Environmental issues have gradually become one of the most challenging global issues. In this Information Age where individualism is on the rise and self-media is prevalent, if we can use the power ...of individuals and make ordinary people become self-driven Green ambassadors to influence everyone around them, their power will be incomparable. This bottom-up force may even shake the entire society. However, how these “Green Opinion Leaders (GOLs)” are created is still an unresolved question. If we can understand the formation process of these GOLs, we may have the opportunity to generate more GOLs in the future. Therefore, this study applied participant observation methods to penetrate three local mountain hiking societies in Taiwan and conduct long-term tracking and unstructured in-depth interviews with five mountain hikers to understand why they eventually became Green Opinion Leaders (GOLs). The results show that “environmental self-identity” and the related “self-efficacies” of social and marketing abilities are the key elements making ordinary mountain hikers become GOLs. The four essential elements that form an environmental self-identity include (1) love of nature, (2) environmental consciousness, (3) environmental self-efficacy, and (4) nature self-identity. Finally, the research summarizes a series of efficient prescriptions for encouraging ordinary people to become Green Opinion Leaders (GOLs).
Information and communication technologies have given rise to a new type of firm, the ibusiness firm. These firms offer a platform that allows users to interact with each other and generate value ...through user co-creation of content. Because of this, ibusiness firms face different challenges when they internationalize compared with traditional firms, even those online. In this article we extend existing internationalization theory to encompass this new type of organization. We theorize that because ¡ business firms produce value through the creation and coordination of a network of users, these firms tend to suffer greater liabilities of outsidership when expanding abroad and therefore concentrate on network and diffusion-based user adoption processes as they internationalize. Based on a multi-case investigation of a sample of ibusiness firms, we develop new theory and testable hypotheses. Thus, we make an important contribution by expanding internationalization theory to a new set of firms.
This study examined the effects of follower number and comment tone on judgements about potential opinion leaders and their pages on Weibo, a Chinese social media site. Two experiments differentiated ...different types of negative comments, uncivil, critical, neutral and mixed, to assess the effects of comment tone relative to previous research. The results suggest that these manipulations have minimal effects, and there is little evidence that the overall number of followers is influential. In contrast to prior research, the readers did not seem to rely upon social cues from either the number of followers or the tone of the comments to form judgements about potential opinion leaders and their pages. Mixed evidence indicates that uncivil comments may be distinguished from merely critical comments, but neither format definitively leads to more positive evaluations. The potential implications for opinion leadership in China and worldwide are considered.
•Manipulations of tone of comments on Weibo have minimal effects on the willingness to follow opinion leaders.•Mixed evidence indicates that uncivil comments may be distinguished from merely critical comments.•There is little evidence that the overall number of followers is influential.•It's not a personality/friendship line of reasoning driving the decision to follow the opinion leaders.
Resistance of the local population to new energy infrastructure may hinder achieving the European Union's goal that 32% of energy consumption come from renewable sources. A vast literature is ...available on the social acceptance of specific renewable energy technologies, but existing research lacks assessments regarding comprehensive transformations to local energy systems. Moreover, the promising energy storage technology power-to-gas has not yet been addressed in acceptance studies. This paper fills these gaps by analysing data from a choice experiment survey with 2000 respondents across four nations (Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland). Results from the analysis show that solar farms and power-to-gas infrastructure increase acceptance of local energy communities, while wind farms have an ambiguous effect, and gas power plants and power lines decrease acceptance. The derived monthly willingness to pay estimates for the acceptance-increasing technologies ranges from 8.5€ for power-to-gas to 29.5€ for photovoltaics. Additionally, we investigate whether stated support from political opinion leaders at the local, national, and EU levels can increase the acceptance of renewable energy systems. Results suggest that Italian choices are influenced by the opinions of EU and national governmental bodies (+3.5% and +2.7%), and that Swiss choices are sensitive to the opinions of local politicians (+2.3%).
•Renewable energy communities (RECs) are emphasized by the EC’s 2018 RES Directive.•The social impacts of technological options for configuring RECs are assessed.•A survey in AT, DE, IT and CH collects related preferences of 2,000 residents.•Acceptance of RECs can be improved with support from politicians in IT and CH.•Monthly willingness to pay for RECs to include solar generation is €30.
RCT Testing Bystander Effectiveness to Reduce Violence Coker, Ann L., PhD, MPH; Bush, Heather M., PhD; Cook-Craig, Patricia G., PhD ...
