Focal Questions Research Articles

Exploring benthic habitat assessments on coral reefs: a comparison of direct field measurements versus remote sensing

Coral reefs are spatially variable ecosystems that form biogenic structures ranging in size from 10 to 1000s of meters. Their changes in response to anthropogenic stress are occurring across increasingly broad scales, yet our ability to detect, understand and respond to these changes at relevant scales is limited. Traditional in-water observation-based coral reef ecology and remote sensing-based methods both offer valuable insights into benthic change, but their relative scalability and use to-date must be understood to inform optimal future research approaches. We conducted a systematic literature review comparing the approaches used to quantify benthic habitat, through traditional in-water ecological studies and remote sensing studies, with respect to: (a) their geographic distribution, (b) reef zone selection, and c) their focal questions. Among the 199 studies reviewed, traditional ecological studies primarily concentrated on community composition (89%), using high-detail direct measurements, especially from the reef slope (80%). By contrast, remote sensing studies provided spatially explicit datasets at coarser spatial and thematic resolutions, with a predominant focus on benthic mapping (72%) across entire reef systems. Only 3% of studies integrated both approaches, combining comprehensive in-situ observations with broadscale remote sensing. As anthropogenic stressors continue to increase in scale, bridging these scientific disciplines offers a promising way to upscale observations to entire reef-scape scales. We identify steps to harness the strengths of both fields and integrate multiple tools at various levels of resolution and scale. Such bridging approaches offer a way forward in understanding and managing coral reef functioning in the Anthropocene.

Expansive Ways to Be an Environmental Activist: A Content Analysis of Children's Picturebooks from 2016 to 2022 Surrounding the Climate Crisis

Abstract: Drawing on a content analysis of 147 picturebooks published from 2016 to 2022, this article examines whose and which stories are told regarding environmental justice and how educators can honor multiple identities in their instruction, advocacy, and actions toward climate justice. The study begins with findings from the analysis across the larger text set of environmental texts in response to the focal questions of environmentalism and environmental justice. It continues with an analysis of three focal picturebooks spanning various global settings. This article advocates for educators, caregivers, and librarians to foster a critical lens with young readers as they engage with environmental texts to raise critique, envision hope, and promote action. We highlight the value of diverse children's literature around environmentalism and environmental justice to support children to delve into the existing breadth of experiences and narratives in known and lesser-known texts. We argue for the need to read across environmentalism picturebooks broadly to foster a more inclusive view of what environmental stewardship is and can be.

Sustainability advertising: literature review and framework for future research

A growing number of consumers want companies to act sustainably. Companies have responded by advertising their sustainability initiatives, practices, and products. This paper takes a fresh look at sustainability advertising, synthesizing empirical research involving two focal questions: (a) What makes a sustainability ad effective? and (b) What drives some consumers to adopt sustainable behaviors? To answer these questions, this paper is organized into three sections. First, the concept of sustainability is introduced, its dimensions are presented, and sustainability advertising is defined. Second, a framework for the effectiveness of sustainability advertising is introduced. Ad context, source characteristics, and message design influence an ad’s effectiveness, while consumer drivers enhance or attenuate this relationship. Finally, measures of ad effectiveness and the unintended consequences of sustainability advertising are discussed. In each section, empirical research is summarized, and future research opportunities are outlined. This paper provides a holistic view of the effectiveness of sustainability advertising in order to inspire new research in this timely and critical advertising arena.

Informal network context: deepening the knowledge and extending the boundaries of social network research in international human resource management

While informal networking has been universally regarded as an important feature of expatriate effectiveness, respective network constructs (yongo, wasta, blat/svyazi, etc.) remain weakly understood when taking expatriates’ ability to connect to local networks into account. Drawing on informal institution and social capital theory, we present informal networks as an important contextual factor in international human resource management (IHRM), relevant to the work of expatriates in particular. We define informal networks by pointing out their distinctive nature in contrast to social networks and developing central themes to guide future research in this area. This is achieved by integrating the informal network context into research themes relevant to the IHRM domain. In this article, seven research themes centering on focal research questions are developed, which, taken together, constitute a future research agenda and expand the typical domain of IHRM research in the informal network context.

Advancing research on early autism through an integrated risk and resilience perspective.

