City Of Glasgow Research Articles

William Smith Mitchell

William Smith Mitchell (“Bill”) was a consultant general physician and rheumatologist at Furness General Hospital in Barrow for over 30 years. He did his initial medical training, including an intercalated...

Croll, feedback mechanisms, climate change and the future

ABSTRACTOur climate future depends on the delicate, fine balance of earth processes first elaborated on by James Croll, born 200 years ago in 1821. A childhood victim of the Scottish clearances, Croll, after following various indifferent occupations, managed to remove to the then rapidly industrialising city of Glasgow and eventually to Scotland's capital, Edinburgh. He blossomed as a most original, outside-the-box, thinker of great intellectual strength and modesty. He carried out scores of studies across a broad range of research topics, many related to the physical causes of climate change. He is well known for his astronomical theory of the ice ages, but should be much better regarded for his incisive physical insights into the central importance of feedbacks in the Earth system. Although humble, Croll was an ardent controversialist who strongly, perhaps over-strongly, always defended his corner. As well as his many accomplishments as a man of science, Croll was committed to exploring philosophical questions of theism and determinism, topics which occupied his earliest and last publications. A ‘top ten’ selection out of the varied subject areas that Croll tackled are explored herein, along with a brisk survey of their legacy to contemporary modelling studies and to Earth's climate future: (1) causes of climate change (1864); (2) ice-cap melt and sea-level rise (1865); (3) predicting future climates using eccentricity (1866); (4) combining orbital precession, eccentricity and obliquity (1867); (5) geological time and the date of the glacial epochs (1868); (6) geological time and denudation rates (1868); (7) ocean currents and the hemispherical temperature difference (1869); (8) feedbacks – a remarkable circumstance which led to changes of climate (1875); (9) temperature of space and its bearing on terrestrial physics (1880); (10) the causes of mild polar climates (1884).

Colorectal cancer screening participation: Exploring relationship heterogeneity and scale differences using multiscale geographically weighted regression

Scotland has an organised colorectal cancer screening programme; however, despite proactively offering screening opportunities free to the at-risk population, and also despite using a screening test which may be completed at home, screening participation levels are unequal. Understanding causal pathways linking participation with other population characteristics may be aided by identifying how relationships between the two patterns vary across different localities, and such knowledge may also inform decisions regarding geographical targeting of screening promotion efforts. In this analysis, models calibrated using multiscale geographically weighted regression enabled the assessment of spatial variations of determinants of screening participation levels. The models were calibrated for localities across west central Scotland (n=409), where participation levels were relatively low, using aggregated individual-level screening records within a two-year window (2009-2011). Area deprivation was found to have a strong negative impact on participation levels across the study area, and ethnic population concentration had a significant impact on male participation levels on localities within Glasgow city. Estimates of local intercepts pointed to a systemic difference in screening participation between the two health board regions in the study area. Overall the results suggest that work to increase screening participation was necessary. They also suggest that barriers to participation could be addressed locally, and that differences between health board regions required further investigation.

Reimagining Nashville: The Changing Place of Country

ABSTRACT For as long as there has been country music, Nashville has been its spiritual if not actual home. This city of recording studios, rehearsal spaces, music shops and venues is one of a small number of cities associated with a specific music genre and the creative cultures and attention this inevitably attracts. But just as heritage is never fixed and always becoming, Nashville - and the perception of Nashville - is changing, to the point where it may no longer have the primacy it once held. In a globalised music industry where not all country music is from Nashville, nor even the United States, new ‘Nashvilles’ emerge and grow, commensurate with actual or relative decline in the prominence of the original. This might be considered a heritage dilemma (heritage ‘at risk’, and a challenge to traditional views on authenticity), but equally the argument can be made for a new heritage replacing or augmenting the old. By considering the city’s ‘at risk’ status, and assessing the fictional representation of a reimagined Nashville in the Scottish city of Glasgow in the 2018 film Wild Rose, we explore this dilemma, and its challenge to heritage convention.

