Definition Of Expertise Research Articles

Audit committee financial expertise and earnings quality: A meta-analysis

Since the implementation of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), a plethora of research has examined financial experts' monitoring on audit committees of financial reporting quality. However, the literature has found mixed evidence. This present study's objective is to reconcile through meta-analysis the results of 90 studies with 165,529firm-year observations concerning the relationship between audit committee financial expertise and earnings quality. The results show that audit committee financial expertise has a positive relationship with earnings quality and that accounting financial experts have a stronger relationship with earnings quality than non-accounting financial experts. Moreover, corporate governance systems, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), and SOX moderate the relationship between audit committee financial expertise and earnings quality. Additional moderators of this relationship are different proxies of earnings quality and audit committee financial expertise, financial experts' independence and busyness, the external auditor's role, and publication quality. This study provides implications for regulators in terms of tightening the definition of audit committee financial expert and the need for at least two financial experts. Further, the study identifies opportunities for future research. Specifically, we provide suggestions for the improvement of financial experts' effectiveness and the expansion of existing research. We also highlight emerging research areas.

Guidelines for Contributors to AJOT.

Guidelines for Contributors to AJOT.

Study of the impact of intro ductio n of employee benefits in pharmacy institutio n on incentive of pharmacy pro fessio nals

This article analyzes the significance of the employee benefits in pharmacy institutions and their impact on the incentive system of pharmacy professionals (PP). A study of implementation of employee benefits in the pharmacy institutions was conducted, it consisted of three phases. Usage of employee benefits abroad was analyzed at the first phase, and their variety and popularity among employees was also established. Analysis of employee benefits usage in Ukraine was conducted at the second phase, and the major problems of their implementation were also found out. The third phase was dedicated to the analysis of the employee benefits usage in the pharmacy institutions in Ukraine. As a part of this phase, a sociological study of 1000 PP was conducted in respect of major options of employee benefits, which they would like to have in their workplace; 170 experts were interviewed regarding the advices to implement employee benefits in the pharmacy institutions in Ukraine. “Model of the definition of expert “competence index” was developed and studied for the analysis of expert targeted assessments of employee benefits options for implementing in pharmacy institutions of different forms of ownership.Aim. To study the employee benefits influence on introduction in pharmacy institution on incentive of pharmacy professionals.Materials and methods. Methodical basis of this study is general scientific and applied scientific research methods, including: formal and logical one, method of expert assessments, system analysis, analogy and comparison methods, analysis of documents and results of sociological researches.Results. Current state of social security services of PP in Ukrainian pharmacy institutions and PP’s basic needs, which can be implemented as options of employee benefits that can be used in pharmacy institutions of different forms of ownership were studied in order to improve incentive of the staff. It has been found out that the introduction of employee benefits in a pharmacy institution have a positive impact on PP’s incentive. “Model of the definition of expert “competence index” was developed and studied.Conclusions. It has been established that currently the system of PP’s incentive in a pharmacy institution is inseparably associated with the introduction of employee benefits. It is proved that the introduction of a social package pharmacies have a positive impact on motivation SF and increasing effectiveness of social and interaction management pharmacies and SF.

Is the current ASAS expert definition of a positive family history useful in identifying axial spondyloarthritis? Results from the SPACE and DESIR cohorts