To date, a deficit-oriented approach dominates autism spectrum disorder (ASD) research, including studies of infant siblings of children with ASD at high risk (HR) for the disabilities associated with this disorder. Despite scientific advances regarding early ASD-related risk, there remains little systematic investigation of positive development, limiting the scope of research and quite possibly a deeper understanding of pathways toward and away from ASD-related impairments. In this paper, we argue that integrating a resilience framework into early ASD research has the potential to enhance knowledge on prodromal course, phenotypic heterogeneity, and developmental processes of risk and adaptation. We delineate a developmental systems resilience framework with particular reference to HR infants. To illustrate the utility of a resilience perspective, we consider the "female protective effect" and other evidence of adaptation in the face of ASD-related risk. We suggest that a resilience framework invites focal questions about the nature, timing, levels, interactions, and mechanisms by which positive adaptation occurs in relation to risk and developmental pathways toward and away from ASD-related difficulties. We conclude with recommendations for future research, including more focus on adaptive development and multisystem processes, pathways away from disorder, and reconsideration of extant evidence within an integrated risk-and-resilience framework.

Learning research in a laboratory classroom: a reflection on complementarity and commensurability among multiple analytical accounts

With the myriad theories generated through research over the years, a continuing challenge for researchers is to navigate the multitude of theories in order to communicate their research, integrate empirical results, and make progress as a field by building upon empirical research. The Social Unit of Learning project was purposefully designed so that researchers from multiple disciplines with different theoretical perspectives could work together to examine the complexity of the mathematics classroom. In this paper, we reflect on the multiple analytical accounts generated from the project, drawing from the notions of complementarity and commensurability. Two parallel analyses, applying the commognitive framework and the theory of representations respectively, are used as illustrative examples for discussion regarding complementarity and commensurability. The paper addresses two focal questions, as follows: in what ways do divergence or contradiction in incommensurable analytical accounts reflect methodological discrepancies or fundamental differences in the underpinning theories? Furthermore, in what ways do the accounts generated by the parallel analyses predicated on different theories lead to differences in instructional advocacy? The answers to these questions provide empirically-grounded insights into the consideration of incommensurability in educational research, and suggest ways in which researchers and practitioners might apply the notion of complementarity to reconcile or exploit incommensurable analytical accounts that have resulted in different instructional advocacies.

The climate resilience cycle: Using scenario analysis to inform climate‐resilient business strategies

AbstractClimate change affects the business environment, and companies need future‐oriented information to build climate resilience. To this end, companies are encouraged to conduct climate change scenario analysis, as recommended by the Task Force on Climate‐Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). However, companies' actual adoption of this practice is limited as they lack a straightforward scenario analysis implementation process and relevant climate change knowledge. This research develops an implementation process by clarifying the concept of resilience into a stability and a change domain and by specifying the type of focal questions for these two domains. Next, a scenario typology guides the selection of reference scenarios, and two standard scenario methods guide the tailoring of these reference scenarios to company‐specific scenarios. By structuring this process in five steps and specifying input and process requirements, we provide an implementation process called the climate resilience cycle. By applying the cycle in transdisciplinary teams of climate change experts and company staff with knowledge about the company value chain, we bring in the required knowledge. To become climate resilient, the outcomes of the climate resilience cycle need to be integrated in the business planning and the overall company strategy. We argue that implementing the cycle as a new company routine contributes to the development of dynamic capabilities like sensing, seizing and transforming, which have been proven to be essential for integrating sustainability in company strategies. Once begun, we show how the cycle can become part of a company strategy process.

Nigeria’s Socio-Economic Factors and Ekiti State’s Youth Involvement in Agriculture

Out of many other options to increase sustainable production of foods to feed its teeming population, Nigerian academics now focus on the possibility of motivating the youths into action in a labour intensive drive; finding reasons why Nigerian youths are not taking to farming. It is well known that a lot of young college and university graduates left the shores of Nigeria only to be engaged by strangers in cultivating plantations in foreign lands as a mean of livelihood. The shame of their discovery and the inability to raise adequate funds with which they would return home eventually keep them in long servitude abroad. Moreover, a lot of studies have ensued in regard of this, but none has been done or reported on Ekiti youths. This study fills the gap. A sample of 300 respondents from the population was drawn using multistage sampling method. Five focal questions were raised in the study and two hypotheses were generated and tested (at 0.05 level of significance) using the chi-square inferential statistical method. Data were collected using a well-structured questionnaire; the research design can be best described as a descriptive survey. Study unveiled that what youths really need most in Ekiti to encourage them in taking on agriculture include finance, awareness, training, fertile land, loan facility, power supply, loan facility, power supply, improved seedlings, fertilizer/agrochemicals availability, and machinery among others.

