The predictors of exam performance of Kazakh university students and secondary school pupils learning Turkish

The present study investigates the effect of sociobiographical, emotional, attitudinal characteristics and teacher perceptions of 275 Kazakh secondary school pupils and 317 university students on their exam performance in Turkish as a foreign language (FL). Multiple regression analyses reveal that exam results in Turkish of secondary school pupils are predicted by teacher gender, participant’s age, attitude towards the FL and FL Classroom Anxiety. A very different picture emerges for university students, where FL level, participant’s gender, FL Enjoyment, FL Classroom Anxiety and teacher’s age explain more than twice as much variance. FL exam scores for both groups are thus underpinned by different sets of complex interactions between multiple learner-internal and learner-external variables and the effect of emotions is much stronger among university learners.

Football fans and stakeholder theory – A qualitative approach to classifying fans in Germany

PurposePublic debates and scholarly literature on football fandom are often characterised by generalisation and lacking differentiation. The changing ethnography of fans, affected by the rapid commercialisation and internationalisation of the game, reinforces the demand for contemporary classification criteria and fan typologies that take the complexity and heterogeneity of fans into account and draw a more differentiated picture of fans and sub-groups.Design/methodology/approachBased on the grounded theory methodology and a systematic literature review on stakeholder theory, stakeholder classification criteria and football fandom, the authors conduct and analyse 14 semi-structured expert interviews with fan managers employed by German professional football clubs. Building on the analysis, the authors identify, present and discuss ten contemporary criteria and five corresponding typologies for the classification of football fans.FindingsThe grounded theory analysis suggests that football fans can be characterised according to ten classification criteria. Building on the analysis, the authors derive five fan typologies that differ in their characteristics along the continua of the identified criteria. Typologies comprise (1) active fans, (2) consuming fans, (3) event fans, (4) corporate fans and (5) passive followers.Originality/valueThe paper enlarges prior knowledge on the behavioural and attitudinal characteristics of fans as individuals and adds knowledge regarding relationships within fan groups, and regarding formal and non-formal relations between fans and clubs. The results provide scholars with a framework for further scientific investigation and practitioners with a concept for a more sophisticated and differentiated approach to managing fan relations.

Will We Fly Again? Modeling Air Travel Demand in light of COVID-19 through a London Case Study

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions have created an unprecedented challenge for the air transport industry, which before the pandemic was facing almost the exact opposite set of problems. Instead of the growing demand and need for capacity expansion warring against environmental concerns, the sector is now facing a slump in demand and the continuing uncertainty about the impacts of the pandemic on people’s willingness to fly. To shed light on consumer attitudes toward air travel during and post the pandemic, this study presents an analysis that draws on recently collected survey data (April–July 2020), including both revealed and stated preference components, of 388 respondents who traveled from one of the six London, U.K., airports in 2019. Several travel scenarios considering the circumstances and attitudes related to COVID-19 are explored. The data is analyzed using a hybrid choice model to integrate latent constructs related to attitudinal characteristics. The analysis confirms the impact of consumers’ health concerns on their willingness to travel, as a function of travel characteristics, that is, cost and number of transfers. It also provides insights into preference heterogeneity as a function of sociodemographic characteristics. However, no significant effects are observed concerning perceptions of safety arising from wearing a mask, or concerns over the necessity to quarantine. Results also suggest that some respondents may perceive virtual substitutes for business travel, for example video calls and similar software, as only a temporary measure, and seek to return to traveling as soon as it is possible to do so safely.

How Do Attitudes and Perceptions Affect Environmental Preferences?

Environmental preferences or willingness to pay (WTP) values tend to be heterogeneous and evolving over time. Attitudes and related theories worked as an alternative observation scope to the more conventional sociodemographic characteristics, explaining preference heterogeneity in environmental economics. Perception as a concept, on the other hand, is too illusive to be exclusively examined so is better treated as an attitude. Although not popular in mainstream environmental economics, the research interest in the attitude–WTP relationship has continued since the late 1990s and has increased and been relatively steady between 2006 and 2020. According to the lessons from the established behavioral models, attitudes are normally categorized as either general or specific. General attitudes are situation-invariant and slow to change, whereas specific attitudes are situational and quick to change. The early pioneering studies of the attitude–WTP relationship used mostly ad hoc measures for environmental attitudes roughly from 1990, followed by the studies of more systematic representation roughly from 2000, and by those of hybrid models roughly from 2010. There were segmentation-based and parameterization-based approaches to incorporating attitudinal characteristics into valuation models. In particular, parameterization has appeared in three generations: indirect inclusion of indicators, sequential estimation using factor analysis, and integrated hybrid models. As future prospects, first, general environmental attitudes might play an important role in the coming decade because of their relative stability (i.e., situation invariant), comparability, and wide influence, determining environmental preferences and behaviors. Second, a potential difference between the segmentation-based and parameterization-based approaches requires further investigation. Third, the role of hybrid models and the payment parameter that is arbitrarily constrained demand more studies for accurate estimation of mean WTP values. The evolving nature of human preferences could be understood only when the observation scope for latent attitudes is enlightened enough to guide studies of environmental economics, to lead environmental policies, and to accomplish sustainable development.

