Search Results (6,819)

Foster care placements involve various role players from the child’s entry into the system through the child’s exit. Positive role fulfilment implies acting in accordance with the respective role expectations while also being dynamic in nature. Key participants in the foster care system include social workers, foster parents, and foster children. These role players all have roles necessary for the foster care placement to be positive. Using role and identity theory, with an underlying Africentric philosophy, as a theoretical framework, this qualitative study sought to describe social workers’ perspectives on positive role fulfilment among role players within the foster child’s care circle in supporting well-being. Data were collected from twelve participants, comprising ten foster care social workers and two social work supervisors, through a focus group discussion and one-on-one interviews. In addition, two foster care policy developers were consulted as key stakeholders to provide contextual insight into the legislative and policy environment. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings showed that social workers face structural challenges, including high caseloads, a shortage of social workers and uncertainty regarding roles, which sometimes make it difficult to fulfil their roles as expected. With that said, they believed that positive role fulfilment influenced the positive nature of foster care placements. When roles are known and met, the care circle enhances the well-being of the foster child. The study concludes that social workers know what they are required to do for the child’s well-being. The recommendation is that an Africentric foster care supervision and monitoring framework be developed to sensitise the role players of their roles and responsibilities in the foster care system. Full article

This study evaluates how architectural heterogeneity and reward design influence coordination in decentralized IPPO-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) systems operating in Search-and-Rescue (SAR) environments with strict sequential task dependencies. Controlled experiments compare homogeneous and heterogeneous teams across multiple reward structures, observation ranges, task complexities, and asymmetric role distributions in a partially observable, communication-denied, decentralized environment. The results show that homogeneous teams consistently achieve faster convergence, higher coordination efficiency, and more stable cooperative behavior than balanced heterogeneous configurations. Under hybrid global–local reward schemes, homogeneous teams achieve a higher success rate than local-only reward schemes. A dedicated test confirms this advantage stems from team composition itself, not parameter sharing: it persists even under independent, non-shared policy networks. Additional experiments suggest that asymmetric role allocation may influence coordination dynamics in heterogeneous teams. The study provides empirically grounded design recommendations for cooperative multi-agent systems, derived from controlled simulation experiments under communication-limited sequential coordination constraints. Full article

Flooding is a destructive natural hazard intensified by climate change, posing challenges to sustainable disaster risk management. This study developed and evaluated machine learning models for flood severity prediction within a hexagonal grid system (H3, resolution 8) under rainy season conditions in Maha Sarakham, Thailand. Four models Random Forest (RF), XGBoost, Gradient Boosting (GB), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) were trained using 11 environmental variables across historical years (2018, 2021, 2022) and tested on a projected year (2025) under SSP scenarios. XGBoost demonstrated the most stable performance (accuracy > 0.95 across all years), while SVM achieved high historical accuracy (0.970 average) but failed to detect positive flood cases in 2025 (recall = 0), highlighting the importance of temporal validation. Topographic variables were the most consistent predictors, but NSMI (soil moisture) emerged as the top SHAP predictor in 2025 (r = 0.52), suggesting a shift in flood-generating mechanisms under climate change. A polarization pattern was observed: flood-affected area declined to 6.8% in 2025 (79% reduction from 2022), yet maximum flood point counts remained high at 14.0, indicating more concentrated but intense flooding. Under SSP projections, using the historical baseline (27.5%), SSP1-2.6 (45.2%) and SSP2-4.5 (45.0%) indicate increased flood risk relative to the historical baseline through 2040. The SSP5-8.5 projection (3.4%) is identified as a model extrapolation artifact through formal out-of-distribution assessment (Mahalanobis distance = 8.72, p < 0.001) and is therefore excluded from policy recommendations. Although GRU and LSTM achieved marginally higher AUC values in retrospective validation, we recommend XGBoost for operational forecasting due to its temporal stability, computational efficiency, and interpretability. We further recommend integrating real-time soil moisture monitoring into early warning systems and shifting to hotspot-targeted adaptation strategies. Full article