Improving decision-making through material flow cost accounting: the case of VietGreen bottled mineral water company

VietGreen, headquartered in the South of Vietnam, is a bottled mineral water company striving towards becoming a leading mineral water producer with a strong reputation for social responsibility and integrity. This case describes VietGreen’s decision to explore the potential of material flow cost accounting (MFCA) for enhanced eco-efficiency and achieving the company’s long-term goals. It introduces the students to the company’s major challenges in meeting existing and newly introduced environmental regulations and in dealing with various controversial perspectives of managers involved in a project to implement MFCA. The focal questions of the case are why and how the company’s management should invest in and apply MFCA to implement its major strategic objectives. In particular, it focuses on the tension between measures improving either environmental or economic performance as well as the search for solutions contributing to both types of goals.

A Critical Appraisal of Dismissals at the Behest of a Third Party: The Impact of the Constitutional Labour Rights

The pivotal judgments on dismissals at the behest of a third party – East Rand Proprietary Mines Ltd v UPUSA, Lebowa Platinum Mines v Hill, NUMSA v Hendor Mining Supplies a Division of Marschalk Beleggings (Pty) Ltd, TSI Holdings (Pty) Ltd v NUMSA, NUPSAW obo Mani v National Lotteries Board and NUMSA v High Goal Investments t/a Chuma Security Services – deeply implicate discrimination in all its manifestations, accountability, gendered precariousness and social justice. This contribution explores the focal questions raised in recent times concerning the fairness of a dismissal at the instance of a third party. First, there are fundamental points relating to the constitutional and statutory protection of security of employment. Secondly, there are those familiar problems often associated with substantive and procedural fairness that surface here under the guise of questioning the disciplinary power of the employer. In this context, inroads into managerial prerogative and disciplinary procedure are amplified where there has been no fault on the part of the employee and no breakdown of the trust relationship, or where the employee has been disciplined, but not dismissed and the employer did not want to terminate the employee’s employment but was coerced by the third party to do so. Thirdly, there is the thorny issue of the reason behind the third-party demand and the related issue of intolerability caused by the targeted employee. And finally, there is the issue of striking in support of a demand for dismissal of a co-employee.

Designing in Context: Reaching Beyond Usability in Learning Analytics Dashboard Design

Researchers and developers of learning analytics (LA) systems are increasingly adopting human-centred design (HCD) approaches, with growing need to understand how to apply design practice in different educational settings. In this paper, we present a design narrative of our experience developing dashboards to support middle school mathematics teachers’ pedagogical practices, in a multi-university, multi-school district, improvement science initiative in the United States. Through documentation of our design experience, we offer ways to adapt common HCD methods — contextual design and design tensions — when developing visual analytics systems for educators. We also illuminate how adopting these design methods within the context of improvement science and research–practice partnerships fundamentally influences the design choices we make and the focal questions we undertake. The results of this design process flow naturally from the appropriation and repurposing of tools by district partners and directly inform improvement goals.

Elaborations in Expository Text Impose a Substantial Time Cost but Do Not Enhance Learning

Textbook passages commonly include elaborations (details supporting main ideas) with the assumption that elaborations will improve learning of the main ideas. However, elaborations increase text length, which subsequently increases the reading time of that text. These observations lead to the two focal questions of interest in the current study: What is the time cost imposed by including elaborations within textbooks? Does the benefit of elaborations for enhancing memory for main ideas outweigh this time cost? In three experiments, students studied elaborated versus unelaborated versions of psychology textbook passages. Two days later, students completed final tests, including cued recall for main ideas and comprehension tests. In all experiments, we found a substantial cost in terms of increased reading time for the elaborated text but no evidence of increased memory for main ideas to offset this cost. To facilitate further interpretation of the similar test performance observed for elaborated versus unelaborated texts, experiment 2 ruled out functional floor or ceiling effects and established that both text versions enhanced learning (but did so to a similar extent). These results indicate that elaborations embedded within textbook passages may not facilitate learning and that unelaborated texts may be more efficient than elaborated texts.

