Suchergebnisse

This study examines the role of leadership in the development of transportation infrastructure, specifically bridges, in the Indian state of Bihar during the 2000s. Drawing from interviews and quantitative data, we show that leadership was a critical factor in fostering institutional change in the state government's bridge organisation. Three leaders worked as a coalition to mobilise resources, enforce new rules of the game, and motivate staff; thereby transforming the organisation from a chronic under-provider of bridges to a more effective provider. Our study contributes to the emerging research about how the role of leadership shapes development outcomes in low-income countries.

PurposeWhat is happening in the perceived world of young people who have non-suicidal self-injury? The answer to this question explains many quantitative research findings in the field of NSSI. The current qualitative research design is Husserl's descriptive phenomenology.Design/methodology/approachThe participants included 17–29-year-old youths with self-injury and were selected with a targeted sampling approach and a conspicuous sampling method based on the theoretical saturation criterion of 21 people. Data were collected in a semi-structured interview and analyzed in the MAXQDA2022 software using the Attride-Stirling (2001) method. Validation of data was done by the method of simultaneous review of colleagues and simultaneous review of participants.FindingsThe themes emerging from the analysis of the findings are the three organizing themes of "vulnerable temperament" which includes height and head, high pain sensitivity threshold and desire for nothingness, "traumatic family" which includes disorganization, crisis and devaluation in the family and "developmental injuries" that are associated with physical, sexual and emotional abuse and neglect. The content of these themes seriously harms a person's self-perception through the emotions of fear, shame, anger and despair and is integrated into the overarching theme of "damaged self".Originality/value"Damaged Self" provides causal explanations related to the formation of self-injurious behaviors and these behaviors are in harmony with the damage that a person observes in his perception of himself.

Abstract
Background
A significant proportion of the global population is displaced, many being women. Qualitative studies can generate in-depth findings that will contribute to an understanding of their experiences, but there is a need for further synthetization efforts. The aim was to provide a comprehensive perspective about adult women's experiences of armed conflicts and forced migration, focusing on women in or from countries in the Middle East, Balkans, or Africa.

Methods
Systematic review of English reports presenting empirical qualitative studies published in scientific journals 1980 or later, utilizing searches performed in September 2021 within three databases combined with manual screening. Of the 3 800 records screened in total, 26 were included. Methodological details and quality were appraised using pre-specified extraction and appraisal tools. The findings within the included reports were analyzed with thematic analysis.

Results
Most reports utilized interviews, including in total 494 participants, and were appraised as having insignificant methodological limitations. The first theme concerns changed living conditions, involving reduced safety, insufficient access to resources meeting basic needs, forced migration as a last resort, and some positive effects. The second theme concerns the experienced health-related consequences, involving psychological distress, risks during pregnancy and childbirth, exposure to violence and discrimination as a woman, as well as a lack of adequate healthcare services and social support. The third theme concerns the resources and strategies that enhance resilience, involving social support and family life, as well as utilization of internal resources and strategies.

Conclusion
When experiencing armed conflicts and forced migration, women face significant challenges related to changed living conditions and are exposed to health-related consequences. Consistently, women are targets of severe structural and personal violence, while lacking access to even the most basic healthcare services. Despite facing considerable hardships, these women display extraordinary resilience and endurance by finding strength through social support and internal resources. Synthesized qualitative research illustrates that women value social support, including peer support, which is a promising intervention that needs to be evaluated in future experimental studies.

Multiple sclerosis (MS), as a progressive and degenerative illness, has an impact on different aspects of individual lives and may lead to difficulties, concerns, and worries in patients. The aim of the present study was to investigate concerns, worries and problems in patients with MS. We used a descriptive phenomenological qualitative approach. Participants were volunteers purposively selected based on their availability. We carried out deep interviews with 15 MS patients and analyzed the detailed information obtained from these interviews by using Colaizzi's method. We extracted six essential themes and thirty-four sub-themes associated with MS from the content of the interviews. The main themes were labelled "Confronting existential concerns," "Crisis of facing up with the illness," "Suffering from the illness," "Relationship," "Confrontation with spirituality and religion," "Searching for tranquility." Results of the present study also reiterated the following: Patients with MS seem to lose meaning of life and this together with problems in dealing with existential concerns, may lead to the "disintegration of self," hence resulting in considerable psychological disturbance and distress. It is concluded that the illness evokes psychological injury such as existential anxiety, relationship disturbance and hopelessness, and these psychological injuries can lead to relapsing of MS.