This study examined awareness, perceived benefits and risks, adoption barriers and future adoption potential for Augmented Wood among construction professionals in South East Nigeria. A quantitative dominant convergent mixed methods design combined a survey of 254 registered architects and engineers with 24 semi-structured interviews. Survey data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, one-sample t-tests, and ordinal logistic regression with 95% confidence intervals reported for all effect sizes. Interview data were analyzed thematically using Cohen’s kappa (κ = 0.81) for inter-rater reliability and integrated with the quantitative findings. Professional awareness was low, with an overall mean of 2.45 on a five-point scale. A one-sample test confirmed that awareness was significantly below the moderate benchmark of 3.00, t(253) = −9.04, p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = −0.57 (95% CI: −0.69, −0.45). Product unavailability, the absence of a regulatory framework and high procurement cost were the most severe barriers, with mean scores of 4.28, 4.17 and 4.11 respectively. Ordinal logistic regression revealed that architects showed greater willingness than engineers to recommend the material to clients (OR = 0.618, 95% CI: 0.444–0.861, p = 0.004), after controlling for years of experience and state of practice, although both groups reported strong readiness for training. Interview accounts explained the conditional nature of this interest, especially the need for local testing, demonstration projects, standards and accessible supply. The findings provide an evidence base for professional education, pilot projects, product certification and policy development in Nigeria and comparable markets. Full article

This study examines the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on unemployment in 90 developing countries over the period 2000 to 2024. Two assumptions of the FDI impact on unemployment are investigated: the positive externality effects, and the negative effect of both crowding-out of domestic firms and the displacement of local workers. The Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag ARDL approaches are employed to estimate the long-run and short-run coefficients in three models. The results indicate that all FDI types are associated with unemployment reduction in developing countries. The FDI flow has a high negative association with unemployment, indicating the presence of a strong positive externality of the FDI flow on host developing countries that contributes effectively to reducing unemployment. Moreover, the FDI stock per capita has a highly significant negative relationship with unemployment, consistence with the absence of dominant crowding-out and labor-displacement effects in the long run; therefore, the macroeconomic policies that attract FDI, productivity development of labor, and improvement of management methods are highly recommended in developing economies. Full article

Digital gatekeeping is increasingly performed by adaptive systems that rank, sequence, package, moderate, and sometimes generate news across repeated interactions. This conceptual analysis asks two questions: how should researchers analyze these systems, and who should be responsible for their effects over time? It brings together gatekeeping theory, research on recommender systems and performative prediction, and scholarship on algorithmic accountability, and it makes three contributions. First, it describes curation through six decision functions (source eligibility, agenda and candidate formation, content generation, packaging, exposure allocation, and moderation) connected by a feedback and optimization layer. Agentic curation is treated as a high-autonomy form of adaptive curation, defined by planning ability, authority to act, reach across functions, and delay before human review, rather than as a separate technology class. Second, it defines cumulative exposure allocation as the normalized distribution of weighted exposure across sources, topics, and population groups over time, and it proposes measures of concentration, breadth, repetition, persistence, and disparity. Third, it links each curation function to the actors who control it, the bodies that oversee it, the evidence they need, the standards they apply, and the remedies they can impose. European Union and United States law illustrate the framework. The analysis shifts evaluation away from isolated outputs and short-term engagement toward patterns of visibility produced by a policy over time, and it proposes testable claims about traceability, concentration, disparity, and constrained multi-objective ranking. Full article