Inclusive education in the academy: pedagogical and political imperatives in a master’s course

ABSTRACTMany universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in inclusive education. There has been much research into the impact of these courses, but little is written about their design. This article focuses on a master’s course in inclusive education in a South African university. The course positions inclusive education as a critical education project and is designed around the four propositions presented by Slee in The Irregular School (2011. Milton Park: Routledge). Using Bernsteinian ideas about pedagogising knowledge, this article accounts for the pedagogical choices made in content selection and course design. The focal questions in the course are described, together with an indication of the range of additional texts that students read. Given that Slee asserts that inclusive education is a political project, and that Allan (2010. “The Inclusive Teacher Educator: Spaces for Civic Engagement.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31 (4): 411–422) urges inclusive teacher educators to reorientate themselves towards civic duty, I argue that producing a pedagogic discourse of inclusive education is a political task that should result in both the teacher educator and the students being oriented towards a critique of existing exclusionary arrangements and an activism that leads to change.

Cancer information seeking and scanning: Sources and patterns

Objective:This study aimed to identify predominant search patterns in a recent search for health information and a potential search for strongly needed cancer information, to identify the commonly scanned sources of information that may represent stable elements of the information fields characteristic of these patterns, and to evaluate whether search patterns are the same for cancer patients and non-patients.Design:Analysis of Health Information National Trends Survey 4 Cycle 2 (HINTS 4.2) data, a nationally representative survey administered by the US National Cancer Institute.Methods:The search patterns of individuals responding to survey questions about a recent search for health information and a hypothetical search for strongly needed cancer information were identified by cross-classifying the first source of information to be consulted in both search contexts. Using a mixed-model repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), we evaluated the relationship between search patterns and scanned sources of cancer information.Results:Five predominant search patterns or groups were evident: Internet–doctor (29%), Internet–Internet (25%), doctor–doctor (16%), Internet–cancer organisation (6%) and print–doctor (6%) for recent search and for the hypothetical search for strongly needed information, respectively. Patterns did not vary by presence/absence of cancer diagnosis. Information search groups differed both demographically and in the sources of information scanned. Patterns were replicated in data from two additional HINTS surveys which differed in the wording of the focal questions.Conclusion:Differences among the patterns in various health-related attitudes and behaviours are identified. Implications for patient engagement in shared decision-making, particularly in the presence of rapid developments in health information technology, are discussed.

Scaling Back and Finding Flexibility: Gender Differences in Parents' Strategies to Manage Work–Family Conflict

Studies show that fathers report work–family conflict levels comparable to mothers. The authors examine gender differences in work‐related strategies used to ease such conflicts. The authors also test whether the presence of young children at home shapes parents' use of different strategies. They address these focal questions using panel data from the Canadian Work, Stress, and Health study (N = 306 fathers, 474 mothers). The authors find that mothers with young children are more likely to scale back on work demands when compared with fathers with young children, but mothers and fathers with older children are equally likely to pursue these strategies. Furthermore, women with young children and men with older children are more likely to seek increased schedule control as a result of work–family conflict when compared with their parent counterparts. The authors situate these findings in the vast literature on the consequences of work–family conflict.

Spatial and environmental processes show temporal variation in the structuring of waterbird metacommunities