The impact of privacy protection measures on the utility of crowdsourced cycling data

The use of new forms of data in the transport research domain is rapidly gaining popularity. However, these data come with specific challenges and one of the major concerns is maintaining the privacy of data subjects. One widely used approach to anonymise the data is to apply binning. Recently, data from activity-tracking applications like Strava has been utilised to study and analyse active travel. Due to privacy concerns, Strava has started providing data in a discretised format from July 2018. In this study, we aim to analyse the impact of the binning criteria on the utility of the crowdsourced data by using Strava data from 2013 to 2016 for the city of Glasgow. We applied the Strava binning criteria on the original dataset at three different temporal aggregations (i.e., Hourly, Daily and Monthly) and conducted different analyses to examine its impacts. First, we compared manual cycling counts with original and binned cycling counts from Strava data. Second, net-errors were calculated by comparing original and binned cycling counts from Strava data. Third, we estimated spatial autocorrelation statistics based on original and binned Strava counts and investigated the extent to which research outcomes change because of the binning approach. Our results confirmed significant amount of information loss. Worryingly, we also show that conclusions reached by previous studies could have been reversed if the new specification of the data had been used. We outline here what precautions researchers and planners should take when working with the binned data.

Employing Emerging Technologies to Develop and Evaluate In-Vehicle Intelligent Systems for Driver Support: Infotainment AR HUD Case Study

The plurality of current infotainment devices within the in-vehicle space produces an unprecedented volume of incoming data that overwhelm the typical driver, leading to higher collision probability. This work presents an investigation to an alternative option which aims to manage the incoming information while offering an uncluttered and timely manner of presenting and interacting with the incoming data safely. The latter is achieved through the use of an augmented reality (AR) head-up display (HUD) system, which projects the information within the driver’s field of view. An uncluttered gesture recognition interface provides the interaction with the AR visuals. For the assessment of the system’s effectiveness, we developed a full-scale virtual reality driving simulator which immerses the drivers in challenging, collision-prone, scenarios. The scenarios unfold within a digital twin model of the surrounding motorways of the city of Glasgow. The proposed system was evaluated in contrast to a typical head-down display (HDD) interface system by 30 users, showing promising results that are discussed in detail.

Modelling cyclists’ route choice using Strava and OSMnx: A case study of the City of Glasgow

Previous research has demonstrated the influence of street layout on travel behaviour; however, little research has been undertaken to explore these connections using detailed and robust street network analysis or cycling data. In this study, we harness state-of-the-art datasets to model cyclists’ route choice based on a case study of the City of Glasgow, Scotland. First, the social fitness network Strava was used to obtain datasets containing the number of cycling trips on each street intersection for the years 2017 and 2018. Second, we employed a Python toolkit to acquire and analyse the street networks. OSMnx was subsequently employed to quantify several commonly used centrality indices (degree, eigenvector, betweenness and closeness) to measure street layout. Due to the presence of spatial dependence, a spatial error model was used to model route choices. Model results demonstrate that: (1) cyclists’ movement models were consistent for the years 2017 and 2018; (2) the presence of a spillover effect suggests that cyclists tend to cycle in proximity to each other; and (3) cyclists avoid streets with high degree centrality values and prefer streets with high eigenvector centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality. These findings reveal cyclists’ desired street layouts and can be taken into consideration for future interventions.

Language Provision in the Scottish Public Sector: Recommendations to Promote Inclusive Practice

Public service providers in Scotland have developed language support, largely in the form of interpreting and translation, to meet the linguistic needs of those who cannot access their services in English. Five core public sector services were selected for inclusion in a research project that focused on the aforementioned language provision and related equality issues: the Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service, NHS Lothian, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, the City of Edinburgh Council and Glasgow City Council. The frameworks within which these public service providers operate—namely, the obligations derived from supranational and domestic legal and policy instruments—were analysed, as was the considerable body of standards and strategy documents that has been produced, by both national organisations and local service providers, in order to guide service delivery. Although UK equalities legislation has largely overlooked allochthonous languages and their speakers, this research found that the public service providers in question appear to regard the provision of language support as an obligation related to the Equality Act (UK Government, 2010). Many common practices related to language support were also observed across these services, in addition to shared challenges, both attitudinal and practical. A series of recommendations regarding improvements to language provision in the public sector emerged from the research findings and are highlighted in this article.