The rapid expansion of intelligent technologies and digital transformation has intensified global debates regarding sustainability, ethical governance, industrial resilience, and human well-being within contemporary industrial systems. Industry 5.0 has emerged as a human-centred and sustainability-oriented framework that seeks to balance technological innovation with broader societal and environmental objectives. This paper critically examines the relationship between Industry 5.0, intelligent technologies, and human-centric sustainability in the digital age. The study adopts a conceptual and integrative literature review methodology grounded in an interpretivist research philosophy. The findings reveal that intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, blockchain, collaborative robotics, and digital twins have substantial potential to improve sustainability, resource efficiency, industrial resilience, and workforce empowerment when responsibly governed. The paper develops a Human-Centric Sustainability Framework for Industry 5.0 and recommends strengthening ethical governance, inclusive innovation, workforce reskilling, and sustainability-oriented policies to support resilient and human-centred industrial transformation. Full article

This study investigates how community engagement and outreach programs can serve as a vehicle for knowledge co-production between higher educational institutions (HEIs) and industry in developing economies. Despite growing calls for collaboration between HEIs and industry, the existing literature remains policy-driven and largely instrumental, offering a limited understanding of how engagement practices are socially constructed, negotiated, and experienced by diverse stakeholders. There is limited qualitative research on how community voices are integrated into co-creation processes and how these interactions shape sustainable development in emerging economies. The research methodology for the study was developed using the research onion, and an interpretivist research philosophy was adopted. The study employed an inductive research approach to explore actors’ lived experiences and the meanings attached to engagement practices and collected data through in-depth interviews. Participants in the study included representatives from HEIs, industry, and community stakeholders across selected sectors of the economy, and the data were analysed thematically to capture patterns of interactions, power relations, and knowledge and exchange processes underpinning co-production. The study revealed that effective community engagement goes beyond formal partnerships to encompass building lasting relationships which are characterised by trust, mutual learning, and context adaptation. Further, the study also showed that power asymmetries, institutional pressures, and resource constraints have restricted real co-production, resulting in symbolic rather than real engagement. Nevertheless, the use of inclusive and reflective approaches has been shown to foster locally acceptable and essential innovative interventions that can improve sustainable development. The study therefore recommends embedding participatory frameworks within HEIs and industry collaborations to strengthen institutional support for inclusive engagement and to reorient policies towards community-centred knowledge systems. This study, therefore, contributes to the body of knowledge by enhancing theoretical and practical understanding of sustainable higher education–industry collaboration in developing economies by promoting an understanding of engagement as a co-production process. Full article

An Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a legal obligation in Bangladesh for projects with substantial environmental and socio-economic impacts. Over time, Bangladesh has established sound policies, rules, and a growing workforce to support the EIA process. However, two key issues persist: the effectiveness of EIA reports and weak implementation of Environmental Management Plans (EMPs). In practice, implementing agencies often prioritize physical progress over environmental safeguards, treating the EIA as merely a clearance formality for Planning Commission approval. Regulatory bodies, such as the Department of Environment and the Planning Commission, frequently neglect the substantive review of EIA reports, focusing on checklist requirements rather than rigorous environmental scrutiny. This procedural mindset undermines the role of EIA as a strategic planning and decision-making tool. This study examines each step of the EIA process, from report preparation to EMP implementation, highlighting gaps that require sustainable improvements. A mixed-method approach was employed to evaluate the quality of the EIA process, with particular attention to its methodological rigor, accuracy of impact assessment, challenges in public participation, and the effectiveness of the proposed EMPs and their implementation. The recommendations presented in this study aim to enhance the efficiency of the EIA process and promote its application in similar contexts across developing countries. Full article

