All course outlines in the MComp degree at UNITEC state that students will learn how to critique issues relating to the topic being studied. The assumption is that critical reflection is a skill that is acquired automatically during the degree. Postgraduate students at UNITEC are required to complete the Research Methods (RM) paper before enrolling in a thesis or dissertation. RM students are e...

A questionnaire requiring respondents to rate the importance of key issues is the traditional data collection tool for investigating the key issues of Information Technology (IT) managers. Such an instrument does not force managers to confront the relationships between issues. Q-sort and interpretive structured modeling (ISM) force managers to consider the linkages among key issues. This articl...

In [1] we present an extension of Prime Event Structures by a mechanism to express dynamicity in the causal relation. More precisely we add the possibility that the occurrence of an event can add or remove causal dependencies between events and analyse the expressive power of the resulting Event Structures w.r.t. to some well-known Event Structures from the literature. This technical report con...

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) provides a set of principles and practices intended to foster coproduction of knowledge. However, CBPR often has shortcomings when applied to population-level policy and practice interventions, including a focus on single communities and a lack of focus on policy change. At the same time, community trials focused on policy have shortcomings, includi...

1 Keynote speech at 1 International Conference on Semantics, Knowledge and Grid, Beijing, China, Nov.27-29, 2005. This work is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Project No.2003CB317000) and the National Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 70271007). Abstract In the human, society, interconnection environment and systems methodology perspectives, this paper answers th...

This study examines the role of insider holdings in affecting the decision to announce a repurchase and the associated announcement period stock returns using a conditional event study methodology. We find that firms are more likely to buy back shares if the insiders have large shareholdings and we find that the announcement period returns are greater for firms where insiders have larger holdin...

Despite the attention for corporate, brand and product images, only few studies focus on methodological comparisons of image research methods. This article presents a comparison of two current instruments: the Q-sort method and a Likert attitude questionnaire. The study applies both methods to measure the image of beef, using the same assertions in similar samples of consumers. The two methods ...

Cancer is difficult for people from ethnically diverse communities to cope with, because there is inequality in getting information and services to meet their needs for prevention, prompt diagnosis, treatment, care and support. Research with black minority ethnic (BME) communities indicates a lack of knowledge about cancer, and a desire for more information, yet research is highly equivocal wit...

mental data are given, the majority of these coming from agricultural experiments, but some being data from medical investigations. The book contains 17 chapters in all. The first three consist of an introduction, an account of methods of increasing the accuracy of experiments, and the review referred to above of methods of statistical analysis. The remaining 14 chapters give the detailed accou...