The aim of the present paper is two-fold: on the one hand, it looks into the patterns of communication between spouses amongst Iranian married couples; on the other hand, it attempts to devise and introduce a newly customized and culture-sensitive coding system to delineate modes of interaction between couples within Iranian families. The role of culture is, therefore, under scrutiny. In order to collect the required data and also examine the cultural impact on marital interaction between Iranian couples, videotapes of 31 distressed and non-distressed couples were coded based on the Iranian Couples Interaction Coding System (ICICS). This observational coding system is based on SPAFF. Moreover, all participants were requested to complete the Persian translation of the Marital Adjustment Test (MAT). Findings show that ICICS is a reliable and valid tool for the measurement of Iranian couples' interactions. Also, an analysis of marital interaction indicates that Iranian distressed couples are more likely to express their Family Contempt and Criticize each other's families (FCOCR) than their Western counterparts. In fact, results of the study highlight the importance of culture-bound mechanisms, especially the importance of family ties, in Iran. It seems that expressing contempt and criticizing each other's families are an indirect put-down technique employed by Iranian couples, indicating that the "family-of-origin" plays an important role in the couples' life cycle. Furthermore, non-distressed, well-adjusted couples were found more inclined towards demonstrating an increase in their positive feelings by using the first person plural pronoun "we" as a bonding glue in their relationships. Other significant culture-related differences found as a result of the present research include selfdegradation, verbal attempts to abort marriage and gender-bound rules regulating codes of conduct. The research, in agreement with other similar studies, clearly indicates that positive interaction is positively associated with relationship satisfaction, whereas turning against and turning away interaction types are negatively associated with it.

Abstract
Exposure to mycotoxins such as aflatoxins can endanger human health, especially infants and children. In this study, an attempt was made to retrieved studies related to the concentration of aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) and ochratoxin A (OTA). Search was performed in international databases such as Embase, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science for the period 1 January 2010 to 20 February 2023. Then, the pooled concentration in the defined subgroups was calculated using meta-analysis and the health risk assessment was conducted by margin of exposure (MOEs). Thirty-one scientific papers with 34 data reports (Sample size=2,277) were included in our study. The lowest and highest prevalence of AFM1 in cheese was related to El Salvador (12.18 %) and Serbia (100.00 %). The pooled prevalence of AFM1 was 49.85 %, 95 %CI (37.93–61.78 %). The lowest and highest prevalence of OTA in cheese was related to Türkiye (6.67 %) and Italy (44.21 %). The pooled prevalence of OTA was 35.64 %, 95 %CI (17.16–56.44 %). Health risk of AFM1 revealed that except Pakistan and Iran, MOE in the other countries was lower than 10,000 for adults and also except Pakistan, MOE for other countries was lower than 10,000 for children. Health risk of OTA revealed that except Greece, MOE in the other countries was higher than 10,000 for adults and also except Germany and Greece, MOE for other countries was higher than 10,000 for children. Therefore, it is recommended to conduct control plans to reduce the concentration of mycotoxins in cheese, especially AFM1.

Publisher Copyright: Author ; Recently, renewable energy sources (RESs) have increasingly being integrated into the power grids as a result of environmental and governmental perspectives. In this regard, the installation of RESs as potential power sources in active distribution systems would benefit the grid by decreasing the power losses, as well as addressing the fossil fuel shortages, and their environmental aspects. Nevertheless, the high-level integration of RESs as well as the development of distributed formations in local systems could challenge the reliable operation of the grid. In this context, conventional approaches could not optimally mitigate the regulation-voltage issue; therefore, utilities have to exploit the scheduling of local responsive sources to address the regulation-voltage issue in systems with high-level penetration of RESs. Consequently, the offered scheme in this paper enables the system operator to activate flexibility service from local responsive sources with the aim of addressing the regulation-voltage issue in the grid. Respectively, the system operator as the leader provides incentive control signals to ensure collaboration of the independent agents in voltage regulating procedure. Finally, the developed framework is applied on the 37-bus IEEE test network to investigate its application in mitigating the regulation-voltage issue in the active distribution systems with multi-agent formations. ; Peer reviewed

In environmental monitoring, the ability to obtain high-quality data across space and time is often limited by the cost of purchasing, deploying and maintaining a large collection of equipment, and the employment of personnel to perform these tasks. An ideal design for a monitoring campaign would be dense enough in time to capture short-range variation at each site, long enough in time to examine trends at each site and across all sites, and dense enough in space to allow modelling of the relationship between the means at each of the sites. This paper outlines a methodology for semiparametric spatiotemporal modelling of data that is dense in time but sparse in space, obtained from a split panel design, the most feasible approach to covering space and time with limited equipment. The data are hourly averaged particle number concentration (PNC) and were collected as part of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health's Ultrafine Particles from Traffic Emissions and Children's Health (UPTECH) project. The panel design comprises two weeks of continuous measurements taken at each of a number of government primary schools in the Brisbane Metropolitan Area, with each school visited sequentially. The school data are augmented by data from long-term monitoring stations at three locations in Brisbane, Australia. The temporal part of the model explains daily and weekly cycles in PNC at the schools. The temporal variation is modelled hierarchically with a penalised random walk term common to all sites and a similar term accounting for the remaining temporal trend at each site. The modelling of temporal trends requires an acknowledgement that the observations are correlated rather than independent. At each school and long-term monitoring site, peaks in PNC can be attributed to the morning and afternoon rush hour traffic and new particle formation events. The spatial component of the model describes the school-to-school variation in mean PNC at each school and within each school ground. The spatial term in the model is derived from a stochastic partial differential equation and approximates a Gaussian process with a Gaussian Markov Random field. Fitting the model helps describe spatial and temporal variability at a subset of the UPTECH schools and the long-term monitoring sites, which can be used to estimate the exposure of school children to ultrafine particles. Parameter estimates and their uncertainty are computed in a computationally efficient approximate Bayesian inference environment, R-INLA.