Argumentative activity has been found beneficial for construction of knowledge and evaluation of information in some conditions. Many theorists in CSCL and some empiricists have suggested that graphical representations may help in this endeavor. In the present study, we examine effects of type of ontology and of synchronicity in students that engage intuitively, without training, in e-discussio...

Recovery efforts after natural disasters typically focus on physical infrastructure. In general less attention is paid to the social infrastructure that might impact the capacity of the community to rebuild. We examine perceptions of preparedness and recovery (markers of resilience at the community level) in the wake of Superstorm Sandy with a novel data set that includes a multi-mode survey of...

The learners’ ability to write a well-organized argumentative essay has gained prominence within the last decades. The multiple intelligences play a significant role in enhancing the precision of both language and thought during the writing process. The current study aimed at investigating the possible relationship between linguistic and logical intelligences and the frequency of informal falla...

INTRODUCTION Intestinal schistosomiasis is widely distributed around Lake Victoria in Kenya where about 16 million people in 56 districts are at risk of the infection with over 9.1 million infected. Its existence in rural settings has been extensively studied compared to urban settings where there is limited information about the disease coupled with low level of awareness. This study therefore...

During its activity, an enterprise passes through different life cycle stages, which differ in terms of management systems, formal structures, control systems, documentation of transactions, and number of procedural hurdles. Therefore, our main research problem focused on the differences in informal and formal institutional measures of business ethics implementation. We used the case study rese...

Informal payments for health care are common in most former communist countries. This paper explores the demand side of these payments in Albania. Using tobit and Heckman selection models we control for individual determinants of informal payments in outpatient and inpatient health care. Propensity score matching techniques are used to investigate the changes in the characteristics of people pa...

The practices of health care in late modernity are informed by competing visions of the ideal human and the nature of care. Western societies typically characterise the ideal human as independent and self-reliant. The resultant welfare systems provide temporary havens away from the everyday, competitive spaces of capitalist societies, termed here the enclave model. Social scientists problematis...

This is a descriptive, interpretive and qualitative study carried out at the ICU of a Brazilian teaching hospital. It aimed to understand the dimensions of human caring experienced by health care professionals, clients and their family members at an ICU, based on human caring complexity. The Transpersonal Caring and Complexity theories support theory and data analysis. The following dimensions ...

This paper investigates the prevalence of incapacity in performing daily activities and the associations between household composition and availability of family members and receipt of care among older adults with functioning problems in Spain, England and the United States of America (USA). We examine how living arrangements, marital status, child availability, limitations in functioning abili...