AbstractMetacommunity theory provides a framework for assessing the role of spatial and environmental processes in structuring ecological communities and places emphasis on the role of dispersal. Four metacommunity perspectives have been proposed: species‐sorting, patch dynamics, mass effects, and a neutral model. Metacommunity analysis decomposes the variance in communities into regional and local dynamics and ascribes it to one of these perspectives, although they are not always mutually exclusive. Although birds are a well‐studied taxon, consensus around processes structuring freshwater avian metacommunities is lacking and few studies have repeated samples through time. We used variance partitioning to analyze waterbird community data collected over seven sampling periods at 60 wetland sites in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa, to distinguish the processes driving beta‐diversity and identify which metacommunity perspective(s) best explained these patterns. We addressed two focal questions: (1) how do environmental, spatial, and spatially structured environmental components contribute to variance in the waterbird community; and (2) given a significant contribution, which environmental variables were most important in explaining metacommunity structure? We also investigated the role of temporal variation in community processes by comparing results across sampling periods. The underlying landscape was characterized by four groups of environmental variables: vegetation structure, water quality, rainfall, and land cover. Moran's eigenvector maps were used to generate a set of multiscale spatial predictor variables. Our results showed that the spatially structured environmental component was dominant through the sampling periods. Purely spatial and environmental components contributed a significant proportion of variance, but their magnitudes showed considerable temporal variation. Environmental processes were more pronounced in winter periods while purely spatial processes were augmented in the summer months. Our results suggest that species‐sorting is the primary structuring forces in waterbird communities. The presence of spatial effects, especially in summer, does however suggest that species‐sorting does not operate in isolation. Future efforts also need to address the causes and consequences of temporal variation in metacommunity processes.

Inquiring the Empireness of the National History: Comparison of the Recent East Asian Regional Histories

As an effort to obtain the “historial perception that is transferable across the East Asian regional community”. This article focused on how to confront the empireness of the national history. In this context, the definition of empireness refers to the tendency to form and expand an empire. There are two perspectives to broadly explain the empireness of the national history: one is “self reflection-based historical perspective”, and the other is “pride-based historical perspective”.BR One of qualities that regional histories require to have is its transferability. Regional history should be differentiated from national history as that of individual country’s, for former is transferable across the national borderline. In course, East Asian history as regional history should confront their empireness of national history after rooting their thought on “self reflectionbased historical perspective”. Having this point in mind, I attempted to thoroughly observe and compare how regional history publications reflect several focal questions that has been taken for granted in national history.BR In order to achieve this aim, I compared academic articles about East Asian history that was published in Korea(Yu Yongtae et al., 2010), China(Yang Jun et al., 2006), and Japan(Mitani Hiroshi et al., 2009). Through comparing these publications, this study attempted to look back pride-based historical perspective, that glorifies the empireness that appears through attacking neighboring country and expand the borderline, in terms of self reflectionbased historical perspective.

Toward a Unified Approach to Conceptualizing and Measuring Virtuality

Contemporary organizations are increasingly implementing virtual work arrangements where employees are geographically distributed and/or rely primarily on electronic, rather than face-to-face, communication. Despite the recent growth in research related to virtual work, researchers have yet to reach consensus on a common approach to conceptualizing and measuring the construct of “virtuality.” This potentially limits research in this area by making it difficult to integrate theoretical perspectives and compare findings across studies. Accordingly, the purpose of the proposed panel symposium is to convene a gathering of interested parties to debate, discuss, and try to bring some closure to key issues related to conceptualizing and measuring virtuality. The focal questions we seek to address include: (1) What key dimensions underlie the construct of virtuality? (2) What is the best approach to measuring these dimensions of virtuality? (3) Are objective or perceptual measures more appropriate for measuring v...

Analytics in higher education: stakeholder perspective

The application of analytics to learners and their contexts, a field known as learning analytics, is increasingly gaining research attention. However, much of the published research to date has a relatively narrow focus of targets consisting of optimising pedagogical outcomes at the level of individual learning tasks or individual courses. Drawing on stakeholder theory, we identify a broader set of constituencies in higher education and argue that learning analytics has a much broader set of potential educational applications. We present emergent insights from an ongoing action research study conducted by an Analytics Task Force at a large public university in the north-east of the USA. We identify additional stakeholders who can benefit from the application of predictive models and we define the preliminary set of questions that can be addressed through predictive analytics for each stakeholder group. Our key contribution to the field of learning analytics is the expansion of learning analytics research landscape to include new stakeholders and new focal research questions.

The stationarity of the collection of the locally regulars

I analyze various natural assumptions which imply that the set $${\{\omega_1^{L[x]} \mid x \subseteq \omega\}}$${?1L[x]?x⊆?} is stationary in ?1. The focal questions are which implications hold between them, what their consistency strengths are, and which large cardinal assumptions outright imply them.