Within English for Specific Purposes (ESP) assessment, reading tasks represent the linguistic and discourse demands of academic and professional communication. Maintaining parallel assessment materials while preserving the intended meaning presents an ongoing challenge, particularly in large-scale testing contexts where repeated test administrations can lead to item exposure. This study examines the feasibility of automated item paraphrasing for generating linguistically varied versions of reading assessment materials. A transformer-based Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) model (Raffel et al., 2020) generated reformulated versions of 16 IELTS reading passages and associated comprehension questions drawn from Academic and General Training materials. The original and paraphrased texts were evaluated using surface-level and meaning-level similarity metrics to assess linguistic variation and semantic preservation. Results showed low to moderate surface similarity alongside consistently high semantic alignment across passages and questions, indicating lexical and structural variation while preserving informational content. These results provide preliminary evidence that AI-assisted paraphrasing may support the development of linguistically diverse ESP assessment materials with high semantic alignment. However, the absence of expert review and test-taker performance data limits conclusions regarding content validity and operational equivalence. The study contributes to emerging research on natural language processing technologies for sustainable item pool management in ESP assessment. (c) 2026 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Psychology of Working Theory (PWT) posits that work volition, a person's perceived freedom of work choice despite barriers, allows people to access decent work. As this relationship has received considerable research attention in the last decade, we conducted a meta-analysis for synthesizing the accumulated evidence to this theoretically proposed relationship. We meta-analyzed the findings of 43 effect sizes (N = 18,659) across 42 unique publications. A positive and large summary effect size (r = 0.48, p < 0.001) showed that work volition was strongly related to decent work. While there is considerable heterogeneity across the results, the strength of this relationship was not moderated by the proposed variables (e.g., cultural dimensions) in this study. Overall, we presented empirical evidence supporting the theoretical association between work volition and decent work postulated by PWT. By identifying a critical error in the current meta-analysis literature-namely, the practice of treating manifest and latent correlations as equivalent effect sizes-this research also makes a substantial contribution to improving future meta-analyses within the PWT.
The present study examined the relationships between poverty-related stress, coping humor, hopelessness, and mental health problems among university students. It was hypothesized that poverty-related stress and coping humor would be associated with hopelessness, which in turn would mediate their relationships with mental health. The sample comprised 373 Turkish university students (272 women and 101 men). The data were collected online using the Poverty Perception Scale, Poverty-Related Stress Scale, Coping Humor Scale, Beck Hopelessness Scale, and Brief Symptom Inventory. The Poverty-Related Stress Scale, developed for the present study, had high internal consistency, acceptable fit for a unidimensional structure, and convergent validity through a positive correlation with perceived poverty. Simultaneous mediation analysis using PROCESS Macro indicated that the direct effects explained 46.21
A sexual consent myth refers to culturally embedded, stereotypical, or misleading beliefs that distort, oversimplify, or misrepresent what constitutes valid consent. Although this construct has gained some recognition, it continues to be unclearly defined and under-researched. This is likely due to the scarcity of a validated measure of sexual consent myths. Thus, the primary purpose of the current study was to create a standardized tool to assess myths about sexual consent and evaluate its initial psychometric properties across three independent samples in Türkiye. In Study 1, which aimed to provide preliminary evidence for construct validity, an exploratory factor analysis revealed a robust two-factor structure: sexual consent behaviors (Factor 1) and safe relationships (Factor 2). We also found that men and people with stronger beliefs in sexual myths tended to perceive sexual violence as less severe. In Study 2, confirmatory factor analysis validated that a two-factor solution was acceptable. In Study 3, moderated mediation analysis indicated that sexual consent myths were associated with sexual violence victimization through sexual assertiveness for both genders. Taken together, the findings suggest that the Sex–M is a useful tool for exploring a range of research questions concerning sexual consent myths.
Emerging adulthood, characterized by identity exploration and the transition from adolescence to adulthood, often involves instability and uncertainty. The quarter-life crisis, a developmental crisis during emerging adulthood, reflects struggles in career, relationships, and personal identity. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, we examined the manifest and latent content of 91 publicly shared TikTok videos and comments. The findings revealed twelve key themes in the manifest content: transition to adulthood: pendulum swings, financial issues, career-related issues, social and societal issues, journey to self, signs of quarter-life crisis, coping strategies, scrolling through support, “no one warned us,” quarter-life crisis as a common experience, age of crisis, and time flies. The latent content analysis identified additional themes such as artistic narratives of crisis experiences, self-promotion, and validation. Music, visual storytelling, and symbolic representations played a significant role in expressing crisis experiences. TikTok was found to serve as a platform for both emotional release and community support, reflecting the increasing role of social media in shaping young adults’ self-perception and coping mechanisms. Overall, this study highlights the significance of TikTok as a space for young adults to narrate their quarter-life crisis experiences, seek support, and engage in identity exploration.
