Search

• Paro can act as a comfort Buddy, relieving emotional distress for older adults. • Paro has the potential to form social bonds and increase interactivity for older adults. • Older adults might encounter unexpected, sometimes even frustrating, experiences when they interact with Paro. This study aimed to explore meaningful experiences of older Taiwanese adults who had received a Paro (social robot) companion. Semi-structured qualitative interviews elicited the perspectives of 25 older adults living in a long-term care facility after they had interacted with an individual Paro companion for 8 weeks. Thematic analysis was used in this study as it allows for rich, detailed, and complex descriptions of qualitative data. Analysis identified four themes: Bridging my social bonds; Acting as a comfort Buddy; Relieving my emotional distress ; and Encountering Paro with distancing. Although Paro's functioning has some limits, such as lacking speech, most participants expressed that the experience was positive. These findings revealed that the meaningful experiences expressed by participants at the end of the intervention with Paro might provide the value of companionship and improve interpersonal relationships for older adults in geriatric nursing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on 2015 annual report of foreign spouse populations were above 507,266 people in Taiwan. Most of them (68%) came from Mainland China, 29% from south-east Asia. 92% of foreign spouses were female (2015). Therefore, a challenge arises for nursing students to provide care to clients with multiple cultural variations in Taiwan. The study objectives were to explore the related factors of cultural care competence and estimate the effects of a short-term reinforced cultural course. The study used a quasi-experimental design. All participants were investigated to measure that changed in cultural competence before and after the community practice period. Of 95 participants, 46 experimental group students engaged with 3 times workshops. The study was conducted from May to August in 2015 at Southern Taiwan. The study results showed a significantly improvement of transcultural nursing competence from comparing control group with experimental group by ANCOVA analysis ( p  < .05). The study approved that the cultural workshop along with the community health nursing practice curriculum might develop students' transcultural nursing competence. In the future, in order to providing cultural sensitively care, a sustained transcultural curriculum should be advocated at Nursing schools in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being the frontline operators in the airline industry, flight attendants constantly obtain and collect first-hand information from their interactions with passengers and other crew members. Their experiences and observations may contribute greatly to airlines' safety management and policy making. It is thus critical to learn how to enhance cabin crews' voice behavior, particularly communicating safety related issues upward through specific leadership styles. The current research aims at the flight attendants working for Taiwanese international airlines. The cabin crew department managers' paternalistic leadership style is adopted to observe how it may trigger cabin crews' different types of voice behavior. This research addresses the following two major questions: 1. What is the motivation for cabin crew to conduct upward safety communication? 2. How does department managers' paternalistic leadership style impact cabin crew's voice behavior? Regression analysis is used to analyze the empirical data collected by the questionnaire survey. The results are applied to provide airlines with practical references for constituting human resource management policies, and the findings also enhance existing literature regarding management applications and employees voice behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Cabin crews are crucial to the cabin safety performance of airlines, and may enhance air travel safety and alleviate passenger concerns. Within the limited literature devoted to cabin crew related research, this study aims to examine the causal relationships among “job demands”, “job resources” and cabin crew safety behaviors. Data from a survey of 339 flight attendants working for Taiwanese international airlines were analyzed using structural equation modeling. A variety of fit indices confirmed the overall model fit, and all the paths in the model were statistically significant. Framed in the context of the job demands-resources model, the results reveal negative causality between “job demands” and “cabin crew safety behaviors”, whereas “job resources” are positively related to “upward safety communication”, “in-role” and “extra-role” safety behaviors. The implications of the results for practitioners and future research are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] This paper examines the effects of organizational, group and individual aspects factors on pilots’ safety behaviors. [•] The direct and indirect effects of selected predictors on pilots’ safety behaviors are confirmed. [•] Safety motivation plays an essential role as a mediator between the selected predictors and pilots’ safety behaviors. [•] The managerial implications for both human resource management and enhanced airline safety are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The airline industry relies on the implementation of Safety Management System (SMS) to integrate safety policies and augment safety performance at both organizational and individual levels. Although there are various degrees of SMS implementation in practice, a comprehensive scale measuring the essential dimensions of SMS is still lacking. This paper thus aims to develop an SMS measurement scale from the perspective of aviation experts and airline managers to evaluate the performance of company''s safety management system, by adopting three-stage scale development procedure. The results reveal a five-factor structure consisting of 23 items. The five factors include documentation and commands, safety promotion and training, executive management commitment, emergency preparedness and response plan and safety management policy. The implications of this SMS evaluation scale for practitioners and future research are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Air technicians carry out critical responsibilities in aircraft maintenance. Their safety behavior is significantly and directly related to overall aviation safety performance. However, to date, only a limited number of studies have been devoted to discussion of air technician safety behavior issues. To gain an understanding of the related topics, in the current paper, Bagozzi's (1992) reformulation of attitude theory is applied to form a dualistic model identifying two types of stressors (i.e. challenge and hindrance) as the appraisal variables, and two types of job passion (i.e. obsessive and harmonious) as the emotional response variables. Air technician safety compliance and safety participation behavior are the targeted behavioral outcomes. A survey questionnaire is designed and distributed to collect data from Taiwanese maintenance technicians working for five national airlines. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to examine the hypothesized model. The results indicate that while the challenge stressor exerts more positive effects on harmonious job passion than on obsessive job passion, the hindrance stressor shows more negative effects on harmonious job passion than it does on obsessive job passion. Meanwhile, obsessive passion significantly and negatively affects air technician safety compliance and safety participation behavior. Harmonious passion, on the other hand, significantly enhances both types of safety behavior. The detailed discussion and implications of the findings are provided to serve as practical references for airlines when they are developing human resource management policies intended to enhance safety behavior on the part of maintenance crews. The research results will also be beneficial in terms of enriching the literature related to organizational safety behavior by offering the empirical evidence. • This paper applies reformulation of attitude theory to construct a dualistic model for considering the development of air technician safety behavior. • While challenge stressor exerts more positive effects on harmonious job passion than on obsessive job passion, hindrance stressor shows more negative effects on harmonious job passion than it does on obsessive job passion. • While obsessive passion significantly and negatively affects air technician safety compliance and safety participation behavior, harmonious passion significantly enhances both types of safety behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the outcomes of using the World Café method for promoting discussion among stakeholders on strategies for managing river patrol teams. The discussion topics included (1) strategies for integrating the resources of river patrol teams, (2) designing activities for stimulating river patrol team synergy, and (3) promoting strategies for pollution reporting. Twenty-three participants were categorized into three stakeholder groups, namely officials from environmental protection authorities, contractors' personnel responsible for managing the river patrol teams, and river patrol team members. The meeting offered participants the opportunity to express their opinions and concerns about the management strategy of river patrol teams in Taiwan. Through statistical analysis of the frequency and duration of opinion sharing of the participants, the average number of the statements proposed by participating officials, contractors' personnel, and river patrol team member were 4.1, 2.0, and 2.8, respectively, and the ratios of opinion sharing duration to the total discussion time for the discussed topics (mean ± standard deviation) were 27.2 ± 17.1%, 13.1 ± 10.8%, and 18.5 ± 10.1%, respectively. The statement number and opinion-sharing time ratio were analyzed using Kruskal–Wallis ANOVA, and the results showed that the opinion-sharing by the river patrol team members were not significantly different from those of the other two stakeholder groups. In addition, the opinion-sharing by officials was more favorable than that of the contractors' personnel, reflecting the general characteristics of the traditional top-down river patrol team management strategy. The results from the discussion on these three topics were summarized as follows: (1) the river patrol teams should be encouraged and assisted to integrate diverse public and private sector resources and to seek support from non-profit organizations and environmentally friendly enterprises; (2) the activities for river patrol team management should be designed according to the composition and characteristics of the team members of interest, and education and training curricula should be diversified and lively with practical exercises and constructive discussion; and (3) most people are used to reporting environmental problems to local officials or organization leaders, indicating that local environmental protection bureaus should collaborate with river patrol team leaders and community heads to gain an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of local environmental pollution. The results from this study showed that the World Café meeting facilitated diverse communication, which enabled the participants to interact with one another effectively, and to engage their own creativity and perspectives on forming solutions and strategies for the discussed topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The majority of the biodegradable polymers in clinical use are composed of stiff materials that exhibit limited extendibility with unsuitably high Young’s modulus and low elongation at break values that make them non-optimal for various biomedical applications. Polylactide (PLA) is often used as a biomedical material because it is biodegradable, but the physical and mechanical properties of PLA need to be improved for biomedical applications. In order to improve the flexibility and strength of biodegradable PLA, various reaction conditions were studied. Urethane structure polymer materials were prepared; PLA was reacted with a small amount of methacryloyloxyethyl isocyanate (MOI) to obtain a ductile PLA with markedly improved mechanical properties. Elongation at break increased by 20 times when compared to neat PLA. Impact resistance (notched) improved 1.6 times. Thus, this modified PLA biodegradable polymer may have greater application as a biomedical material with increased mechanical properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]