BackgroundThe Assessment of SpondyloArthritis international Society (ASAS) definition of a positive family history (PFH) of spondyloarthritis (SpA) includes the following diseases in first- or second-degree relatives: ankylosing spondylitis (AS), acute anterior uveitis (AAU), reactive arthritis (ReA), inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and psoriasis. However, it is not known if a PFH for each of these diseases contributes to making a diagnosis of axSpA, sacroiliitis on imaging, or fulfilling the ASAS criteria in patients presenting with chronic back pain (CBP). Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess which SpA diseases in family members are associated with human leukocyte antigen B27 (HLA-B27) and axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) in CBP patients.MethodsCBP patients suspected of axSpA from the SPACE (n = 438) and the DESIR (n = 647) cohort were asked about the presence of SpA diseases in first- or second-degree relatives (AS, AAU, ReA, IBD, and psoriasis). The associations between a PFH and HLA-B27, sacroiliitis on imaging (magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or radiographs), axSpA diagnosis, and ASAS classification in CBP patients were assessed.ResultsIn the SPACE and the DESIR cohort, a PFH of AS (odds ratio (OR) 5.9 (95% confidence interval (CI) 3.5–9.9), and OR 3.3 (95% CI 2.1–5.2)) and a PFH of AAU (OR 9.8 (95% CI 3.3–28.9) and OR 21.6 (95% CI 2.9–160.1)) were significantly associated with presence of HLA-B27. Furthermore, in both cohorts a PFH of AS and a PFH of AAU were positively associated with fulfilment of the ASAS criteria, but not with sacroiliitis on imaging. In SPACE but not in DESIR a PFH of AAU was positively associated with axSpA diagnosis. In both cohorts a PFH of ReA, IBD, or psoriasis was not positively associated with HLA-B27 positivity, sacroiliitis on imaging, axSpA diagnosis, or meeting the ASAS criteria for axSpA.ConclusionsIn our cohorts, a PFH of AS or AAU is useful for case-finding of axSpA as this is correlated with HLA-B27 carriership. However, as a PFH of ReA, IBD, or psoriasis does not contribute to identifying axSpA in CBP patients, these data suggest that the widely used ASAS definition of a PFH of SpA should be updated.Trial registrationTrial registration number, NCT01648907. Registered on 20 July 2012.

What Are the Principles That Guide Behaviors in the Operating Room?: Creating a Framework to Define and Measure Performance.

To identify the core principles that guide expert intraoperative behaviors and to use these principles to develop a universal framework that defines intraoperative performance. Surgical outcomes are associated with intraoperative cognitive skills. Yet, our understanding of factors that control intraoperative judgment and decision-making are limited. As a result, current methods for training and measuring performance are somewhat subjective-more task rather than procedure-oriented-and usually not standardized. They thus provide minimal insight into complex cognitive processes that are fundamental to patient safety. Cognitive task analyses for 6 diverse surgical procedures were performed using semistructured interviews and field observations to describe the thoughts, behaviors, and actions that characterize and guide expert performance. Verbal data were transcribed, supplemented with content from published literature, coded, thematically analyzed using grounded-theory by 4 independent reviewers, and synthesized into a list of items. A conceptual framework was developed based on 42 semistructured interviews lasting 45 to 120 minutes, 5 expert panels and 51 field observations involving 35 experts, and 135 sources from the literature. Five domains of intraoperative performance were identified: psychomotor skills, declarative knowledge, advanced cognitive skills, interpersonal skills, and personal resourcefulness. Within the advanced cognitive skills domain, 21 themes were perceived to guide the behaviors of surgeons: 18 for surgical planning and error prevention, and 3 for error/injury recognition, rescue, and recovery. The application of these thought patterns was highly case-specific and variable amongst subspecialties, environments, and individuals. This study provides a comprehensive definition of intraoperative expertise, with greater insight into the complex cognitive processes that seem to underlie optimal performance. This framework provides trainees and other nonexperts with the necessary information to use in deliberate practice and the creation of effective thought habits that characterize expert performance. It may help to identify gaps in performance, and to isolate root causes of surgical errors with the ultimate goal of improving patient safety.

When bins blur: Patient perspectives on categories of results from clinical whole genome sequencing