Antecedents and Outcomes of Network Involvement in the Internationalization Process: A Case of SMEs from the USA, China, and Russia

The internationalization processes of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) differ across economic and cultural environments. Creating an operationalizable and predictive framework to explain them has long been a challenging research task. This task is particularly relevant in an era of reconfiguration of globalization, which directly affects the small business sector. This study proposes a model which includes networking, attitudinal, cultural, and environmental factors as antecedents of the degree of SME internationalization. We collected data and tested this model in three distinct cultural environments: the USA, China, and Russia. The results suggest that attitudinal characteristics of managers, such as global mindset and relationship commitment, condition SMEs network involvement. The influence of network involvement on the degree of SMEs internationalization becomes stronger with increasing environmental turbulence. This study’s findings have practical implications for businesses operating in different countries, as well as governmental organizations and educational institutions.

Mobility Styles and Car Ownership—Potentials for a Sustainable Urban Transport

Decision-makers in cities worldwide have the responsibility to contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in urban transport. Therefore, effective measures and policies that allow for a change in people’s mobility towards sustainable mobility must be derived. To understand how different people respond to measures and policies, and to increase the effectiveness of such policies, individual mobility needs and mobility determinants have to be considered. For this, the definition of individual mobility styles as holistic descriptions considering travel behavior, attitudes, as well as life stages is useful. This study presents a segmentation approach that identifies eight urban mobility styles by using data from a multidimensional survey conducted in Berlin and San Francisco. We applied a cluster analysis with both behavioral and attitudinal characteristics as segmentation criteria. By analyzing the characteristics, we identified a mobility style—the Environmentally Oriented Multimodals—that is environmentally oriented, but not yet all people in this cluster are sustainable in their mobility. Thus, they are the group with the highest potential to accept and use sustainable mobility. Additionally, we found that within the Environmentally Oriented Multimodals, the change from one life stage to another is also likely to be accompanied by a car acquisition.

Interpretation of Teachers’ Understanding of the Concept of Personal Social Responsibility

This paper explores the concept of personal social responsibility from the teachers’ self-perceived perspective of its occurrence and understanding in the context of English language teaching and learning. It seeks to highlight the variety of constituents, qualities, and characteristics that shape it. Mixed methods research methodology is used for the analysis and interpretation of personal social responsibility taking into account teachers’ descriptions of its constituents’ level of importance, attitudinal characteristics to the chosen profession, qualities that characterize individual’s behavior towards other people, community and society, and how teaching personal social responsibility might have an impact on students’ learning and development. The participants of the study are English language educators representing the multicultural teaching community in the tertiary education institutions in the Sultanate of Oman. The findings of the study show that the concept of personal social responsibility is perceived as significantly important and meaningful; however, it yields considering approaches in the way it is provided, communicated, and taught in the English language courses. It is expected that the findings of this study may give proper guidance in forming future decisions about personal social responsibility teaching to empower students and enhance their academic and professional success.

Examining the Role of Gender and Educational Level in Committing Plagiarism by Iranian EFL Graduate Students

As an unethical behavior, plagiarism refers to using other people’s words or ideas without appropriately acknowledging the source (Delvin & Gray, 2007). Numerous scholars from different parts of the world have attempted to get into the root of this problem by identifying the underlying factors which contribute to such academic misconduct. In a similar vein, the present study aimed at examining the role of gender and educational level of Iranian EFL graduate students in determining the main reasons for plagiarism commitment from their point of view. To this end, a convenient sample of 159 M.A. and Ph.D. students partook in the study. To gather the necessary data, a 32-item Likert-Type questionnaire was administered whose results were subjected to a two-way MANOVA. Results of the study indicated that neither the students’ gender or educational level nor the interaction effect of these two variables had any significant effect on the reasons for engaging in plagiarism. Descriptive statistics, however, showed that students’ personal and attitudinal characteristics took on paramount importance compared to other factors. This can signal the intentionality of plagiarism among Iranian EFL graduate students, thereby suggesting the need for making more informed decisions on how to deal with this problem.