Sustainable hydrogen policy and national strategy documents are rich in qualitative information whose systematic evaluation still relies largely on subjective SWOT frameworks. This study proposes a reproducible hybrid methodology that couples expert-supervised Natural Language Processing (NLP) with a stochastic techno-economic model of the Levelized Cost of Hydrogen (LCOH) to convert policy discourse into quantitative, evidence-based recommendations. TF-IDF vectorization, K-Means clustering, Shannon entropy and Correspondence Analysis (CA) are applied to a manually annotated corpus of 107 sentences drawn from Türkiye’s national hydrogen strategy documents (Cohen’s κ = 0.81, substantial agreement). CA positions Regulation/Legislation and Financing near the Weakness quadrant, Renewable Resource Potential in the Strength quadrant, and Export/Demand Risk near Opportunity—revealing structural bottlenecks that challenge the sustainable energy transition. These qualitative findings are subjected to a quantitative consistency check via a Monte Carlo simulation (N = 10,000 iterations) propagating joint uncertainty in CAPEX, electricity price, electrolyzer efficiency, annual operating hours, discount rate and plant lifetime. The deterministic 2025 LCOH baseline of 4.89 €/kg H₂ carries a P10–P90 interval of [3.95; 5.92] €/kg. Global Sobol sensitivity analysis identifies electricity price as the dominant driver (S₁ ≈ 0.52), suggesting that financing is discursively surfaced by the textual layer. Under business-as-usual technological learning, the probability of reaching a globally competitive LCOH (≤2 €/kg H₂) by 2050 is only 17.8%; a stylized proactive policy intervention (carbon pricing + subsidies) raises this probability to 78.4%. The framework is adaptable to other countries and languages (though the current implementation is Turkish-specific), providing a scalable, open methodology for evidence-based sustainable clean energy planning. Full article

Under data-intensive and computation-intensive research paradigms, research data and software have become increasingly important scholarly outputs and key components of open science. The American Geophysical Union (AGU), a highly influential publisher in the Earth, space, and environmental sciences, has actively promoted policies and practices for data and software sharing. This study combines policy analysis with journal case studies to examine the evolution, major elements, and journal-level practices of the AGU’s data and software sharing policies. The findings show that the AGU has gradually expanded its policy focus from data sharing to integrated data and software sharing, establishing a policy framework centered on availability statements, data and software citation, and trusted repository recommendations. Evidence from the selected journal samples indicates that data availability statements have become common practice. In the sample, 98.2% of 227 articles from Earth and Space Science (ESS) and 96.4% of 503 articles from the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics (JGR: Space Physics) included data availability statements. In addition, software availability statements and formal citations to data and software have shown increasing visibility over time. The AGU’s policy framework suggests that scholarly publishers can promote data and software sharing by clarifying policy requirements, improving author guidance, standardizing citation practices, and strengthening infrastructure support. These findings provide practical guidance for scholarly publishers, especially Chinese scholarly publishers, to improve open science policies and strengthen the standardization of data and software sharing. Full article

Responsive architecture is increasingly understood as an adaptive socio-technical paradigm in which buildings respond to environmental conditions, user behavior, and safety-related events through integrated sensing, computation, and control. In parallel, fire-safety engineering is shifting from a predominantly prescriptive design toward performance-based, data-informed, and continuously monitored safety approaches. This study develops a conceptual framework for dynamic fire-safety systems (DFS) by combining a Scopus-based bibliometric analysis with a regulatory gap analysis. The bibliometric component is based on 116 Scopus-indexed sources published between 2019 and 2026 and analyzed using VOSviewer. Six DFS conceptual domains were derived deductively from established normative engineering sources prior to and independently of the Scopus search. The bibliometric analysis indicates an interpretive convergence between these domains and the emerging research clusters, understood as conceptual coherence rather than formal validation. The study also examines regulatory implications using Poland as an illustrative case of a predominantly prescriptive and document-based fire-safety framework. Six regulatory gaps were identified, with respect to adaptive systems, performance-based design pathways, BIM/data interoperability, cybersecurity, functional testing, and heritage-building equivalency. Based on these findings, the article proposes a staged reform pathway linking responsive architecture, digital building technologies, and fire-safety engineering with broader sustainability objectives related to resilient infrastructure and safer cities. The regulatory gap analysis is based on documentary sources and has not been independently validated by fire-safety professionals or regulatory authorities; therefore, the findings should be read as conceptual and exploratory rather than as practice-validated policy recommendations. Full article

