Convergences between the Brazilian National Health Plan and scientific articles on Neglected Tropical Diseases

In Brazil, the National Health Plan (NHP) was the central instrument for public health planning from 2016 to 2019. In this paper, we show that there is a convergence between the Plan and the publication of scientific articles written by institutional researchers in the context of Neglected Tropical Diseases. The methodology used consisted of the following stages: identification of the universe of researchers, data collection, thematic characterization of Neglected Tropical Diseases in the Plan, organization of information, and production of indicators. In total, there were 2,719 researchers and 18,023 journal articles from 2015 to 2018. Of these, 2,541 articles, or 14.09%, were related to Neglected Tropical Diseases. Regarding the convergences, there was strong alignment with leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, dengue, leprosy, schistosomiasis, and Chikungunya fever. However, the coverage of topics by scientific publications was broader than that of the political instrument due to the inclusion of other themes: snake bites, helminthiasis and lymphatic filariasis.

Balancing Agency with Structure: Institutional Entrepreneurship as an Embedded Discovery Process

While mainstream research has treated entrepreneurship as a highly individualised and agentic process, institutional researchers contend that entrepreneurship operates within a greater embedded setting. Various researchers have appealed to Giddens’ dual structure to explain an entrepreneur’s embedded-agency. According to Giddens’ dual structure, this embedded-agency consists of the rules or norms of a social group in which these rules constrain and enable an entrepreneur’s resources. Yet, despite Giddens’ contributions, Giddens is criticised for conflating the rules of this embedded setting with an entrepreneur’s resources in which neither affects the other in any significant way. By drawing on concepts of the Austrian entrepreneur and embeddedness, a theory of institutional entrepreneurship is developed to address this conflation problem. This institutional entrepreneurship offers an embedded-agency to explain how an entrepreneur can create, maintain and disrupt their embedded social settings. This embedded-agency addresses Giddens’ conflation problem and broadens the agent-centric focus of institutional entrepreneurship research.

Monsoon, Market and Middlemen as Key Ingredients to Agrarian Distress in Contemporary India: Prioritizing for Policy and Practice Based Interventions

India has been an agrarian society since ages but fails to be an agriculture economy especially post globalization. Farmers who have rightly been termed as ‘Anna-data’ i.e. ‘giver of food’ have been facing an existential crisis unprecedented in India post-independence. One just needs to look at the rich literature on farmer suicides to understand the shades of distress that a farmer household has been going through off late. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has been publishing the statistics for suicide in India since the 1950s. The same body has also been collecting and publishing the statistics for farmer suicides since 1995. More than three lakh farmers have committed suicides in country as per government’s own records only in past two decades. There has been varied responses by both government as well as non-government sector to the issue. However, there has been no substantial change to the existing situation. This paper dwells into the reasons of failing interventions to the issue. Results The paper revisits major factorswhich have resulted in an unprecedented farm crisis in the countryover recent decades. Analyzing secondary data by individual and institutional researchers, it draws conclusions towards farm crisis being an inherently environmental issue surrounding climate change, unsustainable practices of water management and genetically modified seeds -needs attention foremost from an environmental view point, whereas not to discount economic factors like market and middlemen being given due attention for a rights based approach and not just with politically sellable loan-waivers or ritualistic jargons of Minimum Support Prices (MSPs). Counseling and other support services too deserve their due but largely as complementary to environmental and economic factors and never at their cost.

Bringing Transparency to Predictive Analytics: A Systematic Comparison of Predictive Modeling Methods in Higher Education

Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two important dimensions: (1) different approaches to sample and variable construction and how these affect model accuracy and (2) how the selection of predictive modeling approaches, ranging from methods many institutional researchers would be familiar with to more complex machine learning methods, affects model performance and the stability of predicted scores. The relative ranking of students’ predicted probability of completing college varies substantially across modeling approaches. While we observe substantial gains in performance from models trained on a sample structured to represent the typical enrollment spells of students and with a robust set of predictors, we observe similar performance between the simplest and the most complex models.

Critical Imperatives for Studying Queer and Trans Undergraduate Student Retention

The dearth of retention scholarship that centers (or includes) queer and trans (QT) students has resulted in inadequately capturing the nuanced dimensions of student retention. As a scholarly community, we are at a critical juncture where it is academically, administratively, and morally necessary to reexamine assumptions about retention to better acknowledge and center QT people in this body of work. The purpose of this article is to provide critical imperatives for studying QT undergraduate student retention, including methodological, institutional, interpersonal, and individual contexts. I close with implications for education scholars, institutional researchers, and assessment professionals when studying QT student retention.

Distributed Computing Software and Data Access Patterns in OSG Midscale Collaborations

In this paper we showcase the support in Open Science Grid (OSG) of Midscale collaborations, the region of computing and storage scale where multi-institutional researchers collaborate to execute their science workflows on the grid without having dedicated technical support teams of their own. Collaboration Services enables such collaborations to take advantage of the distributed resources of the Open Science Grid by facilitating access to submission hosts, the deployment of their applications and supporting their data management requirements. Distributed computing software adopted from large scale collaborations, such as CVMFS, Rucio, xCache lower the barrier of intermediate scale research to integrate with existing infrastructure.

