Psychological capabilities for salespeople's sustainable work performance in financial services sector

The present study investigated the importance of psychological capabilities to support financial product salespeople in overcoming challenges and sustaining motivation and work performance during and after COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, this study suggests useful ways to develop the psychological capabilities. By using an interpretive phenomenological approach as the methodology, twenty financial product salespeople have been interviewed. The findings reveal that positive mindset, belief-in-oneself and not-giving-up are crucial psychological capabilities for salespeople's sustainable work performance. These psychological capabilities match with the elements in the Psychological Capital Model. Positive mindset is associated with hope and optimism;belief-in-oneself is associated with self-efficacy, and not-giving-up is associated with resilience. The study also found approaches that help develop these psychological elements, including being proactive in seeking help and guidance, setting personal goal, and continuous learning. The findings contribute to the financial services and sales literature by providing a better understanding of how psychological capabilities help motivate financial product salespeople toward positive and sustainable work outcomes, and the ways to develop the psychological capabilities. © 2023, The Author(s).

Promoting preservice teachers? psychological and pedagogical competencies for online learning and teaching: The TEAC H. program

During the widespread COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face teaching was not viable because many schools were forced to close as a preventive measure. Educators abruptly shifted to online classes without sufficient time and resources to prepare for such an enormous transition. Although shifting from traditional face-to-face format to modern e-learning approach ensured that students could be educated outside of the classroom, its impact on the quality of learning and teaching (L&T) can be mixed. This study aims to address the knowledge gap in conventional teacher training by developing a web-based program called T.E.A.C.H. to enhance preservice teachers' psychological and pedagogical competencies for conducting online L&T. The program consisted of five modules, each focused on one dimension of psychological competence (creativity, curiosity, love of learning, judgment, and perspective) and applied to the 'three foci' for online L&T (attendance and participation, engagement, and assessment). Adopting a quasi-experimental design with matched sampling, a total of 314 preservice teachers were allocated into the intervention or control group. The intervention group was given access to the web-based program to receive training materials, learn about the content, and take part in the online L&T exercises. Program effectiveness was evaluated using pretest and posttest questionnaires, a teaching design task, short quizzes, and a program quality assessment. The results showed that the T.E.A.C.H. program was effective in promoting preservice teachers' psychological competencies, positive attitudes toward online L&T, self-efficacy to teach in an online format, intentions to use technology for L&T, and online pedagogical skills. The successful implementation of T.E.A.C.H. encourages school leaders, teachers, and teacher professional development providers to utilize this web-based program to enhance online teaching practices.

Facial Dog Bite in the Era of Covid

Aim: Dog bite is not uncommon in Hong Kong. Though rarely fatal, dog bite wounds can cause significant morbidity if not managed in a timely manner. This study aims to review the pattern of facial dog bite wounds before and during the COVID pandemic. Method(s): Admissions to Tuen Mun Hospital with diagnosis of dog bite from 2018 to 2021 inclusive were reviewed. Patient demographics, treatments and outcome were documented. With 1/1/2020 as a cut off, patients' are divided into the pre-COVID (A) and COVID (B) pandemic group. Result(s): 10% of the 338 admissions for dog bite resulted in facial wounds. 23% of victims were under 18. 91% of the culprit were vaccinated domestic dogs. Most common locations involved were the lip and cheek. None required reconstruction. There were 19 and 15 cases in A & B with no significant differences in patient demographics. Mean time from incident to AED is delayed in B by 30 min but the difference is not significant. 84% in A and all in B had wound irrigation and suturing after transferral to surgical wards, resulting in an insignificant mean delay of 9-11 h. 3 cases of post-operative wound infection (1 in A, 2 in B) were identified, with an average of 15 h gap from incident to documented wound irrigation. Conclusion(s): Prevalence of post-operative wound infection is higher in the pandemic group even though the overall incidence is low. Initiation of wound irrigation as early as presentation to AED is recommended to minimise risk of wound infection.

MENTAL HEALTH CHALLENGES OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: THE CASE OF BRUNEI DARUSSALAM

This paper offers insight into the mental health challenges encountered by migrant domestic workers (MDWs) during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brunei Darussalam. Data collected in one-to-one interviews evaluate their oral stories using various mental health linguistic codes. A preliminary study addresses initial signs of anxiety and other mental health issues that a segment of the migrant worker community has confronted due to employment conditions, structural restrictions, and a lack of access to mental health resources. A pilot study focuses on three narratives that pave the way for further studies into the causes, structures, and solutions around the lived experiences of crisis and control in a global pandemic. © Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2022.

