Search Results (374)

Background/Objectives: Population aging has emerged as a major global challenge, particularly in Asian countries experiencing rapid demographic transitions. Among them, South Korea represents one of the fastest aging societies in the world, having rapidly transitioned into a super-aged society. As aging populations expand worldwide, increasing attention has been directed toward well-dying as an important component of quality of life, end-of-life care, and social well-being in later life. This study aims to identify the major research trends and knowledge structures of well-dying studies by applying text net-work analysis and LDA-based topic modeling. Methods: A total of 91 Korean academic studies related to well-dying published between 2016 and March 2026 were collected from publicly accessible scholarly databases and analyzed via keyword frequency, degree centrality, and community detection analyses, as well as LDA-based topic modeling. Results: The results showed that keywords such as “death,” “awareness,” “education,” “older adults,” “medical care,” and “life-sustaining treatment” played central roles in the knowledge network. Community analysis revealed that well-dying research has evolved into interconnected domains involving psychological preparations for death, hospice and palliative care, legal and ethical decision-making, and community-based aging policies. Topic modeling further identified four major themes: (1) psychological well-being and death preparation in later life, (2) social and policy approaches to well-dying, (3) well-dying education and healthcare perceptions, and (4) legal and ethical issues surrounding life-sustaining treatment decisions. Conclusions: The findings suggest that well-dying research is expanding from individual psychological adaptation to broader social, medical, legal, and policy dimensions. As one of the world’s fastest-aging societies, the Korean case provides meaningful implications for other countries facing accelerated population aging and highlights the importance of integrated well-dying policies and community-based support systems in super-aged societies. Full article

Sustainable development depends on whether emerging economies can convert foreign direct investment (FDI) into durable, knowledge-based capabilities rather than transient, low-skill employment. This paper asks how FDI catalyzes sustainable human-capital formation and whether multinational enterprises (MNEs) can help build the institutions that underpin a knowledge-economy transition. Using a single-equation instrumental-variables (2SLS) model for human-capital formation, with secondary-school enrolment as the dependent variable over 46 annual observations for Morocco (1975–2020), we find a positive and statistically significant FDI effect (β = 0.0029 per million USD of FDI inflow, p = 0.006), robust in sign and significance across OLS, 2SLS, and Dynamic OLS specifications. The result is consistent with a skill-demand channel through which knowledge-intensive MNEs are associated with higher private and social returns to education and with increased targeted public and private training investment. Sectoral evidence from Morocco’s aerospace and automotive clusters shows enrolment in vocationally oriented program growing 312% between 2005 and 2022, concentrated in curricula co-designed with foreign investors. Communications infrastructure carries a positive and significant coefficient across all four estimators but loses significance once urbanization is added as a control, so we do not treat it as a confirmed independent channel, while public education expenditure carries a negative and significant coefficient that is not stable in sign under Fully Modified OLS, indicating that its independent contribution is not well identified with the present instrument set. We interpret these findings through a sustainability lens, linking the mechanism to Sustainable Development Goals 4 (quality education), 8 (decent work and growth) and 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure), and we specify three boundary conditions—skill specificity, investor commitment, and state coordination capacity—and argue that the mechanism should be expected to transfer to other developing economies, including in the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa, only where these conditions co-occur, rather than as a general claim. The study advances the literature on MNE-led institutional co-creation and offers policy guidance for designing FDI strategies that support inclusive, sustainable knowledge-economy development across the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa. Full article

Newcomer youths (i.e., young immigrants, refugees, international students) represent a growing community across Canada, and their transition into school systems is critical to their wellbeing. School integration represents a novel vantage point by which to explore the immigration experiences of newcomer youth who are adjusting to student life. Service providers (e.g., administrative staff, guidance counsellors, settlement workers, etc.) are critical partakers in the school integration of newcomer youth. This qualitative study employed a social constructionist perspective and an integrated social justice lens. The central research questions guiding this inquiry included (1) How do participants understand newcomer youths’ experiences of school integration? And (2) What are the ways in which participants support newcomer students in high schools? In-depth, semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted with six service providers in one designated high school. A thematic analysis led to the development of five salient themes: (1) supporting academic needs, (2) life outside of school, (3) mental health concerns, (4) connections in school, and (5) gaps in the education system. Results of this study highlight the larger systemic issues that continue to impede the experiences of newcomer youth in schools. Implications for service providers working with newcomer youth in schools are presented. Full article