ABSTRACTBackground: Clinical genome and exome sequencing (CGES) is being used in an expanding range of clinical settings. Most approaches to offering patients choices about learning CGES results classify results according to expert definitions of clinical actionability. Little is known about how patients conceptualize different categories of CGES results. Methods: The MedSeq Project is a randomized controlled trial studying the use of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) in primary care and cardiology. We surveyed 202 patient-participants about different kinds of WGS results and conducted qualitative interviews with 49 of these participants. Interview data were analyzed both inductively and deductively using thematic content analysis. Results: Participants demonstrated high levels of study understanding and genetic literacy. A small majority of participants wanted to learn all of their WGS results (n = 123, 61%). Qualitative data provided a deeper understanding of participants' perspectives about different types of WGS results. Participants did not have the same views about which WGS results would be actionable or upsetting to learn. They conceptualized variants of uncertain significance (VUS) in a variety of different ways. Many participants expressed optimism that the uncertainty associated with VUS results could be reduced over time. Conclusions: Proposals to determine which WGS/CGES results to disclose by soliciting patient preferences may fail to appreciate the complex ways patients think about disease and the information WGS/CGES can produce. Our findings challenge prevailing methods of facilitating patient choice and assessing the benefits and harms related to the return of WGS/CGES results, which mostly rely on expert definitions of clinical utility to categorize the kinds of results patients can learn.

Therapist Expertise

In this rejoinder, we respond to comments raised by Goodyear, Wampold, Tracey, and Lichtenberg; Norcross and Karpiak; Reese; and O’Shaughnessy, Du, and Davis about the definition of expertise and methods for increasing expertise. The most consensus among these authors was found for client outcomes as a criterion of expertise and practice as a mechanism for increasing expertise. Until we have better empirical evidence, however, we suggest keeping the eight criteria that we originally proposed to measure expertise (performance, cognitive processing, client outcomes, experience, personal qualities, self-assessment, reputation, credentials), as well as the four mechanisms for increasing expertise (training, practice, feedback, and personal therapy). We challenge future researchers to hone the list and determine how to weight the various criteria and mechanisms based on empirical evidence.

Psychotherapy Expertise Should Mean Superior Outcomes and Demonstrable Improvement Over Time

How the field understands psychotherapy expertise is important. It affects how we practice and how we prepare others for practice. As in our other work, we argue that the most meaningful definition of expertise must involve steady improvement over time to achieve superior performance on some meaningful measure, which typically is client outcome. We also argue that the best means by which a therapist can achieve this is through ongoing deliberate practice. We contrast our position with not only Hill, Spiegel, Hoffman, Kivlighan, and Gelso’s preferred definition, in which they anchor expertise in therapist performance, but also with the various other possible definitions of expertise (e.g., therapist experience, therapist self-assessment of expertise) that they proffer as options.

Therapist Expertise in Psychotherapy Revisited

The thesis of this article is that the lack of evidence related to the identification and development of therapist expertise is due to the inadequate definition and operationalization of the concept. We propose a definition of expertise that is restricted to performance in the conduct of psychotherapy: the manifestation of the highest levels of ability, skill, professional competence, and effectiveness. In addition, we offer several criteria that may be used to assess expertise: performance (including relational and technical expertise), cognitive processing, client outcomes, experience, personal and relational qualities, credentials, reputation, and self-assessment. We then review research related to the development of expertise, highlighting the role of experience with clients, personal therapy, supervision, deliberate practice, and feedback. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for conducting research on therapist expertise.

Our Best Selves

Psychotherapist expertise proves an urgent topic for practice and training, but insufficient research and conflicting definitions confound efforts to enhance expertise. In an ambitious article, Hill, Spiegel, Hoffman, Kivlighan, and Gelso offer a clear definition of expertise and propose broad indicators. In this reaction, we (a) laud the prominent psychologists for undertaking the Herculean task, (b) highlight points of convergence on relationships and responsiveness between their conclusions and those of others and ourselves, (c) take some collegial exceptions to their proposals and advance alternatives, and (d) underscore the probability that expertise resides far more in the person of the therapist than in specific methods. In particular, distinguishing expertise from experience, and separating expertise about psychotherapy from expertise demonstrated in session, will help to operationalize and cultivate it. The title of this commentary—“Our Best Selves”—embodies the conviction that developing the person of the therapist will most likely actualize expertise.