Association between awareness of vulnerability and disaster preparedness in an infrastructure-resilient city: a population-based study.

OBJECTIVES: Factors associated with an individual's awareness of vulnerability can be modified by the infrastructure of a city. These factors may impact disaster preparedness among local populations in an infrastructure-resilient city, which further influences the health risks of various population subgroups. STUDY DESIGN: This was a population-based study. METHODS: Four population subgroups, which have previously been reported to be related to awareness of vulnerability (i.e. past experiences, sociodemographic deprivation, poor housing conditions and family medical needs), were analysed for their impacts on disaster preparedness. Validated population-based phone interviews (n = 856) were conducted in Hong Kong. Three types of disaster preparedness were studied: (1) physical preparedness; (2) social preparedness; and (3) education preparedness. RESULTS: Previous experience of social hazards, accidental hazards and epidemics increased disaster preparedness among the local population. Specifically, experiences of accidental hazards and social hazards were positively associated with physical preparedness (odds ratios 1.626, 95% confidence interval [95% CI] 1.215, 2.172) and 1.501 [95% CI 1.114, 2.024], respectively). However, experiences of natural hazards did not increase preparedness, even in Hong Kong, which is a city with high 'disaster resilience' because of its well-developed infrastructure. Moreover, individuals with a low educational level or low income had lower education preparedness, unmarried individuals had lower social preparedness, and poor housing conditions of non-private-housing households had negative associations with education preparedness. These findings partially align with local disaster responses to the 2018 Typhoon Mangkhut, the 2019 social unrest and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, all of which were observed after the 2018 survey reported in this study. CONCLUSIONS: Social and environmental interventions should be targeted to marginalised subpopulations through location-based community strategies to encourage increased environmental knowledge and participation in disaster preparedness activities.

Survival strategies of the sharing economy from the pandemic to a new normal: A dynamic capabilities approach

This paper explores the business strategies of car-sharing platforms between 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study conducted a systematic review and adopted a dynamic capabilities approach;it analyzes 231 online articles concerning Uber, Ola, and Grab to demonstrate 6S sub-constructs: SAFETY, SCAN, SYSTEM, SUPPORT, SPREAD, and SPEED. The findings suggest that developing safe riding experiences, identifying threats through technology, realigning culture/structure through financial/community support, and expanding delivery services are necessary strategies to combat the pandemic. The new normal has managerial and policy implications on how businesses in the sharing economy sector adapt to radical and dynamic environments. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Influence of COVID-19 outbreak on changing buying behaviors: Chinese consumer's growing concerns over food safety

The outbreak of COVID-19 in China has caused Chinese consumers to question the hidden danger of food safety after their experience with previous epidemics like SARS, H1N1, and swine flu. It is feared that the virus could spread from animal to human, similar to avian and swine influenza. They are also concerned that food purchased from supermarkets and farmer's markets could be infected due to improper control measures. This study reviews the potential impact of the COVID- 19 pandemic on Chinese consumers' growing health, ethical, and food safety concerns, which could influence their purchasing attitudes and intention to buy food. The implications of this research are to suggest to marketers the long- term behavioral and attitude shifts we could witness from the COVID- 19 pandemic is a primary concern that needs to be given attention. In order to study the effects of COVID-19 on consumers' attitudes, an online questionnaire was administered in this study. Participants are Chinese consumers from different areas who have different ages and educational backgrounds. This study applies regression analysis to figure out the relationships between the independent variables and dependent variables. The results show that, during the pandemic of COVID- 19, food safety concerns and health consciousness changed the purchasing behaviors of Chinese consumers. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2021. All rights reserved.

Exploring young people's online food shopping behavior during the COVID-19 epidemic in China

The sudden escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic contributes to Chinese young people's online food shopping behavior changes. Because of the government decree restricting going out and further outbreaks of COVID-19, young people select e-shopping, which offers contactless payments and delivery, to avoid risks. Furthermore, young people prefer to purchase food such as snacks or raw materials online to get rid of boredom. With the occurrence of COVID- 19, this chapter aims to explore Chinese young customers' online food shopping behavior, including types of products, the quantity of products, frequency of purchases by using food delivery apps during this time. Considering Information Quality, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), and UTAUT 2, eight main variables, including information quality, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, price value, and habit, are used to indicate customers' continuous intention of applying takeaway delivery apps as mediums. Based on the 203 survey results, the Chinese young people's online food shopping behavior using food delivery apps has been examined. The findings provide practical cases for the e-commerce and catering industry to predict or prepare emergency plans. It can primarily reduce the reaction time and can have a specific prevention ability to solve force majeure, such as coronavirus diseases. This research can help to reduce the loss of the e- commerce and catering industry, especially food retailers, by understanding customers' online purchasing behavior during epidemic diseases. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2021. All rights reserved.