Energy-transition policy increasingly asks households and small firms to behave as informed players in liberalised electricity markets. How far they can actually play that part, however, depends on two things at once: how energy-literate they are, and how clearly their bills speak to them. Although both strands are separately well researched, they are rarely measured jointly, on the same respondents, and at the level of the bill itself—the document through which almost every consumer actually meets the market. Working from a case study of Polish electricity customers, we examine how self-assessed knowledge of billing relates to perceived bill comprehensibility and to the detailed understanding of individual invoice elements. The evidence comes from a mixed-mode CATI/CAWI survey of 602 respondents—individual consumers, prosumers and micro/small enterprises—all served by a single major supplier in the Upper Silesia region. Because the achieved sample is dominated by older respondents of one supplier, the study is framed throughout as an exploratory, regional investigation. Three findings stand out. First, self-assessed energy literacy, perceived bill comprehensibility and the detailed understanding of individual invoice elements are positively interrelated (Spearman’s ρ between 0.49 and 0.61, p < 0.001), indicating that consumer competence and information design are complementary correlates of comprehension. Second, declared knowledge and understanding are socially patterned: they run higher among respondents aged 35–54 and those in a better financial position and lower among older and financially vulnerable customers, while a third of respondents find their current bill hard to understand. Third, Ward’s cluster analysis distinguishes three internally consistent layers of billing information—detailed billing parameters, transactional and payment content, and regulatory and legal content—of which the regulatory and legal layer is read least often. Because the data come from one supplier in one region, the findings are indicative rather than nationally representative and should be generalised only with care. The paper’s contribution is to measure energy literacy, perceived transparency and detailed bill comprehension jointly on the same respondents and to document—for a Central European retail market undergoing rapid price change—that the regulatory layer of the bill is precisely the layer consumers read least. For policy, the findings support piloting simpler bill structures, communication aimed at vulnerable groups, and energy education that equips consumers to take part in the market as the transition unfolds; given the sample, these implications are advanced as directions to be tested rather than as validated prescriptions. Full article

This study examines whether fertility-related employment penalties differ across countries at different stages of demographic transition, using Kenya and South Africa as comparative case studies. Using nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, the analysis employs an instrumental-variable approach that exploits exogenous variation in fertility generated by twin births, with the sex composition of the first two children used as a supplementary robustness instrument. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based Economic Independence Index is also employed as an alternative outcome measure to capture broader dimensions of economic autonomy. The results show that higher fertility significantly reduces women’s paid employment participation and broader measures of economic autonomy. Instrumental-variable estimates exceed ordinary least squares estimates, suggesting that conventional models underestimate the economic costs of childbearing. Fertility-related employment penalties are remarkably similar across Kenya and South Africa despite their different demographic transition trajectories, providing little evidence that lower-fertility contexts experience weaker employment penalties. The adverse effects are strongest among women with higher parity and lower educational attainment, highlighting important life-course heterogeneity. The study contributes comparative causal evidence on fertility-related employment penalties across two Sub-Saharan African countries using a common quasi-experimental identification strategy. The findings have implications for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) by demonstrating that demographic change alone is unlikely to improve women’s labour-market outcomes. Instead, policies that reduce childcare constraints and strengthen women’s labour-force participation may help mitigate fertility-related employment penalties and promote more inclusive and sustainable development. Full article

This article traces how nontraditional preservice teachers experience the mediation of academic research writing, and how the transition from mediation to independence unfolds in their accounts when the supporting structure is withdrawn. The case centers on the first research seminar of a teacher education program in which 13 experienced paraprofessionals, most of them the first in their families to enter higher education and carrying long histories of academic difficulty, design and write a structured self-regulation intervention study with a pupil. From a qualitative analysis of three retrospective focus groups, five themes were constructed: (1) arriving with academic apprehension; (2) holding the standard as recognition; (3) the graduated scaffold of the first seminar; (4) concentric circles of mediation and support; and (5) the abrupt fading of the scaffold in the move toward independence. The findings highlight that participants valued scaffolding not only for the support it provided but for the way responsibility for the work was gradually handed over. Despite this gradual structure, the handover toward independence was experienced by some students as an abrupt, sudden transition, which provoked ambivalent feelings. The discussion proposes two participant-grounded sensitizing concepts, the effort ladder and the concentric circles of mediation, as interpretive lenses for scaffolding theory. We discuss the unresolved tensions that participants hold between the importance of high academic standards and the need for accommodations, and the implications for teacher education. Full article

