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The development of COVID-19 vaccines is occurring at unprecedented speeds, but require high coverage rates to be successful. This research examines individuals' psychological beliefs that may act as enablers and barriers to vaccination intentions. Using the health beliefs model as a guide to our conceptual framework, we explore factors influencing vaccine hesitancy and health beliefs regarding risks and severity of the disease, along with individual variables such as income, age, religion, altruism, and collectivism. A questionnaire using newly created measures for various antecedents provided 4303 usable responses from Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, and the United States. A factor analytic and structural equation model indicates that trust in vaccine approval, the perceived effectiveness of the vaccine for protecting others, and conspiracy beliefs are the most significant drivers of intentions to vaccinate. Older people, those seeking employment, and those who have received a recent influenza vaccine are more likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The findings have implications for improving communication strategies targeting individuals about the merits of vaccination, particularly focusing on younger individuals and expanded message framing to include altruistic considerations, and to improve government transparency regarding the effectiveness and side effects of vaccines.

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability (PWD) has been signed by over 160 nations to achieve greater social participation, with public and private transport clearly identified as an area to improve accessibility. Whilst the majority of scholarly work has focused on public transport needs, less research has examined the barriers or benefits of access to private modified vehicles for PWD. In this exploratory study, a Delphi technique with health experts, researchers, drivers and funding agencies developed an instrument to examine the barriers and benefits of access to private modified vehicles for PWD. An online survey was completed by 287 drivers and carers to report on barriers to private modified vehicles, whilst a sub-set of 190 drivers with access to a private modified vehicle reported on experientially derived benefits. A factor analytic approach identified how financial and informational barriers vary with respect to several characteristics including disability type and level of support needs. Factors relating to independence, social and recreational benefits are perceived as more valued experientially derived benefits relative to benefits relating to employability and ability to enjoy downtime. Benefits in the form of independence are greater among drivers and owners, those with an acquired condition, less complex mobility and everyday support needs, whilst little difference emerged in terms of the social and downtime benefits. The findings inform policy development and funding opportunities to provide insight and evidence into the barriers, but also benefits and variation in private transport needs among PWD.

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Student study of science at school has been linked to the need to provide a scientifically capable workforce and a scientifically literate society. Educators, scientists, and policymakers are concerned that too few students are choosing science for study in their final years of school. How and why students choose and reject certain subjects, including science, at this time is unclear. A Best–Worst Scaling (BWS) survey was completed by 333 Year 10 (age 14–17) students to investigate the relative importance of 21 factors thought to impact students’ subject-selection decisions. Students ranked enjoyment, interest and ability in a subject, and its perceived need in their future study or career plans as the most important factors in both choosing and rejecting subjects. They considered advice from teachers, parents or peers as relatively less important. These findings indicate that enhancing students’ enjoyment, interest, and perceptions of their ability in science, as well as increasing student perceptions of its value in a future career, may result in more students studying science at school.

© 2019, The Author(s). This paper develops and examines a scale to capture teachers’ views of the mobile pedagogies they are adopting. Mobile pedagogies refer to the practices and approaches teachers use that involve mobile technologies to support learning. A mobile technology is any portable, handheld technology that potentially supports learning and includes laptops, tablets and smartphones. This study develops a rigorous scale to capture mobile pedagogies adopted in mobile learning tasks designed by teachers. In particular, the scale focuses on measuring pedagogies related to the iPAC framework which comprises three overarching dimensions of m-learning: personalisation, authenticity and collaboration (PAC). Each dimension has a pair of sub-components associated with it (for personalisation: agency and customisation; for authenticity: context and task; for collaboration: conversation and co-creation). The reliability and validity of a 20-item scale is assessed. A measure of overall m-learning experiences was also established and found to be significantly predicted by m-learning pedagogy. We also report on differences between teachers in m-learning practice with respect to subject area and year of schooling.

