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This paper presents a comprehensive review of existing literature concerning the domains of accreditation and quality assurance in various sectors. Accreditation and quality assurance play vital roles in ensuring the credibility, transparency, and effectiveness of educational institutions, healthcare facilities, industries, and other domains. This paper synthesizes the findings of numerous studies, focusing on the conceptual frameworks, methodologies, and outcomes associated with accreditation and quality assurance processes. The review encompasses a wide range of perspectives, including historical context, best practices, challenges, and advancements in accreditation and quality assurance. Through a systematic analysis of these scholarly works, this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of the evolving landscape of accreditation and quality assurance across diverse sectors and shed light on potential future research directions.

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An emerging consensus among scholars of Muslim political and social identity suggests that Western Muslims live out an anti-essentialist critique of identity construction. Considering this view, this paper examines a cross-national comparison of British Bangladeshis in London and Spanish Moroccans in Madrid that solicits the perceptions of working-class Muslim men. While the results indeed reaffirm respondents' concomitant relationships to a variety of identity paradigms, interview content demonstrates that subjects' multiplicity is complicated by their desire to meet – not reject – the essentialist standards of belonging to the identity paradigms discursively available to them. Rather than defiantly cherry-picking preferred characteristics of religion, ethnicity and nationality, individuals' responses suggest that they are trying to fulfil perceived standards of authenticity. Such a contention helps explain the prevalence of Western Muslims' expressed and well-documented ‘identity crisis’, suggests the enduring relevance of identity essentialisms, and more broadly, complicates post-modern conceptions of identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Violence against women (VaW) is a widespread crime and violation of the rights of women. It is present in every country without exception and crosses boundaries of culture, class, education, income, and race. Despite the magnitude of the literature and the abundance of publications on this problem, the field lacks a comprehensive and homogeneous way to measure and compare the extent of VaW across countries. Proper quantification of this problem is needed to develop preventive policies and strategies to reduce it. This article develops an index of VaW (VAWI) with global scope and multidimensional approach for 102 countries. It is an original index that calculates the total level of VaW by capturing information from the main VaW types (physical, sexual, psychological, and economic violence) in a single value between 0 and 1, where 0 denotes complete absence of violence and 1 the highest level of violence in a country. The proposed index is easy to compute and is comparable across countries. Our main results show that the nations with the highest levels of global VaW are Yemen, Senegal, Oman, Cameroon, and Uganda. The countries with the lowest levels are the Northern European Countries, Canada, and Malta. This VAWI makes a novel and important contribution to the study of gender issues. It can be used not only to monitor the statistics on VaW data within countries over time but also to make comparisons among countries. Further, it could be useful in designing new policy initiatives to reduce VaW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Active Aging Index (AAI) is a tool for detecting and tracking active aging in the older population. The proportion of the aging population is growing very fast, from 6.4% in 2020 to around 20.0% in 2041, in Bangladesh. But the country does not have a calculated AAI to know its active aging situation or to make a global comparison. Objective: The objective of the study was to calculate and compare AAI for Bangladesh with a European AAI approach. Method: Secondary analysis was conducted based on the data from Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), General Economic Division, Ministry of Planning, Department of Population Sciences, and the United Nations (UN) study to calculate the individual indicators of the four domains of AAI. Results: For Bangladesh, 15 out of 22 indicators of AAI were available from the analysis. The result of the study shows that the AAI value for Bangladesh is 30.1. Among the four domains of the AAI, the 'capacity and enabling environment' domain scored the best (59.9) and the participation domain scored the second highest (40.3). The score of the 'independent, healthy and secure living' domain was poor (28.2) and the score in the employment domain was very poor (3.3). Conclusion: Policy-makers should pay special attention immediately to improve each of the individual indicators of AAI for better active aging of the seniors. At the same time, policy-makers should focus on the immediate initiative for the generation of data for the missing 7 indicators for AAI. The study findings would be a basic reference case for Bangladesh to know the situation of active aging and what to do for the betterment of the upcoming huge number of seniors of the country and also possible to compare with other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]