City Profile: Glasgow: City of Storytellers

city profile Glasgow City of Storytellers by J. R. Patterson GLASGOW IS NOT SO MUCH A CITY of books as a city of stories and storytellers . In the years I lived there, the stories I heard reflected the truly woeful conditions in which so many Glaswegians grew up; of filthy tenement blocks and binmen strikes, of bone-chilling winters and rat-catching, of the local variations on the kiss (a headbutt ) and the smile (a knife slash to the cheek). In other places, these tales might form the basis for lessons about character or values, but in Glasgow, they were more often the premise for jokes. Glasgow is, despite everything—the low pay, the dreich (bad weather), the weekend fankles—a jovial place, one quick to laugh. What is so confusing is that so many of Glasgow’s better times, usually considered to be when the Clyde shipyards and Singer sewing machine factory were in full swing, coincide with some of the city’s worst: its barest poverty, its foulest slums. Both the shipyards and the slums are gone now, leaving “The Dear Green Place” in a kind of stasis, being neither fully modern (hovering around fifty-five years, the life expectancy in the city’s east end is decades behind the rest of Europe) nor, with its plethora of vegan restaurants and modern sculpture, stuck in the dark ages. Of course, hard times persist. It’s for their evocation that Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain was lauded and rewarded the 2020 Man Booker. There again times have changed. In 1994, when Glaswegian James Kelman collected the same honor for How Late It Was, How Late, his Scots-language novel about substance abuse and generational trauma was ridiculed and scorned by readers and publishers alike for being a literary sandbank. Such thinking is completely glaikit, or stupid, as Kelman might write it. Much of it comes down to the language. Glaswegian , and the wider Scots language, is a form of English all its own, its meaning only possible to grasp in its echo, and sometimes not even then. It’s a sound even the Scots themselves, from the northern countryside to the English border, struggle to understand. Of his fellow Glaswegians , Kelman noted in his essay “The Importance of Glasgow in My Work” that “none of them knew how to talk! What larks! Every time they opened their mouth out came a stream of gobbledygook. Beautiful ! Their language a cross between semaphore and Morse code.” Writers who chose to work in that local patois are often considered by English scholars to be nothing but literary oiks. But within the use of that rough vernacular is the understanding that language not only transcends form and tradition, it also shapes them. Everywhere the Glaswegian is, the city is with him. Think of Billy Connolly’s two Glaswegians in Rome (hearing the Pope drinks crème de menthe before bed, they order two pints each. “The Pope drinks that stuff?” one says. “It’s nae wonder they carry him aboot on a chair!”). In the city, there are bookish sites—the baroque Mitchell Library, the Women’s Library, Alasdair Gray’s mural of roman-nosed nymphettes at the Hillhead subway station. Among the artists themselves, there is little literary tourism. If Glaswegians write well about hardship and want, it’s because it’s true to them. And any disregard among the growing self-refinement of British writing only proves its worth. Of course, there are books to buy. The best are found within the bourachs of Caledonia Books, Thistle Books, and the Voltaire & Rousseau Bookshop, which are all on the scrubby banks of the River Kelvin. Editorial note: To read Patterson’s essay on reviving Scottish Gaelic, turn to page 10. J. R. Patterson was born on a cattle and grain farm in rural Manitoba, Canada. He has worked as a farm laborer, factory worker, and writer. His fiction was longlisted for the 2016 CBC Short Story Contest. His essays can be found in Maisonneuve and Overland. Notebook 9 WORLDLIT.ORG 5 PHOTO BY ARTUR KRAFT / UNSPLASH ...