Transformative Collaborations: How a Motherscholar Research Collective Survived and Thrived during COVID-19

The COVID-19 global pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated existing gender-based inequities in the workforce. A research collective developed by academic mothers with young children ("motherscholars") emerged as a solution to address some of the constraints particularly faced by mothers in academia. The Motherscholar Collective was formed to research the effects of the pandemic on the work and personal lives of academic mothers with young children. Focus group interviews of participants explored how the Motherscholar Collective has provided relief from the sources of threat generated and amplified by the pandemic. Findings showed that participation in the Collective was transformative. Key themes, including flexibility, collaboration, validation, and empowerment, reflect how the Collective contributed to motherscholars' sense of authenticity as scholars by facilitating a harmonious integration of their professional and personal identities. The resulting implications for academic workplaces suggest opportunities for institutional improvement toward the end of transformational empowerment for motherscholars in academia. © 2021 Hogrefe Publishing.

Using focus group interviews to investigate the willingness of medical personnel to voluntarily participate in COVID-19 group tasks in a one government quarantine facility in north Taiwan

Objectives: The Taiwan Centers for Disease Control have established government quarantine facilities (GQF) to prevent the community spread of COVID-19. Medical personnel are frontline workers who must have contact with individuals in quarantine and are thus at higher risk of infection. As a reference for future recruitment, this study investigated why some medical personnel volunteer to care for individuals in GQF. Methods: The researchers used purposive sampling to recruit participants from a GQF in northern Taiwan. Focus group interviews were administered. The consistency of the interview outline content was 91%. After the interviews, content analysis was performed to examine and summarize the data. The data were coded before comparison, categorization and summarization, producing various core categories. Results: A total of 12 participants voluntarily attended our interviews, compromising 4 men and 8 women, with an average age of 48.1 ±6.4 years and an average length of service in GQF of 82.1 ± 77.1 days. Our study results revealed four aspects and six reasons that affect the voluntary participation of medical personnel in epidemic prevention tasks. The first aspect was meeting safety needs, and the reasons included sufficient personal protective equipment, complete standard operating procedures, and orientation training and in-service education and training. The second aspect was meeting the needs of love and belonging, and the reason included a good working atmosphere. The third aspect was meeting the need for self-esteem, and the reason included Taiwan's previous SARS epidemic prevention experience. Finally, the fourth aspect was meeting the need for selfrealization, and the reason was based on the humanistic concern. Conclusions: At the time of the coronavirus outbreak, various countries reported insufficient medical personnel or personnel unwilling to participate in epidemic prevention work. Our results revealed that if the environment met the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it can attract medical personnel to volunteer in GQF tasks. In formulating policies, the needs must be met at all levels, so that medical staff would be willing to participate in epidemic prevention work. © 2021 Chinese Public Health Association of Taiwan. All rights reserved.

Successful features of crowdfunding campaigns: An analysis of requests for Coronavirus food relief

Crowdfunding is an emerging industry in the past decades, which proliferates and has attracted an enormous population from the public to be involved in various funding projects in multiple fields such as business entrepreneurship, healthcare, and fintech. Meanwhile, charitable crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter have allowed internet users to provide help and donation to the fundraisers directly. As the year 2020 is surrounded by the COVID-19 global pandemic spreading out the world, the topic of coronavirus relief has surged. Thus, it is worthy of evaluating the crowdfunding campaign's effectiveness during the coronavirus context by making a connection between fundraising activities and coronavirus relief. This paper aims to investigate the effects of various factors affecting a donation-based crowdfunding campaign for coronavirus relief of food donation in the United States and determine the significant factors affecting the campaign's success rate. To achieve this research purpose, secondary data were extensively collected from the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe for regression analysis. The sample data was derived from crowdfunding campaigns launched from March 1st, 2020, to May 31st, 2020. During this period, the United States was severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with an exponentially surged number of confirmed cases. This paper derives the independent variables that have been examined from previous studies and further applies in the coronavirus context to identify whether these factors are significant influencers to the success of crowdfunding campaigns for coronavirus relief of food donation. The factors being examined include target funding amount, the existence of spelling mistakes, the presence of pictures, video, social network sites, project updates, comments between fundraisers and backers, and links to external websites. That the significant factors contributing to a successful funding project are similar, as identified in previous reward-based and equity crowdfunding studies. On the other hand, several independent variables' effectiveness varied between the normal scenario and the coronavirus context, as such variables demonstrate a much compelling role to attract donors for the coronavirus relief activations. The analysis is valuable and worthy of different viewpoints. First, understanding the donor's motivation and the success features of funding projects is valuable for fundraisers to have a strategic mindset for decision-making criteria when initiating funding projects to attract more donors and the amount of money. Second, because of the lack of literature focusing on examining the success features for donation-based crowdfunding campaigns, this study fills the gap and further focus on the crowdfunding activations in the context of coronavirus food relief in the US. Therefore, this study provides significant insight to understand the dynamics of the donation-based crowdfunding campaign and provides a recommendation to develop coronavirus relief more efficiently. © 2020 International Consortium for Electronic Business. All rights reserved.