© 2019, Association for Educational Communications & Technology. This article discusses the results of a survey that measured school teachers’ and mobile learning (m-learning) experts’ perceptions of the relative importance and effectiveness of various pedagogical principles underpinning m-learning designs. A scan of relevant literature produced a set of articles describing effective innovative m-learning. Principles underpinning the learning activities in these articles were identified. These principles were then provided to respondents so that they could identify the most important ones relative to the others for designing effective and innovative m-learning tasks. A rigorous Best/Worst Scaling (BWS) survey was used to collect these data. This is the first time that a BWS has been conducted with regard to mobile pedagogical principles. Findings showed that principles related to authenticity were rated most important relative to other principles by the m-learning experts and principles related to personalisation and customisation were rated most important by practising teachers. Other principles that have been used in innovative m-learning designs, such as gamification and intergenerational learning, were seen as least important by all respondents. The findings will inform design of professional development activities, in particular, those pertaining to an app being developed in an Erasmus + project, Developing and Evaluating Innovative Mobile Pedagogies (DEIMP).

Models of category acceptance and diffusion, including Davis's technological acceptance model (TAM), have established that ease of use (EOU) is a significant determinant of technological product adoption. This supports user-centered design philosophies, where aspects of cognitive attractiveness (e.g., logical to use) and emotional attractiveness (e.g., lack of frustration in use) are essential, and contrasts traditional design practices where physical attractiveness dominates concern. These studies consider the impact of EOU on category (primary) demand. It is unclear whether firms should incorporate EOU into design and positioning strategies to differentiate their products from others in the same category that perform better on functional features. A random utility theory-based choice model is used to measure the relative value of EOU. In a new product category (DVD recorders; n?=?496) and one that is more established (cell phones; n?=?202), consumers were found to forgo functional features in preference for products better rated on EOU. With implications for segmentation, those seeking simplicity were older, female, educated, and with less product knowledge, while those already owning a complex phone made replacement decisions with less concern for EOU. The findings support EOU-based differentiation strategies as a legitimate alternative to other forms of differentiation.

The present paper utilizes a random utility theoretic experimental design to provide estimates of the relative value that selected consumers place on the social features of products. Experiments were conducted in Hong Kong and Australia using both university students and supporters of the human rights organization Amnesty International. The paper focuses on two classes of social features, "labor practices" and "animal rights and the environment". The results show that the social features of products can, on average, affect an individuals' likelihood of purchasing a product. Also, this paper finds distinctive segments of ethically orientated consumers. Crown Copyright © 2008.

We argue that consistent decision making in judging a patent's validity and basing this on its underlying technological quality are important elements of patent office service (“assessment”) quality. To understand which level of assessment quality patent offices (can) provide, particularly in new technological areas, we study the concordance of the European Patent Office's (EPO) granting and opposition decisions for individual patents. Using the biotechnology industry in the 1980s (an emerging patenting area then) as an example, we find no empirical evidence that the EPO provided maximal or optimal assessment quality as far as can be told from bibliographic indicators. We discuss research limitations and consequences of this first empirical analysis, and suggest ideas for refinements in future work.

This paper examines the role that social attributes-environmental and labour conditions-play in product choice across a range of developed and emerging economies. We use a multi-attribute design to force consumers to not only trade-off social attributes with tangible attributes but also make trade-offs with other intangible attributes, namely brand and country of origin. Our results show that: (1) social attributes are generally more influential in developed than in emerging economies, (2) the importance of social attributes holds across high and low involvement products, and (3) social attributes can influence product choice even when other intangible attributes are included in the design. We believe that our results offer a more accurate picture of the role of social attributes since they are based on a multi-cue, multi-product design that forced consumers to make tradeoffs between tangible and intangible attributes. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We argue that consistent decision making in judging a patent's validity and basing this on its underlying technological quality are important elements of patent office service ("assessment") quality. To understand which level of assessment quality patent offices (can) provide, particularly in new technological areas, we study the concordance of the European Patent Office's granting and opposition decisions for individual patents. Using the biotechnology industry in the 1980s (an emerging patenting area then) as an example, we find that the EPO hardly maximized or optimized assessment quality as far as can be told from bibliographic indicators. We discuss research limitations and consequences.