scholarly journals Digital diplomatics and measurement of electronic public data qualities

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basma Makhlouf Shabou

Purpose – This paper aims to present a recent study on the definition and measurement of quality dimensions of public electronic records and archives (QADEPs: Qualités des archives et documents électroniques publics). It develops an original model and a complete method with tools to define and measure electronic public data qualities within public institutions. It highlights also the relationship between diplomatics principles and the measurement of trustworthiness of electronic data in particular. This paper presents a general overview of the main results of this study, with also illustrative examples to demonstrate the feasibility of measuring the qualities of electronic archives in the context of public institutions. Design/methodology/approach – This research was conducted in two phases. The first one was the conceptual phase in which the quality dimensions were identified and defined with specific sets of indicators and variables. The second phase was the empirical phase which involved the testing of the model on real electronic documents belonging to several public institutions to validate its relevance and applicability. These tests were performed at the Archives of the State of Wallis and the Archives of the State of Geneva, thanks to different measurement tools designed especially for this stage of the research. Findings – The QADEPs model analyzes the qualities of electronic records in public institutions through three dimensions: trustworthiness, exploitability and representativeness. These dimensions were divided into eight sub-dimensions comprising 17 indicators for a total of 46 variables. These dimensions and their variables tried to cover the main aspects of quality standards for electronic data and public documents. The study demonstrates that nearly 60 per cent of the measured variables could be automated. Research limitations/implications – The QADEPs model was defined and tested in a Swiss context on a limited sample of electronic public data to validate, essentially, its feasibility. It would be useful to extend this approach and test it on a broader sample in different contexts abroad. Practical implications – The decisionmaking of records retention in organizations and public institutions in particular is difficult to establish and justify because it is based generally on subjective and non-defendable practices. The QADEPs model offers specific metrics with their related measuring tools to evaluate and identify what is valuable and what is eliminable within the whole set of institutional electronic information. The model should reinforce the information governance of those institutions and help them control the risks related to information management. Originality/value – The current practice of archival appraisal does not yet invest in a meticulous examination of the nature of documents that should be preserved permanently. The lack of studies on the definition and measurement of the qualities of electronic and public electronic records prevents verification as to whether archival materials are significant. This paper fills in some of the gaps.

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 583-604 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Zide ◽  
Ben Elman ◽  
Comila Shahani-Denning

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the elements of a LinkedIn profile that hiring professionals focus on most, and then examine LinkedIn profiles in terms of these identified elements across different industries. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology was comprised of two phases. In the first phase, researchers interviewed hiring professionals to determine their usage of LinkedIn. In the second phase, LinkedIn group member profiles from three industries – HR, sales/marketing and industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology – were compared on the 21 variables identified in Phase 1 (n=288). Findings – χ2 and ANOVA tests showed significant differences with respect to ten of the LinkedIn variables in how people presented themselves across the three groups. There were also several gender differences found. Research limitations/implications – A general limitation was the use of a qualitative research approach. A limitation of Phase 1 was that only a small sample of New York City-based hiring professionals was interviewed. Perhaps a wider, more diverse sample would have yielded different variables. In terms of Phase 2, it is possible that just utilizing the second connections of the researchers limited the generalizability of findings. Practical implications – User unwillingness to fully complete the LinkedIn profile suggests that it may not have replaced the traditional resume yet. Sales/marketing professionals were more likely than HR and I/O psychology professionals to complete multiple aspects of a LinkedIn profile. Women were also less likely than men to provide personal information on their profiles. Originality/value – Most of the empirical research on social networking sites has focussed on Facebook, a non-professional site. This is, from the knowledge, the first study that systematically examined the manner in which people present themselves on LinkedIn – the most popular professional site used by applicants and recruiters worldwide.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 485-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Borut Milfelner ◽  
Tanja Vidergar Kikel ◽  
Damijan Mumel ◽  
Aleksandra Pisnik

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to measure attitudes towards cosmetic surgery services among women and to determine the potential segments of women according to their attitudes towards cosmetic surgery services and discover the main differences among them. Design/methodology/approach The research was implemented on a sample of 258 women in Slovenia. A quota sample was chosen for this research following the age characteristics of the Slovenian female population. The data collection method used was personal interviews. Convergent validity for the attitudes towards cosmetic surgery services was assessed with exploratory factor analysis. The segmentation analysis procedure was implemented in two phases. First, hierarchical clustering with Ward’s method was deployed, and in the second step K-means cluster analysis was used. Findings The results show that four clusters were clearly distinctive according to three dimensions, namely, intrapersonal, social and consider component. In further analysis, four segments of women were analysed regarding the fear of ageing, the importance of appearance, body image and self-esteem. Results show that all four segments are unique and distinguish one from another. Practical implications Through segmentation analysis, authors of this study indicate two segments (target groups) that are possibly interesting for providers of cosmetic services. Marketing communication activities should mainly be focussed on the woman’s appearance. Originality/value Based on a theoretical hypothesis and use a quantitative method, the aim of this paper is to provide a deeper analysis and understanding of attitudes and views of different woman profile regarding cosmetic surgeries. It presents a more structured view on differences that exist among segments of female consumers while also adding new insights into the factors that influence attitudes towards cosmetic procedures.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azadeh Lak ◽  
Reihaneh Reihaneh Aghamolaei ◽  
Hamid Baradaran ◽  
Phyo K Myint

Abstract Background Considering the lack of specific measurement tools to study elders' perceptions in outdoor spaces, the study objectives were to derive and validate a questionnaire that assesses the essential features of elderly-friendly urban spaces. Methods We used closed-ended questions in two phases. In the first qualitative phase, a preliminary questionnaire was defined using grounded theory. In the second phase, the psychometric properties of the elderly-friendly urban spaces were examined through validity and reliability indices. Results The findings of the first phase led to a preliminary item extraction and questionnaire with 15 major domains based on three dimensions: place function, place preferences, and process. In the second phase, a 48-item questionnaire, based on three dimensions, in addition to personal characteristics, was introduced. Conclusions The Elderly-Friendly Urban Spaces Questionnaire (EFUSQ) can be adopted in various communities in understanding of how to create elder-friendly urban spaces to promote active aging.


Author(s):  
Eugene Yujun Fu ◽  
Hong Va Leong ◽  
Grace Ngai ◽  
Stephen C.F. Chan

Purpose Social signal processing under affective computing aims at recognizing and extracting useful human social interaction patterns. Fight is a common social interaction in real life. A fight detection system finds wide applications. This paper aims to detect fights in a natural and low-cost manner. Design/methodology/approach Research works on fight detection are often based on visual features, demanding substantive computation and good video quality. In this paper, the authors propose an approach to detect fight events through motion analysis. Most existing works evaluated their algorithms on public data sets manifesting simulated fights, where the fights are acted out by actors. To evaluate real fights, the authors collected videos involving real fights to form a data set. Based on the two types of data sets, the authors evaluated the performance of their motion signal analysis algorithm, which was then compared with the state-of-the-art approach based on MoSIFT descriptors with Bag-of-Words mechanism, and basic motion signal analysis with Bag-of-Words. Findings The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach accurately detects fights in real scenarios and performs better than the MoSIFT approach. Originality/value By collecting and annotating real surveillance videos containing real fight events and augmenting with well-known data sets, the authors proposed, implemented and evaluated a low computation approach, comparing it with the state-of-the-art approach. The authors uncovered some fundamental differences between real and simulated fights and initiated a new study in discriminating real against simulated fight events, with very good performance.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heng-Yang Lu ◽  
Yi Zhang ◽  
Yuntao Du

PurposeTopic model has been widely applied to discover important information from a vast amount of unstructured data. Traditional long-text topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation may suffer from the sparsity problem when dealing with short texts, which mostly come from the Web. These models also exist the readability problem when displaying the discovered topics. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel model called the Sense Unit based Phrase Topic Model (SenU-PTM) for both the sparsity and readability problems.Design/methodology/approachSenU-PTM is a novel phrase-based short-text topic model under a two-phase framework. The first phase introduces a phrase-generation algorithm by exploiting word embeddings, which aims to generate phrases with the original corpus. The second phase introduces a new concept of sense unit, which consists of a set of semantically similar tokens for modeling topics with token vectors generated in the first phase. Finally, SenU-PTM infers topics based on the above two phases.FindingsExperimental results on two real-world and publicly available datasets show the effectiveness of SenU-PTM from the perspectives of topical quality and document characterization. It reveals that modeling topics on sense units can solve the sparsity of short texts and improve the readability of topics at the same time.Originality/valueThe originality of SenU-PTM lies in the new procedure of modeling topics on the proposed sense units with word embeddings for short-text topic discovery.


2014 ◽  
Vol 114 (5) ◽  
pp. 398-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gitte Engelund ◽  
Ulla Møller Hansen ◽  
Ingrid Willaing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore educator competencies and roles needed to perform participatory patient education, and develop a comprehensive model describing this. Design/methodology/approach – Data collection in the qualitative study proceeded through two phases. In the first phase, 28 educators were involved in exploring educator competencies needed to perform participatory, group-based patient education. The paper used qualitative methods: dialogue workshops, interviews and observations. In the second phase, 310 educators were involved in saturating and validating the insights from phase one using workshop techniques such as brainstorming, reflection exercises and the story-dialogue method. A grounded theory approach was used to analyse data. Findings – A model called “The Health Education Juggler” was developed comprising four educator roles necessary to perform participatory patient education: the Embracer, the Facilitator, the Translator and the Initiator. The validity of the model was confirmed in phase two by educators and showed fit, grab, relevance, workability and modifiability. Practical implications – The model provides a tool that can be used to support the focus on “juggling” skills in educators: the switching between different educator roles when performing participatory, group-based patient education. The model is useful as an analytical tool for reflection and supervision, as well as for observation and evaluation of participatory, group-based patient education. Originality/value – The study proposes a comprehensive model consisting of four equally important roles for educators performing participatory, group-based patient education.