Preface

It was an immense honour to bring the 27th International Nuclear Physics Conference (INPC2019) to the city of Glasgow in August 2019. The location of each conference is decided by Commission 12 (Nuclear Physics) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). The event in Glasgow followed conferences in Adelaide 2016, Florence 2013 and Vancouver 2010, and this was the first time it had been held in Scotland. As can be seen from the list of local organisers, this was very much a joint effort from across the whole of the UK nuclear physics community.Held every three years, INPC is one of the most important conference series in the world for fundamental nuclear physics, covering as it does a wide range of topic areas from the study of hadrons to the heaviest of nuclei, and the role of nuclear physics in our understanding of the universe.These proceedings represent a sample of some of the very best research in nuclear physics. What is abundantly clear is that nuclear physics as a research field is in rude health, and continues to be an area that attracts some of the best scientific talent, with many active programmes addressing fundamental questions in nature. At the same time, nuclear physics provides real impact to society through applications and the training of the next generation of researchers.For the first time at an INPC, a dedicated parallel session on public engagement was held, indicating the enthusiasm for promoting the field to a wider audience, and how it can be used to stimulate interest in science in general. The importance of applications of nuclear science was also highlighted, and one of the busiest sessions of the conference proved to be “Societal Impact”, where many topics were discussed, including medical applications, environmental monitoring (including reactor monitoring), isotope production, archaeology, nuclear security and precision timing. Contributions from both public engagement and societal impact areas are well represented in this collection of papers.The reviewing of the proceedings contributions was undertaken by the local organisers, together with several colleagues who had kindly acted as convenors of the parallel sessions during the conference. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the reviewers warmly for their efforts.It was a real pleasure organising this conference, and I would also like to thank once again the Institute of Physics Conferences team for all their help and support throughout the process of planning, and delivering a successful conference.David Ireland, University of Glasgow, UK (Conference chair), on behalf of the local organising committee:Marialuisa Aliotta, University of Edinburgh, UKCarlo Barbieri, University of Surrey, UKAlison Bruce, University of Brighton, UKChristian Diget, University of York, UKKieran Flanagan, University of Manchester, UKBill Gelletly, University of Surrey, UKRodi Herzberg, University of Liverpool, UKPeter Jones, University of Birmingham, UKAlison Laird, University of York, UKPaddy Regan, University of Surrey, UKMarcus Scheck, University of the West of Scotland, UKJohn Simpson, STFC Daresbury Laboratory, UKDaria Sokhan, University of Glasgow, UK

Expanding Studio Boundaries: Navigating Tensions in Multidisciplinary Collaboration within and beyond the Higher Education Design Studio

AbstractIn this article the authors set out and critically reflect upon an innovative pedagogical approach to delivering studio‐based learning – drawing on the ‘Collaborative Futures’ project. Collaborative Futures is a live project premised on a futures‐focused design brief written with an external partner. In previous iterations of the project, partners have included Hitachi and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Each year this project brings together a team of students in their final year on the Masters European Design programme to collaborate with a group of early career design graduates. Between 2019 and 2020, the Collaborative Futures project worked with Glasgow City Council’s Centre for Civic Innovation to explore and prototype citizen‐centred scenarios surrounding data experiences set in the context of Glasgow 2030. Throughout the project the student‐graduate team engaged in multidisciplinary collaboration within and beyond the boundaries of the higher education studio context, working with civic, academic and design professionals, public and third sector organisations, and members of the public. The authors reflect on the design process; theoretically unpack the cross‐cultural, studio‐based collaboration that took place; and discuss the complex challenges that emerged and the meditating role design artefacts played. The insights presented in the article have value for design educators seeking new approaches to designing and delivering studio‐based design learning that fosters creative, multidisciplinary communities of practice and collaborative capacity‐building for design students in a professional setting.

Integrated Multimedia City Data: Exploring Learning Engagement and Greenspace in Glasgow

This paper showcases a holistic, data-led, analytical approach to complex research questions about the associations between learning engagement and green spaces, and uses this exemplar to reflection, and make recommendations relevant to, future implementation of CIM approaches to aspects of urban inclusion. This research offers a holistic picture of educational engagement, digital use, sustainability, cultural and civic participation, and transportation, employing data from diverse strands of the Integrated Multimedia City Data (iMCD) project in the Glasgow city region. This includes a household survey, individuals' travel diaries and GPS trails around the city, linked to other urban administrative datasets on area deprivation and greenspace. Triangulated findings from iMCD data indicate that greenspace is generally positively related to adult learning engagement (in particular, less formal learning), highlighting the value to urban planners of considering varied types of data capture for lifelong learning, with linkage to more objective measures of active mobility (e.g. walking) around the city. iMCD, in line with CIM approaches, offers an interdisciplinary bridge to address healthy ageing and educational inclusion. Insights generated in a CIM-based context can help education policymakers, city planners, and other educational stakeholders reconsider resource and infrastructure allocation, for instance, in promoting lifelong learning engagement for adults in urban settings.

Did Safe Cycling Infrastructure Still Matter During a COVID-19 Lockdown?