American journal of preventive medicine,
05/2017, Volume:
52, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Introduction Bystander-based programs have shown promise to reduce interpersonal violence at colleges, yet limited rigorous evaluations have addressed bystander intervention effectiveness in high ...schools. This study evaluated the Green Dot bystander intervention to reduce sexual violence and related forms of interpersonal violence in 26 high schools over 5 years. Design A cluster RCT was conducted. Setting/participants Kentucky high schools were randomized to intervention or control (wait list) conditions. Intervention Green Dot−trained educators conducted schoolwide presentations and recruited student popular opinion leaders to receive bystander training in intervention schools beginning in Year 1. Main outcome measures The primary outcome was sexual violence perpetration, and related forms of interpersonal violence victimization and perpetration were also measured using anonymous student surveys collected at baseline and annually from 2010 to 2014. Because the school was the unit of analysis, violence measures were aggregated by school and year and school-level counts were provided. Results A total of 89,707 students completed surveys. The primary, as randomized, analyses conducted in 2014–2016 included linear mixed models and generalized estimating equations to examine the condition−time interaction on violence outcomes. Slopes of school-level totals of sexual violence perpetration (condition−time, p <0.001) and victimization (condition−time, p <0.001) were different over time. During Years 3–4, when Green Dot was fully implemented, the mean number of sexual violent events prevented by the intervention was 120 in Intervention Year 3 and 88 in Year 4. For Year 3, prevalence rate ratios for sexual violence perpetration in the intervention relative to control schools were 0.83 (95% CI=0.70, 0.99) in Year 3 and 0.79 (95% CI=0.67, 0.94) in Year 4. Similar patterns were observed for sexual violence victimization, sexual harassment, stalking, and dating violence perpetration and victimization. Conclusions Implementation of Green Dot in Kentucky high schools significantly decreased not only sexual violence perpetration but also other forms of interpersonal violence perpetration and victimization.
Little is known about networks for positive behaviour support (PBS) in disability services. This study explores a PBS network to identify influential persons in its promotion and communication.
...Quantitative sociometric methods were used to identify persons who occupy positions of either boundary spanning (those that link people and groups) and/or opinion leadership (those that are sought for advice).
Nineteen persons were identified. Boundary spanners met all criteria for the position while opinion leaders did not.
This is the first published study of a PBS network in disability services and provides insights into persons involved in its systemic promotion. Boundary spanners are effectively bridging the PBS network, yet persons seeking information about PBS are doing so from opinion leaders that do not display a requisite characteristic for this role. These results have implications for the wider utility of PBS within disability service systems.
This research explores characteristics that make consumers more likely to circulate ads. We focus on (a) the main transmitters of the viral content which we refer to as propagators, consumers who are ...more socially connected and active, and (b) two key ad characteristics: creativity and informativeness. Results from field data and two online studies show that propagators may wish to elevate their social status and therefore circulate ads that are both creative and informative. Since propagators spread ads to many people, ads that are both creative and informative are more likely to go viral compared with ads that are only creative or informative. These results extend previous research on the role and preferences of propagators and emphasize that, contrary to common beliefs, ad creativity alone may not be enough to drive a successful viral campaign.
•Propagators report higher intentions to circulate ads that are both creative and informative.•Ads that are creative and informative are perceived by propagators as elevating social status.•Elevating social status mediates propagators' intentions to circulate the ad.
This study explored the potential of telemedicine integration into the eye health ecosystem with an aim of scaling effective refractive error coverage in Kenya. This exploratory study was conducted ...telephonically and through online interviews with key opinion leaders, ophthalmologists, optometrists, ophthalmic clinical officers, optical technicians and beneficiaries of the optical technician’s services in rural areas. A telemedicine workflow was developed and validated based on the comments from the key opinion leaders using the Delphi technique. Quantitative and qualitative data were analysed using SPSS and NVivo Software respectively. All of the key opinion leaders agreed that telemedicine is relevant in the eye health ecosystem and recognition of primary vision technicians is critical for effective telemedicine integration. The reasons for the need of telemedicine integration were categorized into; good relationship, organized refractive error service delivery, convenience and availability and cost reduction. The possible factors influencing integration of telemedicine identified were categorized into cost, unwillingness, dominance, perception, lack of technical team, policies and network coverage. The limited human resources in the eye health ecosystem in developing countries cannot effectively deliver refractive error services to the growing population. Hence, integration of telemedicine and establishment of policies recognizing telemedicine are desirable to strengthen task shifting and scale effective refractive error coverage.
Key opinion leaders (KOLs) are people who can influence public opinion on a certain subject matter. In the field of medical and health informatics, it is critical to identify KOLs on various disease ...conditions. However, there have been very few studies on this topic.
We aimed to develop a recommender system for identifying KOLs for any specific disease with health care data mining.
We exploited an unsupervised aggregation approach for integrating various ranking features to identify doctors who have the potential to be KOLs on a range of diseases. We introduce the design, implementation, and deployment details of the recommender system. This system collects the professional footprints of doctors, such as papers in scientific journals, presentation activities, patient advocacy, and media exposure, and uses them as ranking features to identify KOLs.
We collected the information of 2,381,750 doctors in China from 3,657,797 medical journal papers they published, together with their profiles, academic publications, and funding. The empirical results demonstrated that our system outperformed several benchmark systems by a significant margin. Moreover, we conducted a case study in a real-world system to verify the applicability of our proposed method.
Our results show that doctors' profiles and their academic publications are key data sources for identifying KOLs in the field of medical and health informatics. Moreover, we deployed the recommender system and applied the data service to a recommender system of the China-based Internet technology company NetEase. Patients can obtain authority ranking lists of doctors with this system on any given disease.
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