The benefits and challenges of conducting an overview of systematic reviews in public health: a focus on physical activity

Introduction The ultimate aim of Cochrane systematic reviews is to inform policy and practice decisions for better health outcomes. However, due to the increasing numbers of scientific publications, wading through the available evidence of both individual studies and systematic reviews can be challenging and overwhelming even for avid authors and readers. This paper briefly describes the first overview (a systematic review of reviews) of the Cochrane Public Health Group (CPHG) in development and proposes a way forward for the methodologies under consideration.

Customer journey and experience canvas

A need to respond to changing legislative requirements, rising expectations from customers and shortages of suitably experienced staff are forcing non-profit organisations in the aged care sector to change. As new customer segments emerge and the existing aged care offering becomes less relevant, organisations must rethink the value they present to market, and adopt innovative strategies and approaches to care delivery in order to have a sustainable future. This paper presents a framework for unpacking a customer journey and experience, developed during a longitudinal study of a non-profit organisation redefining their core purpose and attempting to design a customer-centric business model.

From valuing design to designing value

This paper presents findings of an embedded action research project within a small to medium sized enterprise (SME). Through the implementation of design-led innovation processes, this research aims to identify the changes experienced in the participating company during a shift in the perspective of design from a product focus towards a strategic focus. Staff interviews and a reflective journal were used as methods to collect data from a range of design interventions that were facilitated throughout the engagement. A shift in perspective of design was evident through three cultural changes within the firm. First, the perceived outcome focus of design became increasingly long-term. Second, the value of design outcomes became less directed towards current projects, and more directed towards future possibilities. Finally, the perceived tangibility of design outcomes shifted from tangible to intangible. For example, design activities which produced customer insights, rather than product features, became seen as beneficial to the firm. These three components are proposed as cultural stepping stones which describe how a company transitions from an exclusively product-focused perspective and utilisation of design towards design as a company based process. Implications of this research provide considerations for designers who are attempting to facilitate a similar transformation within a business in the future.

‘It's all scientific to me’ : focus group insights into why young people do not apply safe-sex knowledge

Despite rising levels of safe-sex knowledge in Australia, sexually transmitted infection notifications continue to increase. A culture-centred approach suggests it is useful in attempting to reach a target population first to understand their perspective on the issues. Twenty focus groups were conducted with 89 young people between the ages of 14 and 16 years. Key findings suggest that scientific information does not articulate closely with everyday practice, that young people get the message that sex is bad and they should not be preparing for it and that it is not appropriate to talk about sex. Understanding how young people think about these issues is particularly important because the focus groups also found that young people disengage from sources of information that do not match their own experiences.

Demand Response for Residential Appliances in a Smart Electricity Distribution Network: Utility and Customer Perspectives

This thesis introduces advanced Demand Response algorithms for residential appliances to provide benefits for both utility and customers. The algorithms are engaged in scheduling appliances appropriately in a critical peak day to alleviate network peak, adverse voltage conditions and wholesale price spikes also reducing the cost of residential energy consumption. Initially, a demand response technique via customer reward is proposed, where the utility controls appliances to achieve network improvement. Then, an improved real-time pricing scheme is introduced and customers are supported by energy management schedulers to actively participate in it. Finally, the demand response algorithm is improved to provide frequency regulation services.

Insight into the pain customer : how to improve the value proposition for community pharmacy

1. Shoppers Profiles- Are Grocery Shoppers any different to Pharmacy Shoppers? 2. Awaking the Sleeping Giants- Supermarkets push into OTC Medicines 3. Price versus Value for Money- What’s the Difference? Value and Perceived Quality 4. Consumer Decision Making Process- The Pharmacists ‘Trump’ Card

Online Customer Experience : What is the Experience and how is it Difference for Frequent and Infrequent Purchasers, Age Cohorts and Gender Groups?