Background: The transition from nursing education to professional practice requires nurse interns to consolidate clinical competence, develop professional identity, and establish future expectations within their work environments. Aim: This study examined the associations among perceived work environment, professional identity, and dispositional hope among nurse interns and assessed whether perceived work environment and professional identity remained independently associated with dispositional hope after adjustment for demographic and internship-related characteristics. Methods: An analytical cross-sectional correlational study was conducted among 1450 nurse interns at Benha University Hospitals, Egypt, using a total population sampling approach. Data were collected using the Perceived Work Environment Questionnaire, Professional Identity Scale for Nursing Students, and Adult Hope Scale. Descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation, and multiple linear regression were performed. Results: The mean scores were 138.42 ± 18.92 for perceived work environment, 57.84 ± 8.96 for professional identity, and 47.20 ± 5.68 for dispositional hope. Perceived work environment showed significant positive correlations with professional identity (r = 0.58, p < 0.001) and dispositional hope (r = 0.52, p < 0.001), while professional identity was also positively correlated with dispositional hope (r = 0.49, p < 0.001). In the multiple linear regression analysis, perceived work environment (β = 0.359, p < 0.001) and professional identity (β = 0.282, p < 0.001) were both positively associated with dispositional hope after adjustment for the included demographic and internship-related covariates. The overall regression model was statistically significant—F (10, 1439) = 70.054, p < 0.001—and explained 32.7% of the variance in dispositional hope (R² = 0.327; adjusted R² = 0.323). Conclusions: Perceived work environment and professional identity were independently associated with dispositional hope among nurse interns. These findings underscore the relevance of structured supervision, constructive feedback, mentoring, and professional identity development within nursing education and internship programs. Full article

Rapid innovation-driven transitions have, across successive eras, been associated with increased psychological distress, substance use, and suicide when social and economic change outpaces the adaptive capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, and governments. The early artificial intelligence (AI) economy is emerging at an unprecedented pace, reshaping education, employment, and social organization in ways that may intensify these risks, particularly among young people. This perspective argues that school-based mental health nursing, working collaboratively with school psychologists, counsellors, physicians, and other interdisciplinary professionals, represents a practical upstream response to AI-era disruption. Drawing on historical evidence from the Industrial Revolution, population mental health research, and the contemporary mental health nursing literature, the paper examines the mechanisms through which rapid socio-economic change may contribute to psychological distress and substance-use problems. It further distinguishes AI as both a source of socio-economic disruption and a clinical tool that can support—but not replace—relationship-based nursing practice. Strengthening school-based mental health nursing within interdisciplinary systems offers a practical, prevention-oriented strategy to promote resilience, facilitate early intervention, and mitigate downstream mental health and substance-use harms during the AI transition. Full article

Background: Family caregivers play a central role in supporting people with colorectal cancer (CRC) and often manage complex physical, emotional, and practical demands. However, evidence regarding their experiences and supportive care needs in Kazakhstan remains limited. This qualitative study explored caregiving experiences, caregiving burden, caregivers’ needs, and coping strategies. Methods: A qualitative descriptive design was used, involving semi-structured interviews with 21 family caregivers caring for patients with CRC. Participants were recruited purposively from the Medical Center of West Kazakhstan Marat Ospanov Medical University and outpatient clinics in Aktobe between December 2025 and March 2026. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using inductive reflexive thematic analysis. Results: Most family caregivers of patients with colorectal cancer were women (95.2%). Five main themes developed: emotional challenges, transformation of daily life, caregiving tasks, caregivers’ needs and support gaps, and coping strategies and resilience. Diagnosis was described as a distressing experience characterized by shock, fear, and uncertainty. Caregiving substantially disrupted employment, financial stability, and family roles, often requiring work adjustment or leaving the workforce. Caregivers reported insufficient preparation for stoma care and expressed a strong need for structured training. Social isolation was common, as both caregivers and patients experienced a shrinking of their social support networks. Despite substantial burden, caregivers described adaptive responses to ongoing emotional and practical demands, and resilience was a prominent theme. Conclusions: Family caregivers of patients with colorectal cancer in Kazakhstan face interconnected emotional, informational, physical, and system-level challenges, while also drawing on resilience. The findings highlight priorities for support, including structured stoma care education, psychological services, recognition of caregivers’ roles, and improved discharge and transitional care. Full article