A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor's appointment

Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment (N = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findings suggest that text messages sent prior to a primary care visit can boost vaccination rates by an average of 5%. Overall, interventions performed better when they were 1) framed as reminders to get flu shots that were already reserved for the patient and 2) congruent with the sort of communications patients expected to receive from their healthcare provider (i.e., not surprising, casual, or interactive). The best-performing intervention in our study reminded patients twice to get their flu shot at their upcoming doctor's appointment and indicated it was reserved for them. This successful script could be used as a template for campaigns to encourage the adoption of life-saving vaccines, including against COVID-19.

ORAL LESIONS IN A PATIENT WITH HYPER IMMUNOGLOBULIN M: DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS AND MANAGEMENT

Introduction: Hyper immunoglobulin M (HIGM) syndromes are a group of rare inherited disorders characterized by deficiencies in immunoglobulin class switch recombination (CSR). Patients with HIGM are predisposed to infectious, autoimmune, inflammatory, and malignant complications. We describe a case of a 21-year-old male with HIGM presenting with fever and severe oral ulcers. Case Description: A 21-year-old male with HIGM due to a CD40L mutation on immunoglobulin therapy was admitted for 4-week history of painful erosive oral lesions, sore throat, and fever. He had deep ulcers on his hard palate, tonsils, and tongue that worsened despite treatment with valacyclovir and azithromycin as an outpatient. Neutrophil counts were normal. Blood and respiratory cultures were negative;one out of two throat fungal cultures showed Candida albicans. Biopsy of the ulcers was negative for fungal elements and HSV. COVID-19 PCR was negative, but COVID-19 IgM to the receptor-binding domain was positive (1:80). IgG was negative, which was expected with HIGM. The patient was treated with acyclovir, fluconazole, ceftriaxone, and metronidazole while undergoing infectious work-up. He continued to have fevers with no improvement in stomatitis. After adding prednisone, his ulcers and fever quickly resolved. Discussion: This remains an unclear case of chronic fevers and severe oral ulcers in a patient with HIGM. Candida albicans was unlikely to be the cause. Surprisingly, COVID-19 IgM was positive, suggesting that an infection had occurred. Mucosal involvement has been increasingly reported with COVID-19, and lesions may be more severe in patients with primary immunodeficiency. Steroids may be an effective therapy once other infections are excluded. [Formula presented]

COVID-19 pandemic: adaptation and psychometric assessment of the Face Mask Use Scale

Objective:To culturally adapt the Face Mask Use Scale to Brazilian Portuguese and assess its psychometric properties. Methods: This is a methodological, cross-sectional, quantitative study, which comprised the following steps: translation;Portuguese version consensus;assessment by an expert committee;back-translation and comparison with the original version;pilot test;and psychometric assessment of the Face Mask Use Scale (FMUS). Results: The original version of FMUS was translated into Brazilian Portuguese. Content validity was performed by a panel of five experts.The Content Validity Index for the scale (CVI-S/Ave) was 0.87 and for the items (CVI-I) it ranged from 0.6 to 1.0. The FMUS - Brazilian Portuguese version (FMUS-BP) was applied to 4822 adults with a mean age of 30 years (SD = 11.7).For internal consistency, Cronbach's alpha was 0.86. The original two-factor model of the FMUS was not suitable for the Brazilian population due to the use of Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Thus, an Exploratory Factor Analysis was carried out to investigate the factor structure of the FMUS-BP again and a new potential model of the FMUS-BP for better explanation. The FMUS-BP presented a factor structure different from the original model. Items were aligned on a single factor, creating a one-dimensional instrument that explained 59.7% of the total variance. Construct validity by known-groups was satisfactory (p <0.001). Conclusion: The FMUS-BP is reliable and valid to measure the practice of using masks among the Brazilian population, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic.