scholarly journals Agriculture and natural resources business owners economic and communication concerns early in the COVID-19 pandemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
Lauri Baker ◽  
Michaela Kandzer ◽  
Shelli Rampold ◽  
Christy Chiarelli ◽  
Hikaru Peterson ◽  
...  

The purpose of this study was to describe agriculture and natural resource (ANR) leader business owners’ initial concerns and feelings about the impacts of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Based on the theories of opinion leadership and bounded rationality, researchers analyzed survey findings to identify and describe ANR business owners’ 1) business and economic concerns associated with COVID-19, 2) communication concerns associated with COVID-19, and 3) any other concerns or impacts experienced due to COVID-19. Findings indicated that the majority of respondents were concerned about their bottom lines, employees missing work, and their abilities to provide employees a safe workplace. Additionally, respondents were concerned about the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. economy. Regarding communication concerns, respondents were concerned about others sharing inaccurate COVID-19 information. When asked about additional concerns related to COVID-19, many respondents noted their concerns about economic impacts, personal and business finances, and canceled events causing them to become unable to interact with customers. Overall, the biggest concerns were related to economic impacts and misinformation. Recommendations for future research are to continue to assess this population as the pandemic continues, and again when the health crisis ends to understand the recovery process for ANR leader business owners.

Pharmacy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
George Daskalakis ◽  
Ashley Cid ◽  
Kelly Grindrod ◽  
Michael A. Beazely

A recent report found that the number of opioid-related deaths in Ontario in the first 15 weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic was 38.2% higher than in the 15 weeks before the pandemic. Our study sought to determine if pharmacy professionals self-reported an increase or decrease in naloxone provision due to the pandemic and to identify adjustments made by pharmacy professionals to dispense naloxone during the pandemic. A total of 231 Ontario community pharmacy professionals completed an online survey. Pharmacy professionals’ barriers, facilitators, and comfort level with dispensing naloxone before and during the pandemic were identified. The sample consisted of mostly pharmacists (99.1%). Over half (51.1%) reported no change in naloxone dispensing, while 22.9% of respondents reported an increase and 24.7% a decrease. The most common adjustments made during the pandemic were training patients how to administer naloxone over video or phone, delivering naloxone kits, and pharmacy technicians offering naloxone at prescription intake. Over half (55%) of participants said the top barrier for dispensing was that patients did not request naloxone. Naloxone distribution through pharmacies could be further optimized to address the increased incidence of overdose deaths during the pandemic. Future research should investigate the reasons for changes in naloxone dispensing.


Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Chilton ◽  
Robert Silverman ◽  
Rabia Chaudhrey ◽  
Chihaungji Wang

The U.S. Congress authorized the creation of real estate investment trusts (REITs) in 1960 so companies could develop publically traded real estate investment portfolios. REITs focus on commercial property, retail property, and rental property. During the last decade, REITs became more active in regional housing markets across the U.S. Single-family rental (SFR) REITs have grown tremendously, buying up residential properties across the country. In some regional housing markets, SFR REITs own noticeable shares of single-family homes. In those settings, SFR REITs take large numbers of housing units off of real estate markets where homeownership transactions occur and manage these properties as part of commercial rental inventories. This has resulted in a new category of multiple property owners, composed of institutional investors as opposed to individual investors, which further exacerbates property wealth concentration and polarization. This study examines the socio–spatial distribution of properties in SFR REIT portfolios to determine if SFR REIT properties tend to cluster in distinct areas. This study will focus on the regional housing market in Nashville, TN. Nashville has one of the most active SFR REIT sectors in the country. County tax assessor records were used to identify SFR REIT properties. These data were joined with U.S. Census data to create a profile of communities. The data were analyzed using SPSS statistical software and GIS software. Our analysis suggests that neighborhoods with clusters of SFR REITs fit the SFR REIT business model. Clusters occur in communities with newer homes, residents with higher levels of educational attainment, and middle to upper-middle incomes. The paper concludes with several recommendations for future research on SFR REITs.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Richard Philip Lee ◽  
Caroline Coulson ◽  
Kate Hackett

The on-going rise in demand experienced by voluntary and community organisations (VCOs) providing emergency food aid has been described as a sign of a social and public health crisis in the UK (Loopstra, 2018; Lambie-Mumford, 2019), compounded since 2020 by the impact of (and responses to) Covid 19 (Power et al., 2020). In this article we adopted a social practice approach to understanding the work of food bank volunteering. We identify how ‘helping others’, ‘deploying coping strategies’ and ‘creating atmospheres’ are key specific (and connected) forms of shared social practice. Further, these practices are sometimes suffused by faith-based practice. The analysis offers insights into how such spaces of care and encounter (Williams et al., 2016; Cloke et al., 2017) function, considers the implications for these distinctive organisational forms (the growth of which has been subject to justified critique) and suggests avenues for future research.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 1088-1101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Moschella ◽  
Sidney Turner ◽  
Victoria L. Banyard

Sexual assault (SA) and intimate partner violence (IPV) occur at alarming rates in the United States. Prior research indicates that victims of traumatic events frequently experience both positive and negative changes as part of their recovery process. The present study aimed to further existing research by examining the relationship between self-blame, posttraumatic growth (PTG), and happiness when controlling for posttraumatic stress and time since victimization. The current study analyzed 357 women who had experienced at least one incident of SA or IPV. We found that PTG partially mediated the relationship between self-blame and happiness, suggesting that PTG only somewhat explains the impact of self-blame on victim happiness. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.


Author(s):  
Olivia Mirza ◽  
Dane Wigg ◽  
Won Hee Kang ◽  
Sepani Senaratne ◽  
Vivian Tam ◽  
...  

The global demand for construction aggregate exceeds 26 billion tons per year. With global policy attention directed towards climate change, environmental and economic sustainability, changes are required to the Australian construction industry regarding the extraction of natural resources. In particular, the concrete industry requires seeking innovative, sustainable solutions for reducing the impact of construction and maintenance on the environment. The majority of structures in Australia use reinforced concrete. Therefore, using environmentally and economically sustainable materials such as recycled concrete in construction would preserve natural resources and reduce construction waste and overall costs. There is considerable research available on the use of recycled concrete as a construction material and the use of steel fibers as structural reinforcement has been studied since the 1960’s. However, there is very little research on the combination of the two as a construction material for concrete structures. This study focused on secondary beams made of recycled concrete with the incorporation of steel fibers. This combination offers a structurally sound material that will provide a durable and sustainable solution to Australian Construction Industry. Experimental studies were conducted to validate the performance of the new material in a structural application. Based on the results of the study, recommendations for future research and design applications using these materials are made.


10.28945/4755 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 291-317
Author(s):  
Basil Cahusac de Caux

Aim/Purpose: To date, few studies have investigated the impact of global health crises on the academic writing of doctoral candidates. This paper seeks to start a conversation about the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral candidates’ academic writing output and strategies. Background: This paper employs and analyses data elicited from surveys and interviews involving doctoral candidates from around the world. Data were collected during April 2020, at a time when government-mandated lockdowns and restrictions on movement were in full force in many countries around the world. Methodology: Surveys were conducted with 118 doctoral candidates from over 40 institutions based in four continents. Follow-up interviews were carried out with four doctoral candidates enrolled in an Australian institution. A qualitative descriptive design, employing thematic analysis, is used to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral candidates’ writing output and strategies. The data analysis includes statistical descriptions of the surveys. Contribution: This paper provides insights into the myriad challenges and obstacles facing doctoral candidates during the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes the writing strategies adopted by doctoral candidates during a period of significant societal disruption, and illustrates how thematic analysis can be employed in research involving global health crises. Findings: Despite the adoption of novel approaches to academic writing, which appear in an insignificant minority of respondents, doctoral candidates’ overall commitment to academic writing has been negatively impacted by the pandemic. Similarly, delays to academic research activities caused by the pandemic have resulted in a significant decline in commitment (motivation) to academic writing and a substantial impact on doctoral candidates’ ability to write about their research. Recommendations for Practitioners: Supervisors and mentors should strive to provide doctoral candidates with timely feedback during the pandemic. Given the impact of the pandemic on doctoral candidates’ mental health and motivation to write, increased institutional and peer support is required to help doctoral candidates overcome academic issues during the pandemic and future health crises. This researcher recommends consulting regularly with and offering individually tailored solutions to doctoral candidates who are struggling to work on their theses during the pandemic. Similarly, institutions should empower supervisors in ways that allow them to provide greater levels of support to doctoral candidates. Recommendation for Researchers: Further research on the impacts of the pandemic on various academic cohorts, such as early career researchers (doctoral candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and assistant professors) and student cohorts (e.g., undergraduate and postgraduate), will clarify the extent to which the pandemic is impacting the academic writing of doctoral candidates. Impact on Society: The pressure placed on doctoral candidates to produce quality academic writing seems to have been heightened by the pandemic. This has a range of adverse effects for the higher education sector, particularly administrators responsible for managing doctoral candidate success and the academe, which recruits many of its faculty from holders of doctorate degrees. Future Research: Additional focus on academic writing of doctoral candidates during the pandemic is needed. Research should include randomised samples and represent a range of academic disciplines.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 236-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Williamson ◽  
David Hoppey ◽  
James McLeskey ◽  
Erica Bergmann ◽  
Hanna Moore