Kybernetes ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (9) ◽  
pp. 1342-1357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saeedeh Hazratzadeh ◽  
Nima Jafari Navimipour

Purpose Expert Cloud as a new class of cloud systems enables its users to request and share the skill, knowledge and expertise of people by employing internet infrastructures and cloud concepts. Since offering the most appropriate expertise to the customer is one of the clear objectives in Expert Cloud, colleague recommendation is a necessary part of it. So, the purpose of this paper is to develop a colleague recommender system for the Expert Cloud using features matrices of colleagues. Design/methodology/approach The new method is described in two phases. In the first phase, all possible colleagues of the user are found through the filtering mechanism and next features of the user and possible colleagues are calculated and collected in matrices. Six potential features of colleagues including reputation, expertise, trust, agility, cost and field of study were proposed. In the second phase, the final score is calculated for every possible colleague and then top-k colleagues are extracted among users. The survey was conducted using a simulation in MATLAB Software. Data were collected from Expert Cloud website. The method was tested using evaluating metrics such as precision, accuracy, incorrect recommendation and runtime. Findings The results of this study indicate that considering more features of colleagues has a positive impact on increasing the precision and accuracy of recommending new colleagues. Also, the proposed method has a better result in reducing incorrect recommendation. Originality/value In this paper, the colleague recommendation issue in the Expert Cloud is pointed out and the solution approach is applied into the Expert Cloud website.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 516-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingy Shafei ◽  
Jan Walburg ◽  
Ahmed Taher

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to determine the best measure among several alternatives (SERVQUAL, weighted SERVQUAL, SERVPERF, weighted SERVPERF) and develop a scale which healthcare providers can use for measurement of healthcare service quality.Design/methodology/approachThe study involved two phases. The first phase was through a series of in-depth interviews with experts and patients followed by a pilot study. Subsequently, the second phase involved a quantitative phase through surveys with 384 patients. Alternative measures were analyzed using coefficient (Cronbach)α, composite reliability, factor analysis and logistic regression analysis.FindingsFindings confirmed “Weighted SERVPERF” using an interactive methodology as the most appropriate for measurement of healthcare service quality.Originality/valueUsing the model and scale developed, healthcare providers will be able to measure healthcare service quality and identify areas of shortfall and act accordingly to improve delivery through allocating resources in service areas that would generate the greatest returns in customer satisfaction. Enhancing satisfaction will ultimately generate patient loyalty and positive recommendation behavior.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmud Akhter Shareef ◽  
Yogesh K. Dwivedi ◽  
Norm Archer ◽  
Mohammad Mahboob Rahman

PurposeStakeholders affiliated with healthcare services should understand patient attitudes and criteria that are involved in selecting a personal physician. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that are significant to patients in selecting or deselecting physicians as providers of healthcare services.Design/methodology/approachThe research structure was set to theorize the physician selection criteria (PSC) model into two phases. The first phase developed a conceptual model as revealed from healthcare consumer perceptions. The second phase was designed to test and validate the model through cause–effect statistical analysis underpinned by theoretical explanations through an empirical study.FindingsThrough an empirical study of benchmarking perceptions of people from 15 different countries, qualitative PSC were gathered and used to formulate an initial PSC model. Based on the proposed model, a validity test was conducted, and finally, the PSC model was developed, resulting in several interesting and self-explanatory outcomes.Research limitations/implicationsThe model was tested in only one (relatively cosmopolitan) city. For proper generalization, it should be tested in countries with differing healthcare service systems.Practical implicationsThe results of this study are interesting, important and have potential values to academics and medical professionals. The study provides strong evidence that a physician’s external approach to patients is the most significant issue for patients seeking medical services. This does not refer to basic medical services, but rather the treatment process, where the physician’s behavior and positive attitude has the strongest effect on the patient’s decision to choose one physician over others.Originality/valueFinal PSC model has identified some significant theoretical explanations for academics and professional justifications for practitioners.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-141
Author(s):  
Ryan Sanders ◽  
Shengfan Zhang

PurposeTeacher pay in Arkansas public schools varies widely from district to district across the state. This pay discrepancy is driven by both the funds available to a district and by how these funds are allocated. A standard per student budget is given to districts across the state, but this budget can be supplemented by additional property taxes collected on property within a district. This leaves districts with more highly valued property at an advantage. Districts are free to allocate their budget for teacher pay as they see fit, with constraints on number of students per teacher and minimum teacher salary.Design/methodology/approachUsing public data available through the Arkansas Department of Education, this research investigates what variables affect student performance in Arkansas public schools using feature selection and predictive modelling and determine the cost-effectiveness associated with changing possible decision variables in terms of improving student performance.FindingsIt was found that the most cost-effective ways for districts to increase student performance are to (1) increase average teacher salary and (2) increase average years of teacher experience. This result is validated by education research, as both of these methods have been identified in literature as being effective ways to increase teacher quality and increase student performance. Furthermore, districts should consider increasing student–teacher ratio and applying the resulting savings toward teacher salaries.Originality/valueThis methodology gives a fresh perspective on the most cost-effective use of resources in publicly funded schools.


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