The UK government introduced strict measures (including asking people to work from home and a lockdown) to slow the spread of COVID-19 by limiting people’s movement. This led to substantial reductions in traffic, making roads much safer for cyclists. This provides a unique opportunity to study the role played by safe cycling infrastructure. Many UK cities have provided cycling infrastructure to improve safety and encourage cycling. However, access to safe cycling infrastructure varies across neighbourhoods, potentially contributing to inequality. Since roads became safer due to the unprecedented reduction in traffic during the lockdown, safe cycling infrastructure may not play a significant role during this period. On the other hand, safe cycling lanes are often connected to amenities, potentially attracting cyclists even if they confer no additional safety benefit. That is, connectivity might matter more than safety. In this study, we utilised crowdsourced cycling data and regression models to examine the extent to which cycling intensity for non-commuting purposes changes with different types of cycling infrastructure in the city of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. In addition, we selected some areas with large increases in cycling intensity and examined the surrounding environments using Google Street View. Our results showed that non-commuting cycling activities increased significantly after the government interventions on both typical roads and safe cycling lanes while much higher increases were observed on safe cycling lanes than on other roads. A further analysis showed that there were large increases in cycling volumes on both typical roads and safe cycling lanes with good amenities and connectivity, highlighting the importance of these factors when building new cycling infrastructure. Since safe cycling lanes are not equally accessible to people, providing temporary cycling lanes during the pandemic considering these conditions could encourage people to cycle more, and thereby improve their health.

Reduction of Environmental Impacts Due to Using Permeable Pavements to Harvest Stormwater

While rainwater harvesting can provide additional water resources, this approach is largely undertaken using water from roofs. More recently, the potential for using stormwater harvested from permeable pavements was recognised as a potential additional water resource. The objective of this study was to estimate the reduction of environmental impacts caused by traditional drainage systems and centralised water utilities if permeable pavement systems were used to harvest stormwater for nonpotable purposes in buildings. The lifecycle environmental impacts and costs associated with the proposed pavements and hydraulic systems were assessed. The city of Glasgow was chosen as a case study. We used the Netuno computer programme to estimate the potential for potable water savings considering the use of stormwater for nonpotable purposes and the SimaPro software to perform a lifecycle assessment (LCA). With the implementation of permeable pavements and stormwater utilisation, great reductions in lifecycle emissions (i.e., CO2-, SO2-, and PM2.5-equivalent emissions) were observed. The proposed system also proved to be economically feasible, i.e., a payback period equal to 16.9 years. The results show the economic and environmental feasibility of permeable pavements when used on a large scale, proving to be an important strategy to reduce water and environmental stresses caused by centralised water utilities and traditional drainage systems.

Opportunity mapping for urban scale renewable energy generation

Abstract As part of a project awarded to Glasgow City Council by Innovate UK, a GIS-based Geospatial Opportunity Mapping (GOMap) tool was developed to enable the identification of land throughout the city of Glasgow that is both policy unconstrained and technically feasible in relation to the possible future deployment of Solar Photovoltaic Power Stations (PVPS). To evaluate the suitability of a specific site, two sets of constraints are considered: one addresses the technical aspects that may constrain the economically achievable power capacity; the other addresses the policy aspects that may affect the likelihood of receiving planning permission for an otherwise technically feasible scheme. Overall technical and policy ratings are determined and the outcome displayed on a 10 m × 10 m grid across the city. The output maps allow users to determine the overall suitability of any given site and identify the specific technical or policy aspects that might impede a proposed deployment. Application of GOMap to the city of Glasgow indicated that the potential contribution of deploying PVPS on unconstrained Vacant and Derelict Land is equivalent to the annual heating energy requirement of 21.8% of dwellings in the hard-to-heat category. This finding is significant in relation to the Scottish Government’s energy strategy that calls for the electrification of building heating in a manner that alleviates fuel poverty. Alternatively, the generated energy is equivalent to 26.6% of the energy requirement of Glasgow’s car fleet if this was converted to electric vehicles. The paper describes the scoring and weighting methods as applied to the policy and technical aspects and their underlying factors, and presents the outcome of an application of GOMap to quantify the PVPS potential for the city of Glasgow. GOMap is made available under an open source licence and is free to download and apply.