Physical activity is an important determinant of sleep health; however, its relationship with sleep quality may differ depending on the domain in which it occurs. This study examined the differential associations of occupational physical activity (OPA) and total physical activity (TPA) with sleep quality among adults in the United Arab Emirates. Data were collected from 1310 adults (February–April 2024) using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire, the Occupational Sitting and Physical Activity Questionnaire, and the Sleep Quality Scale, in an analytical cross-sectional design. Higher TPA was associated with better sleep quality at the bivariate level (r = −0.104, p < 0.001) but not independently after adjustment (β = −0.042, p = 0.246); this null adjusted finding was sensitive to how skewness in the activity data was handled. Occupational sitting was associated with poorer sleep quality only at the bivariate level, whereas occupational heavy labor remained independently associated with better sleep quality after adjustment (β = −0.080, p = 0.022). Standing, walking, and the TPA × sitting interaction were not significant. These findings indicate that the physical activity–sleep quality association depends on domain and support promoting overall activity alongside attention to occupational demands; however, given the small effect sizes, cross-sectional design, and unmeasured confounders, these implications should be regarded as preliminary rather than a basis for policy recommendations. Full article

The transition to kindergarten is a critical developmental milestone within the broader continuum of early intervention and early childhood special education, particularly for children with disabilities who must navigate new instructional expectations, service changes, and social environments. This systematic review synthesized 12 peer-reviewed studies to examine parents’ perspectives on this process and the extent to which evidence-based transition practices are reflected in research and practice. Guided by PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) procedures and appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, the review identified seven themes: communication and collaboration, transition practices, parental concerns, inclusion priorities, formal and informal supports, transition programs, and implementation gaps. Parents consistently emphasized the importance of early and sustained communication, continuity of services, and culturally responsive engagement while also describing stress, inequities, and gaps in implementation that undermined confidence in schools. Findings further indicate that many practices valued by families align with established evidence-based and recommended practices; however, their implementation remains inconsistent across settings. Although high-intensity, individualized transition practices were valued, they were inconsistently available, and low-intensity events were viewed as insufficient. Emerging evidence on structured transition programs and family-focused interventions suggests promising, yet underutilized, approaches for improving child and family outcomes. Findings highlight that parents serve as central advocates, decision-makers, and partners, underscoring the need for relationship-based, equitable transition systems. Implications for research, practice, and policy include the need to strengthen implementation fidelity, expand access to evidence-based supports, and explore innovative approaches, including technology-enhanced strategies, to improve transition experiences. Future research should prioritize more inclusive and intersectional approaches and evaluate structured interventions that strengthen family–school collaboration. Full article

Women remain underrepresented in leadership positions in higher education institutions (HEIs) across the Gulf region despite sustained policy efforts to advance gender equity. This study examined how stakeholders perceive the relationship between gender diversity and inclusion policies and women’s leadership advancement at the University of Sharjah, UAE. Specifically, it investigated the association between perceived policy adequacy and leadership opportunities, explored how policies supported or hindered progression, and identified persistent barriers. A concurrent mixed-method cross-sectional design was employed. The study population comprised academic and administrative staff at the University of Sharjah, from whom 40 survey participants (29 women, 72.5%; 11 men, 27.5%) were invited, with all 40 completing the form, and eight were purposively selected for qualitative interviews (seven women and one man, spanning administrative, faculty, and leadership roles). Quantitative findings revealed a very strong positive correlation between perceived gender diversity policies and women’s leadership (r = 0.95, p < 0.001), with policies explaining 89.8% of the variance in leadership perceptions. However, qualitative data highlighted gaps between formal policy commitments and practice, linked to structural, managerial, and cultural constraints. The study recommends adopting gender-responsive, enforceable policies supported by accountability mechanisms, transparent promotion systems, and targeted leadership development initiatives to achieve sustainable and substantive progress. Full article