Economic consequences of SEC regulation pertaining to financial expert definition

This paper examines the economic effects of issue dates pertaining to the definition of audit committee financial expert regulation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and discussion of the definition by news services on firms traded on U.S. equity exchanges. This research study uses the methodology of Zhang (2007) to extend DeFond, Hann and Hu (2005) and Krishnan and Visvanathan (2008) by using event dates previously untested to provide additional insights regarding SOX regulation and market perceptions of this required disclosure of voluntary appointment of financial experts to corporate audit committees. Using stock market returns, the findings from this study suggest that companies traded on U.S. capital markets and subject to SEC regulatory requirements experienced significant negative returns around SEC financial expert regulation event dates, while media disclosure events were mostly not significant. Also, larger firms were more negatively impacted than smaller firms by this new SOX requirement.

Death by neurological criteria: expert definitions and lay misgivings.

For decades, there has been persistent controversy concerning brain death, or the determination of death by neurological criteria, among physicians, philosophers, and the lay public. This article examines the various ways that brain death is conceptualized and justified, as well as the persistent questions and controversies related to brain death, particularly within pluralistic, multicultural societies. A culturally sensitive and practical way forward is proposed.

The Heritage of Displacement: Forced Migration in the Mediterranean through History

The Heritage of Displacement: Forced Migration in the Mediterranean through History

Expert students in social learning management systems

Purpose A social learning management system (social LMS) is a tool which favors social interactions and allows scholastic institutions to supervise and guide the learning process. The inclusion of the social feature to a “normal” LMS leads to the creation of educational social networks (EduSN), where the students interact and learn. The advantages derived from an augmented student-student interaction are counterbalanced by the difficulty to control the quality of the information. For this reason, the purpose of this study is to understand who is a source of reliable and high quality knowledge among the students. Design/methodology/approach The authors suggest to categorize the actions of the students within roles where the most natural formal role regards the academic performance of a student. Within the EduSN, a student can produce information − social contribution role − and evaluate the contents provided by other peers − social judge role. Aside from the free production, it provides a publication workflow which allows to certify and improve the quality of the material created by the peers. The publication workflow naturally leads to the definition of two additional roles – the editorial and leader roles. Findings The paper provides a new definition of expertise within a social LMS, where the key feature of an expert in an EduSN is to improve the quality and quantity of the knowledge flow in the network. The indicators which stem from the roles naturally lead to the definition of the figure of the anti-expert. Originality/value At variance with the spectrum of values usually associated with expertise (which ranges from novice to expert), in a social LMS, it becomes clear the need of the definition of a new figure – the anti-expert, who has a negative impact on the overall knowledge flow of the EduSN.

December

Adequate crowd selection is an important factor in the success of crowdsourcing platforms, increasing the quality and relevance of crowd answers and their performance in different tasks. The optimal crowd selection can greatly vary depending on properties of the crowd and of the task. To this end, we present December, a declarative platform with novel capabilities for flexible crowd selection. December supports the personalized selection of crowd members via a dedicated query language Member-QL. This language enables specifying and combining common crowd selection criteria such as properties of a crowd member's profile and history, similarity between profiles in specific aspects and relevance of the member to a given task. This holistic, customizable approach differs from previous work that has mostly focused on dedicated algorithms for crowd selection in specific settings. To allow efficient query execution, we implement novel algorithms in December based on our generic, semantically-aware definitions of crowd member similarity and expertise. We demonstrate the effectiveness of December and Member-QL by using the VLDB community as crowd members and allowing conference participants to choose from among these members for different purposes and in different contexts.

An ontological model for managing professional expertise

A precise description of user skills is important in order to assign each particular task to suitable employees in organizations. In this paper, an ontological model for managing expertise is described. This model offers a formal definition of expertise through an ontology based on UNESCO nomenclature together with other semantic relationships and keywords designed specifically for the expert recommendation task. User’s expertise is represented in our ontological model by means of Expertise Lines. An Expertise Line is a combination of formally conceptualized knowledge terms and keywords that allow increase expressiveness using natural language. The ontological model has been integrated in an application infrastructure that provides several functionalities to manage expertise and to facilitate the definition of the expertise-based retrieval processes. The application infrastructure has been validated in expert finding tasks in order to provide suitable experts for evaluating research projects.