The Lancet–Chatham House Commission on improving population health post COVID-19

The Lancet–Chatham House Commission on improving population health post COVID-19

Equal pay struggles on the Clyde

This article examines the fight for equal pay at Glasgow City Council: the techniques, tools and tactics used by unions before and during the strike in 2018. Focusing initially on the organisation ...

Borehole temperature log from the Glasgow Geothermal Energy Research Field Site: a record of past changes to ground surface temperature caused by urban development

As part of the Glasgow Geothermal Energy Research Field Site (GGERFS) project, intended as a test site for mine-water geothermal heat, the GGC-01 borehole was drilled in the Dalmarnock area in the east of the city of Glasgow, starting in November 2018. It was logged in January 2019 to provide a record of subsurface temperature to 197 m depth, in this urban area with a long history of coal mining and industrial development. This borehole temperature record is significantly perturbed away from its natural state, in part because of the ‘permeabilizing’ effect of past nearby coal mining and in part due to surface warming as a result of the combination of anthropogenic climate change and creation of a subsurface urban heat island by local urban development. Our numerical modelling indicates the total surface warming effect as 2.7°C, partitioned as 2.0°C of global warming since the Industrial Revolution and 0.7°C of local UHI development. We cannot resolve the precise combination of local factors that influence the surface warming because uncertainty in the subsurface thermal properties trades against uncertainty in the history of surface warming. However, the background upward heat flow through the shallow subsurface is estimated as only c . 28–33 mW m −2 , depending on choice of other model parameters, well below the c . 80 mW m −2 expected in the Glasgow area. We infer that the ‘missing’ geothermal heat flux is entrained by horizontal flow at depth beyond the reach of the shallow GGC-01 borehole. Although the shallow subsurface in the study area is warmer than it would have been before the Industrial Revolution, at greater depths – between c . 90 and >300 m – it is colder, due to the effect of reduced background heat flow. In future the GGERFS project might utilize water from depths of c . 90 m, but the temperature of the groundwater at these depths is maintained largely by the past effect of surface warming, due to climate change and urban development; it is thus a resource that might be ‘mined’ but not sustainably replenished and, being the result of surface warming rather than upward heat flow, arguably should not count as ‘geothermal’ heat in the first place. Our analysis thus indicates that the GGERFS site is a poor choice as a test site for mine-water geothermal heat. Supplementary material : A summary history of coal mining in the study area is available at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4911495.v2

The Burrell Renaissance: Unpicking a Collection and Its Building

ABSTRACT The Burrell Collection, which opened in 1984, was built to display and house the fine and decorative art collection given to the City of Glasgow by the ship owner, politician and philanthropist Sir William Burrell. The building design was chosen via a competition in the 1970s, with the structure fully listed in the early twenty-first century. It is one of the best examples of late twentieth-century architecture in Scotland. Despite its relatively young age, the building now requires major refurbishment, and the collection has been removed ahead of a planned redisplay and re-installation in 2020–21. The Burrell Renaissance Project has provided the opportunity to examine the relationships between the objects, the building and the public. When the Burrell Collection first opened the important relationship was that between the objects and the building, with the structure including specific design solutions for the collection. During the Burrell Renaissance Project this has been broadened to emphasise the relationships of the public to the building as well as the collection. For conservation staff, this has meant an evaluation of how the building and collection had been related, the re-examining of the methods of display, treatment, installation and maintenance, development of new methods and an acknowledgement of conservators’ own emotional relationship with the objects in their care.

Improving migrant well-being: spontaneous movement as a way to increase the creativity, spontaneity and welfare of migrants in Glasgow

ABSTRACT This article describes the experience of two years of working with migrants residing in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. Three different groups, with participants from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, students, migrants and asylum seekers, converged in three different spaces and frameworks. A total of 51 participants, six men and 41 women between 20 and 50 years of age, took part in spontaneous movement workshops to promote their health, body awareness and well-being, the strengthening of affective bonds and creativity. The impact of the sessions was assessed through an anonymous survey, a semi-structured interview and a facilitator’s diary of the sessions. The settings of the three groups were not identical and, thus, did not allow for a comparison between them. However, the results showed that the sessions helped participants to increase their sense of well-being and confidence, facilitate their integration process and strengthen their bonds with other participants.