Perceived employability is increasingly recognized as a core component of individuals’ capacity to build sustainable careers: occupational trajectories that remain viable, meaningful, and adaptive across the working lifespan. Within the broader framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), higher education institutions play a strategic role in equipping students with the psychological resources needed for a successful and sustainable transition from education to employment. This study examined the university learning experience in relation to perceived employability, testing college satisfaction as a mediator between two key academic dimensions, good teaching and university commitment, and students’ occupational self-perception. A sample of 179 students (59.2% female; Mage = 24.40, SD = 5.95) enrolled at the University of Palermo completed self-report measures of all four constructs. A mediation model was tested on composite scale scores, with indirect associations estimated through bias-corrected bootstrapping (5000 resamples). Good teaching (b = 0.332, β = 0.338, p < 0.001) and university commitment (b = 0.250, β = 0.247, p = 0.001) were both positively associated with college satisfaction, accounting for 26.3% of its variance; college satisfaction, in turn, was positively associated with perceived employability (b = 0.258, β = 0.396, p < 0.001), with the full model accounting for 32.8% of the variance in perceived employability. College satisfaction fully accounted for the association between teaching quality and perceived employability, and partially accounted for the association between university commitment and perceived employability. These findings point to a consistent conclusion: a satisfying and supportive academic experience is not a peripheral feature of university life, but a key process through which students develop a confident sense of their own occupational potential. For universities, this translates into concrete levers, namely teaching quality and institutional belonging, that can meaningfully support students’ long-term and resilient integration into the labor market, while contributing more broadly to the sustainability of the higher education-to-work pipeline. Full article

Citizenship education in engineering programs has become a topic of growing concern due to the social, environmental, and technological impacts of engineers’ professional practice. However, there is a lack of systematized information about trends and gaps in the academic literature in this area, which hinders the work of researchers, educators, and academic administrators. Therefore, this study examined the academic literature of the last thirty years (1996–2025) in four major scientific databases (WoS Core Collection, Scopus, SciELO, and Dialnet Plus). A systematic review was conducted using the PRISMA method, which allowed the selection of the articles (n = 74). These articles were then examined through qualitative thematic analysis. Additionally, descriptive frequencies of the corpus were identified, allowing for more precise contextualization. The results show a growing, albeit concentrated, field amidst an incipient transition from a dominant individualistic approach to a critical-democratic one. Furthermore, several significant gaps in the literature were identified, pointing to new research directions. Finally, the implications of these results for engineering schools are presented. Full article

This study identifies two stage-specific configurations of CLIL teacher well-being in Andalusia: an ecology of proximity in Primary Education and a disciplinary-departmental ecology in Secondary Education. Drawing on 14 semi-structured interviews with seven Primary and seven Secondary teachers, the study used a deductive–inductive ecological analysis combining within-case, cross-case, cross-stage, and subsystem-coupling procedures in QDA Miner. Participants described professional well-being not merely as a subjective psychological state but in terms of professional viability: the perceived ecological enactability of pedagogically legitimate and sustainable practice. Primary teachers’ accounts foregrounded sustained pupil contact, tutorial responsibility, family expectations, classroom routines, and adaptation for younger learners. Secondary teachers’ accounts foregrounded subject specialisation, departmental organisation, heterogeneous language proficiency, assessment ambiguity, and the Primary–Secondary transition. Across both stages, participants described compensatory overfunctioning—additional care, coordination, material redesign, translation, and assessment work undertaken to keep CLIL operational when implementation conditions were perceived as insufficient. Protected coordination time, stage-specific training, shared assessment frameworks, appropriate materials, and transition structures emerged as potential regulatory leverage points. The study advances a phase-sensitive systems interpretation of teacher well-being by identifying a fast balancing loop of frontline adaptation and a slower reinforcing stabilisation trap through which restored continuity may conceal persistent underprovision. Full article