What do we know? • Customer Experience is increasingly becoming the new standard for differentiation in both offline and online retailing, and offers a sustainable competitive advantage. o The economic value of a company’s offering has been observed to increase when the customer has a fulfilling shopping experience (Pine & Gilmore, 1998) o Crafting engaging and customer experience is a known method of generating loyalty, advocacy and word of mouth (Tynan & McKechnie, 2009). o A good experience can entice consumers to shop for longer and spend more (Kim, 2001). • The customer’s experience is made up of diverse elements occurring before, during and after the purchase itself. (Discussed further on page 5). It is cumulative over time and can be influenced by touch points across multiple channels. What remains unclear? • How do Coles customers respond to the elements of online customer experience? • How does the online customer experience differ for frequent and infrequent purchasers? • Do differences between genders and age cohorts for online customer experience exist?

Aspect-based opinion extraction from customer reviews

Text is the main method of communicating information in the digital age. Messages, blogs, news articles, reviews, and opinionated information abounds on the Internet. People commonly purchase products online and post their opinions about purchased items. This feedback is displayed publicly to assist others with their purchasing decisions, creating the need for a mechanism with which to extract and summarize useful information for enhancing the decision-making process. Our contribution is to improve the accuracy of extraction by combining different techniques from three major areas, named Data Mining, Natural Language Processing techniques and Ontologies. The proposed framework sequentially mines product’s aspects and users’ opinions, groups representative aspects by similarity, and generates an output summary. This paper focuses on the task of extracting product aspects and users’ opinions by extracting all possible aspects and opinions from reviews using natural language, ontology, and frequent “tag” sets. The proposed framework, when compared with an existing baseline model, yielded promising results.

The psychological and economic factors that influence energy consumption habits of low-income earners

Social marketers and governments have often targeted hard to reach or vulnerable groups (Gordon et al., 2006) such as young adults and low income earners. Past research has shown that low-income earners are often at risk of poor health outcomes and diminished lifestyle (Hampson et al., 2009; Scott et al., 2012). Young adults (aged 18 to 35) are in a transition phase of their life where lifestyle preferences are still being formed and are thus a useful target for long-term sustainable change. An area of focus for all levels of government is the use of energy with an aim to reduce consumption. There is little research to date that combines both of these groups and in particular in the context of household energy usage. Research into financially disadvantaged consumers is challenging the notion that that low income consumer purchasing and usage of products and services is based upon economic status (Sharma et al., 2012). Prior research shows higher income earners view items such as televisions and computers as necessities rather than non-essential (Karlsson et al., 2004). Consistent with this is growing evidence that low income earners purchase non-essential, energy intensive electronic appliances such as multiple big screen TV sets and additional refrigerators. With this in mind, there is a need for knowledge about how psychological and economic factors influence the energy consumption habits (e.g. appliances on standby power, leaving appliances turned on, running multiple devices at one time) of low income earners. Thus, our study sought to address the research question of: What are the factors that influence young adult low-income earners energy habits?

Regulatory focus moderates the relationship between task control and physiological and psychological markers of stress : a work simulation study

This experiment examined whether trait regulatory focus moderates the effects of task control on stress reactions during a demanding work simulation. Regulatory focus describes two ways in which individuals self-regulate toward desired goals: promotion and prevention. As highly promotion-focused individuals are oriented toward growth and challenge, it was expected that they would show better adaptation to demanding work under high task control. In contrast, as highly prevention-focused individuals are oriented toward safety and responsibility they were expected to show better adaptation under low task control. Participants (N = 110) completed a measure of trait regulatory focus and then three trials of a demanding inbox activity under either low, neutral, or high task control. Heart rate variability (HRV), affective reactions (anxiety & task dissatisfaction), and task performance were measured at each trial. As predicted, highly promotion-focused individuals found high (compared to neutral) task control stress-buffering for performance. Moreover, highly prevention-focused individuals found high (compared to low) task control stress-exacerbating for dissatisfaction. In addition, highly prevention-focused individuals found low task control stress-buffering for dissatisfaction, performance, and HRV. However, these effects of low task control for highly prevention-focused individuals depended on their promotion focus.

Dialogicality in Focus : Challenges to Theory, Method and Application

The phenomenon which dialogism addresses is human interaction. It enables us to conceptualise human interaction as intersubjective, symbolic, cultural, transformative and conflictual, in short, as complex. The complexity of human interaction is evident in all domains of human life, for example, in therapy, education, health intervention, communication, and coordination at all levels. A dialogical approach starts by acknowledging that the social world is perspectival, that people and groups inhabit different social realities. This book stands apart from the proliferation of recent books on dialogism, because rather than applying dialogism to this or that domain, the present volume focuses on dialogicality itself to interrogate the concepts and methods which are taken for granted in the burgeoning literature.

Can we do better? Researchers' experiences with ethical review boards on projects with later life as a focus

The goal of this study was to describe researchers' experiences in submitting ethical proposals focused on older adult populations, including studies with persons with dementia, to ethical review boards. Ethical approval was granted for an online survey. Researchers were recruited via listservs and snowballing techniques. Participants included 157 persons (73% female) from Australia and the United States, with a mean age of 46 (±13). Six main issues were encountered by researchers who participated in this survey. In descending order, these included questions regarding: informed consent and information requirements (61.1%), participants' vulnerability, particularly for those with cognitive impairments (58.6%), participant burden (44.6%), data access (29.3%), adverse effects of data collection/intervention (26.8%), and study methodology (25.5%). An inductive content analysis of responses revealed a range of encounters with ethical review panels spanning positive, negative, and neutral experiences. Concerns voiced about ethical review boards included committees being overly focused on legal risk, as well as not always hearing the voice of older research participants, both potential and actual. Respondents noted inability to move forward on studies, as well as loss of researchers and participant groups from gerontological and clinical research as a result of negative interactions with ethics committees. Positive interactions with the committees reinforced researchers' need to carefully construct their research approaches with persons with dementia in particular. Suggested guidelines for committees when dealing with ethics applications involving older adults include self-reflecting on potential biases and stereotypes, and seeking further clarification and information from gerontological researchers before arriving at decisions.

Festival focus : Brisbane International Film Festival

In 2012, the Brisbane International Film Festival officially came of age, celebrating its twenty-first birthday. The festival has emerged from a tumultuous adolescence and redefined its position on the Australian festival circuit as an advocate of locally made films and documentary filmmaking in particular. Brisbane’s International Film Festival opened in 1992 and has since been attended by more than 400,000 filmgoers. The festival is held annually and showcases a diverse range of feature films, documentaries, short films, animation and experimental work, children’s films and retrospectives.

A framework for qualitative analysis of focus group data in information systems

Focus groups are a popular qualitative research method for information systems researchers. However, compared with the abundance of research articles and handbooks on planning and conducting focus groups, surprisingly, there is little research on how to analyse focus group data. Moreover, those few articles that specifically address focus group analysis are all in fields other than information systems, and offer little specific guidance for information systems researchers. Further, even the studies that exist in other fields do not provide a systematic and integrated procedure to analyse both focus group ‘content’ and ‘interaction’ data. As the focus group is a valuable method to answer the research questions of many IS studies (in the business, government and society contexts), we believe that more attention should be paid to this method in the IS research. This paper offers a systematic and integrated procedure for qualitative focus group data analysis in information systems research.

The Threshold Learning Outcome on self-management for the Bachelor of Laws degree : a proposed focus for teaching strategies in the first year law curriculum

The Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Discipline Scholars for Law, Professors Sally Kift and Mark Israel, articulated six Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) for the Bachelor of Laws degree as part of the ALTC’s 2010 project on Learning and Teaching Academic Standards. One of these TLOs promotes the learning, teaching and assessment of self-management skills in Australian law schools. This paper explores the concept of self-management and how it can be relevantly applied in the first year of legal education. Recent literature from the United States (US) and Australia provides insights into the types of issues facing law students, as well as potential antidotes to these problems. Based on these findings, I argue that designing a pedagogical framework for the first year law curriculum that promotes students’ connection with their intrinsic interests, values, motivations and purposes will facilitate student success in terms of their personal well-being, ethical dispositions and academic engagement.