Facilitating a student-educator conceptual model of dispositions towards critical thinking through interactive management

Critical thinking (CT) is a metacognitive process, consisting of a number of sub-skills and dispositions that, when used appropriately, increases the chances of producing a logical conclusion to an argument or solution to a problem. Though the CT literature argues that dispositions are as important to CT as is the ability to perform CT skills, the majority of research in the area has focused on CT skills. In addition, though most CT interventions are designed based on academic or expert definitions of CT, students are rarely, if ever, asked to guide their instruction by describing their perspectives on what constitutes CT. Thus, the current study used interactive management to examine similarities and differences in the way students and educators conceptualise CT dispositions. Interactive management (IM) is a computer-assisted process that allows a group to build a consensus-based structural model describing relations between elements in a system. Consistent with previous research, it is suggested that addressing how students conceptualise CT may provide a starting point to negotiate and innovative the CT curriculum and learning process. Furthermore, evaluating similarities and differences in the way students and educators understand CT dispositions may facilitate the building of complementary and integrative models of CT dispositions that reflect the full range of perspectives in University teaching environments. Results of the current study suggest that while students’ conceptualisation of CT dispositions was largely consistent with both the educators’ conceptualisation and dispositions highlighted in the extant literature, students’ descriptions were broader, less abstract and more concrete accounts of CT dispositions; and were also primarily focused on utility or function rather than ideal principles of action. Results are discussed in light of research and theory on CT and best practice for CT instruction.

Airway Management in Trauma: Defining Expertise

Prompt attention to airway management is a fundamental component of the approach to trauma anesthesiology. While anesthesiologists manage the greatest number of airways in their training and practice, a variety of medical providers perform airway management in the trauma population (i.e., paramedics, emergency physicians, anesthesiologists, respiratory therapists). Rates of successful intubation can vary widely between groups; therefore, a definition of expertise is required to develop training plans, as well as standards for maintenance of proficiency. While competency is challenging to define in any field, the data suggest that individuals with the greatest experience achieve the highest level of success. Given that anesthesiologists manage several thousand airway encounters throughout their training and careers, their leadership as subject matter experts is essential to development of training curricula in airway management of all varieties. Consensus on training of less experienced providers, as well as tasking of the most difficult cases to the most experienced provider, is imperative for successful airway management in trauma.

Knowledge Expertise and Mass Amateurization on Internet-Based Knowledge Markets

Few studies have investigated the emerging category of Pro-Ams and its impact on knowledge markets over the Internet. We tend to address this gap in our study. Our research proposes a formal framework of knowledge expertise with mass amateurization and analyzes its impact on Internet-based knowledge markets. Specifically, the new definition of knowledge expertise consists of three major components: primary, searching, and learning expertise. Due to the effect of mass amateurization, questions posted by knowledge seekers on Internet-based knowledge markets are more likely to be answered by knowledge providers, resulting in more knowledge transactions to be consummated. This paper also discusses the impact of mass amateurization on different types of Internet-based knowledge markets. This research provides valuable insights for practitioners to manage knowledge markets with effective policies.

‘The full has never been told’: building a theory of sexual health for heterosexual Black men of Caribbean descent

Research on Black sexual health often fails to represent the heterogeneity of Black ethnic groups. For people of Caribbean descent in the USA, ethnicity is a salient cultural factor that influences definitions and experiences of sexual health. Most research on people of Caribbean descent focuses on the relatively high rate of STIs, but sexual health is defined more broadly than STI prevalence. Psychological and emotional indicators and the voice of participants are important to consider when exploring the sexual health of a minority culture. The purpose of this study was to qualitatively explore how heterosexual Black men of Caribbean descent define and understand sexual health for themselves. Eleven men who self-identified as Black, Caribbean and heterosexual participated in three focus groups and were asked to define sexual health, critique behaviours expertly identified as healthy and address what encourages and discourages sexual health in their lives. Findings point to six dimensions of sexual health for heterosexual Black men of Caribbean descent. These include: heterosexually privileged, protective, contextual, interpersonal, cultural and pleasurable dimensions. There were some notable departures from current expert definitions of sexual health. Recommendations for further theory development are provided.