Understanding how managers institutionalise sustainability reporting

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how sustainability reporting managers (SRMs) institutionalise sustainability reporting within organisations. Design/methodology/approach In total, 35 semi-structured interviews with SRMs in Australia and New Zealand were analysed using an institutional work perspective. Findings SRMs’ institutional work can be categorised into four phases with each phase representing a different approach to sustainability reporting. Organisations transition from phase one to four as they achieve a higher level of maturity and a deeper embedding and routinisation of sustainability reporting. These include educating and advocacy work undertaken by engaging with managers (phase one), transitioning to a decentralised sustainability reporting process (phase two), transitioning to leaner, focussed, materiality driven sustainability reporting (phase three), and using sustainability key performance indicators and materiality assessment reports for planning, decision-making, goal setting, performance appraisal, and incentives (phase four). However, SRMs face challenges including their inexperience, limited time and resources, lack of management commitment to sustainability reporting and low external interest in sustainability reporting. The study identifies ten reasons why material issues are not always (adequately) disclosed. Practical implications This study recommends more training and development for SRMs, and that regulation be considered to mandate the disclosure of the materiality assessments in sustainability reports. Originality/value This research extends the existing literature examining how sustainability reports are prepared and sheds further light on how a materiality assessment is undertaken. The study identifies ten reasons for the non-disclosure of material matters, including but not limited to, legitimacy motives. Researchers can use these reasons to refine their methods for evaluating published sustainability reports. At a theoretical level, the study provides four observations that institutional researchers should consider when examining forms of institutional work.

Is there room for another hedonic model?

Purpose This paper aims to explore the in-sample explanatory and out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of the generalized additive model for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS) model in contrast to the GAM method in Munich’s residential market. Design/methodology/approach The paper explores the in-sample explanatory results via comparison of coefficients and a graphical analysis of non-linear effects. The out-of-sample forecasting accuracy focusses on 50 loops of three models excluding 10 per cent of the observations randomly. Afterwards, it obtains the predicted functional forms and predicts the remaining 10 per cent. The forecasting performance is measured via error variance, root mean squared error, mean absolute error and the mean percentage error. Findings The results show that the complexity of asking rents in Munich is more accurately captured by the GAMLSS approach than the GAM as shown by an outperformance in the in-sample explanatory accuracy. The results further show that the theoretical and empirical complexities do pay off in view of the increased out-of-sample forecasting power of the GAMLSS approach. Research limitations/implications The computational requirements necessary to estimate GAMLSS models in terms of number of cores and RAM are high and might constitute one of the limiting factors for (institutional) researchers. Moreover, large and detailed knowledge on statistical inference and programming is necessary. Practical implications The usage of the GAMLSS approach would lead policymakers to better understand the local factors affecting rents. Institutional researchers, instead, would clearly aim at calibrating the forecasting accuracy of the model to better forecast rents in investment strategies. Finally, future researchers are encouraged to exploit the large potential of the GAMLSS framework and its modelling flexibility. Originality/value The GAMLSS approach is widely recognised and used by international institutions such as the World Health Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission. This is the first study to the best of the author’s knowledge to assess the properties of the GAMLSS approach in applied real estate research from a statistical asymptotic perspective by using a unique data basis with more than 38,000 observations.

Measuring student engagement in UK higher education: do surveys deliver?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a general review of “student engagement” with a focus on the measurement of student engagement in UK higher education. A wide variation in how the construct is measured has made it difficult for institutional researchers to compare findings across studies. This study seeks to understand more about the measurement of student engagement by examining the reliability and validity of three national student surveys: National Survey of Student Engagement, National Student Survey and UK Engagement Survey. Design/methodology/approach Using a narrative review of literature, each survey method is examined to identify the strands of student engagement they can be applied, to determine to what extent survey results can be benchmarked across institutions, and to explore their potential use in institutional led research. Kahu’s (2013) four perspectives of engagement are adopted as a framework for analysis as they represent student engagement as a fluid, multifaceted and, at times, abstract construct. Findings Findings support the notion that a single instrument cannot examine all facets of this complex construct and that student surveys currently collect information on limited and discrete perspectives of engagement. The use of these three surveys provides a depth and breadth of information about student engagement; however, institutions need to maintain an open dialogue about the construct to ensure its validity, and how to measure and understand it. Originality/value Student engagement as a construct continues to evolve and change. This paper adds to the call for institutional researchers to continue to engage in debate about the validity of the construct. The need to maintain essential knowledge of the construct and its many facets is necessary, as is the need to incorporate such knowledge into ongoing work to provide accurate, actionable data to guide improvement and enhancement research.