This conceptual paper examines how dominant frameworks of college access and equity in U.S. higher education marginalize undocumented and international students by anchoring inclusion to citizenship, legal eligibility, and institutional risk management. In the context of intensified anti-DEI and anti-immigrant politics, legally precarious students face overlapping yet distinct legal, financial, emotional, and symbolic forms of exclusion that conventional access and equity models do not fully capture. Institutional retreat, anticipatory obedience, and the re-coding of equity work can further make supports for these students harder to locate, defend, and sustain. Synthesizing scholarship on college access, undocumented and international student experiences, critical citizenship studies, legal status stratification, border theory, anticipatory obedience, and coalitional politics, the paper argues for moving “beyond legality” as the organizing framework of access. It advances a conceptual model of College Access Beyond Legality centered on four interlocking structures: emotional safety and trust, informal resource networks, campus and community organizing, and identity-based and status-conscious advocacy. The model conceptualizes cross-status coalition-building among students, institutional stakeholders, faculty, and community partners as both a survival strategy and a practice of institutional accountability. It also emphasizes that access beyond legality must begin before matriculation and extend through persistence, belonging, and post-graduation transitions. The model aims to reduce harm, strengthen belonging, expand access to material supports, support persistence, and deepen institutional accountability. The paper concludes with implications for institutional policy, equity practice, basic-needs and community-connection infrastructures, and future research aimed at expanding access for marginalized students in legally and politically hostile contexts. Full article

The transition into higher education is one of the most consequential junctures in a young person’s trajectory. Institutional retention is an institutional responsibility. When students leave before completing their degree, the default response has been to look at the student, their preparation, their motivation, their fit. This paper starts from a different premise: the cracks students fall through are structural. They form where offices operate in isolation, where handoffs go unowned, and where no unit is responsible for the space between them. Those cracks are most costly for students who were never given the social or political capital to navigate institutional complexity on their own: first-generation, Pell-eligible, and racially minoritized students, students with disabilities, LGBTQI-identified students, and others for whom the institution was not designed. This article introduces Embedded Institutional Process Mapping (EIPM), a framework adapted from business process mapping traditions and applied to higher education to help institutions map what their offices do and synchronize those efforts toward a shared institutional purpose. Drawing on loose coupling theory, administrative burden scholarship, and QuantCrit, EIPM surfaces where coordination fails and identifies which students bear the cost of that failure. A proof-of-concept application at a regional open-access institution, where 67% of students are first-generation, 58% are Pell-eligible, and 83% work while enrolled, demonstrates how EIPM makes structural misalignments visible that conventional program assessment routinely overlooks. In its widest application, EIPM operationalizes what equity work requires: disaggregated institutional data examined through a critical lens, to name who is being underserved and trace that outcome back to the institutional processes that produced it. Full article

This paper examines how exclusionary epistemic practices embedded in science as a discipline are reproduced in classroom settings and how these practices can be disrupted when teachers adapt existing materials toward goals of epistemic inclusion. The inequities in access, participation, and representation in science that are reproduced at a societal level are developed in the classroom. Students learn how to do science—they develop the epistemic and social practices of the scientific discipline—in science education classes. When exclusion of some students from classroom knowledge building is normalized, marginalization becomes part of how students learn to engage in science and engineering practices. Drawing on a curricular redesign project conducted during the COVID-19 transition to virtual learning, the study highlights how the repositioning of teachers as active agents and experts in curriculum adaptation was central to the work. Using qualitative data-driven coding with productive disciplinary engagement and epistemic inclusion to guide the analysis, critical cases of curricular adaptations were developed with 10 elementary science teachers during a year-long project-based learning online science curriculum enactment project. Five themes associated with disruption of entrenched exclusionary practices emerged that can be codified as adaptation principles: 1. adapt features of project-based learning to: (1) bring in and leverage students’ identities and intellectual resources from home; (2) provide student-centered choice; (3) elicit diverse knowledge, expertise and ideas; (4) support students to make use of many different modalities; (5) dismantle the usual (traditional) structures between the teacher and students. Full article