Research on humor in organizations has rarely considered the social context in which humor occurs. One such social setting that most of us experience on a daily basis concerns the team context. Building on recent theorizing about the humor-performance link in teams, this study seeks to increase our understanding of the function and effects of humor in team interaction settings. We examined beha...

BACKGROUND Cognitive mapping is a participatory research methodology that documents, in visual form, a construct of the local environment in which people live and work. We adapted this method to provide detailed data about study locales to inform recruitment and retention strategies for HIV prevention community based clinical trials. METHODS Four cognitive mapping studies were undertaken betw...

We investigated how positive affectivity influences people's perception of the pat terns of social relationships around them. Positive affectivity was measured as trait positive affect. The outcome variable was accuracy in the perception of informal patterns of social interaction in a group (i.e., the group's network structure). Data on the perception of the relationships of friendship and work...

PURPOSE Quality improvement (QI) is a common competency that must be taught in all physician training programmes, yet, there is no clear best approach to teach this content in clinical settings. We conducted a realist systematic review of the existing literature in QI curricula within the clinical setting, highlighting examples of trainees learning QI by doing QI. METHOD Candidate theories de...

The words we use matter. The concept of a social norm exists in many social and behavioral science disciplines and research traditions (1). Because the general term “social norm” is a hypernym, an explicit definition is crucial to discussions of its place and usefulness in solving complex social–environmental issues (cf. ref. 2). In their discussion of incentives, Lubchenco et al. (3) suggest t...

BACKGROUND An exclusive focus on individual or family coping strategies may be inadequate for people whose major point of concern may be collective healing on a more communal level. METHODS To our knowledge, the current study is the first to make use of ethnographic fieldwork methods to investigate this type of coping as a process in a natural setting over time. Participant observation was em...

this article seeks to identify and classify the micro factors affecting the implementation of poverty reduction policy in iran. the existence and spread of poverty in society, in spite of the existent policy programs is the sign of some weaknesses in the executive models of policy. policy making in the field of poverty reduction theoretically is classified into several categories different fact...

As an educational setting, the traditional classroom fails to meet the learner’s need for suitable skills to learn with educational software. The development of digital learning skills in school curricula challenges designers of educational software. A useful starting point of research in this domain is the study of literacy, both in its traditional and new forms (Tyner, 1998). It is a powerful...