interact with it under missing information and with simplified communication styles. Participants ranked the impacts of six 3-dimensional (water consumption, non-renewable energy use and CO 2 emissions) environmental profiles of coffee. With a 3 × 3 between-subjects design, we analyzed answer accuracy under three communication styles (LCA standard units, values converted to popular references, and standardized units), the positioning of a missing information profile under three data gap patterns, and if common dimensions (those for which all options provide information) are overweighted in the decision. Our results show that: (1) Simplification does not always translate into better comprehension, as both the simplified communication styles were less accurate than LCA standard units. (2) Loss aversion was the dominant force guiding decisions under missing information, leading participants to rank the missing information profile as the least impactful in many cases. This contradicts previous work that suggested that the dominant force was the tendency to see willful deception on information omission. (3) There is no evidence that consumers try to minimize their cognitive efforts to reach a decision by overweighting common dimensions when analyzing environmental information as has been reported for other contexts. These findings suggest the viability for a “sustainability facts panel” based on standard LCA data. They also sound the alarm about the need for a uniform approach to communicate environmental performance
Plate waste in foodservice outlets: Revealing customer profiles and their support for potentially contentious measures to reduce it in Italy
No full textFood waste impacts the environment and the financial gains of foodservice establishments. Reducing it entails targeting the customers, as plate waste is the primary source of waste in these outlets. However, little is known about why some customers are more prone to not finishing their food. Furthermore, many of the measures proposed to curb plate waste can potentially generate a negative customer experience, yet no work has tried to ascertain whether diners actually disapprove of them. To investigate these issues, we surveyed 1,131 consumers in Italy. We tested the association between socio-demographic and attitudinal features and self-reported plate waste. We also measured their support for six contentious strategies for reducing food waste. Our results show that women, those who dine out more often, and those that are less aware of the social/environmental consequences of food waste tend to leave their plate unfinished more frequently. Additionally, although customers approve of doggy bags, information dissemination through awareness campaigns, and sales in last minute markets, they are resistant to portion size reduction without a corresponding price reduction, unsolicited advice on the quantity of food ordered, and limits on the number of options in the menu. Finally, support for the measures correlated strongly with awareness, and women complained significantly more about oversized portions. In addition to profiling out-of-home wasters and revealing which strategies do not affect customer experience, these results suggest the existence of a gender bias in portion size definition and underline how awareness campaigns can indirectly lead to reductions in food waste
Passively concerned: Horeca managers’ recognition of the importance of food waste hardly leads to the adoption of more strategies to reduce it
No full textRecent works have found a negative correlation between the amount of food waste generated in foodservice outlets and the extent to which managers perceive it as a relevant problem. However, it is hard to believe that food flows would be impacted by wishful thinking alone. In this paper, we try to offer an explanation to these findings by testing the associations between importance recognition, food waste measurement and compliance to waste reduction strategies in three different stages (pre-kitchen, in-kitchen and post-kitchen). We do so by fitting a generalized structural equation model in the results of a survey ran in Italy with almost 500 Horeca (Hotels, restaurants and cafeterias) managers. Our findings reveal that importance perception triggers strategies’ adoption in only one of the three stages (in-kitchen). Furthermore, this association is essentially dependent on the mediation performed by measurement, suggesting that importance recognition covers a complex pathway to arrive in reduced amounts of waste. Additional results indicate that larger and higher-end outlets tend to place more importance on food waste. Moreover, although 77% of the sample recognizes the relevance of food waste to their businesses, the incorporation of some of the main reduction strategies is still low, as 85% of the establishments report the adoption of no more than 3 out of the 9 strategies presented
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
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