The least restrictive environment (LRE) mandate suggests a preference for educating students with disabilities in general education settings provided their needs can be met there. This study examined national trends in the educational placements of students with disabilities ages 6 to 17 in the 50 states and the District of Columbia from 1990 through 2015. Data were retrieved electronically from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Census Bureau websites. Cumulative placement rates were then calculated. Findings indicate that from 1990 through 2015, (a) general education placements increased while more restrictive placements decreased, (b) students in secondary schools continued to be placed in more restrictive settings, and (c) the impact of disability categories on national LRE trends varied. Future research is needed to investigate the effect of increased identification rates in specific disability categories on national placement trends and explore how placement practices vary across schools, districts, and states.


2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Ashima Yadav ◽  
Dinesh Kumar Vishwakarma

Towards the end of 2019, Wuhan experienced an outbreak of novel coronavirus, which soon spread worldwide, resulting in a deadly pandemic that infected millions of people around the globe. The public health agencies followed many strategies to counter the fatal virus. However, the virus severely affected the lives of the people. In this paper, we study the sentiments of people from the top five worst affected countries by the virus, namely the USA, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa. We propose a deep language-independent Multilevel Attention-based Conv-BiGRU network (MACBiG-Net) , which includes embedding layer, word-level encoded attention, and sentence-level encoded attention mechanisms to extract the positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. The network captures the subtle cues in a document by focusing on the local characteristics of text along with the past and future context information for the sentiment classification. We further develop a COVID-19 Sentiment Dataset by crawling the tweets from Twitter and applying topic modeling to extract the hidden thematic structure of the document. The classification results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 85%, which is higher than other well-known algorithms for sentiment classification. The findings show that the topics which evoked positive sentiments were related to frontline workers, entertainment, motivation, and spending quality time with family. The negative sentiments were related to socio-economic factors like racial injustice, unemployment rates, fake news, and deaths. Finally, this study provides feedback to the government and health professionals to handle future outbreaks and highlight future research directions for scientists and researchers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Majd Megheirkouni ◽  
Alison Thirlwall ◽  
Ammar Mejheirkouni

Purpose The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of gender in the sport business by investigating gender differences in entrepreneurial leadership and cultural values using quantitative methods. Design/methodology/approach In total, 241 surveys were completed by sport business owners in 4 countries in the Middle East. Findings The results revealed that gender differences and similarities are not only widely affected by national cultural values but also the effects of national cultural values vary between countries in the Middle East, despite these countries being similar in terms of habits, traditions, history, language and institutional systems. Additionally, it was found that entrepreneurial leadership is a role, task or responsibility that is related to both men and women in the sport business in the Middle East. Research limitations/implications Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed, together with limitations and suggestions for future research. Originality/value This is the only study in the field of entrepreneurial leadership that examined the concept of entrepreneurial leadership in Middle East sport businesses.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachid Zeffane

AbstractWe explore the impact of gender, individualism–collectivism on individual’s propensity to trust. The study draws on data from three groups of individuals in the United Arab Emirates: students; (n=370); small business owners/operators (n=324), and employed individuals (n=376). Three main hypotheses are tested. We develop and explore three main hypotheses. Statistical results reveal that females are generally more collectivist and less trusting than their males counterparts. Further analysis revealed that small business/operators are generally more trusting than the other cohorts of respondents. Propensity to trust was also found to be strongly associated with collectivist (rather than individualist) aspirations. Implications for future research and management practice are discussed.


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