Background Frontline health workers in Sierra Leone have endured pandemics and recurrent infectious and maternal emergencies under chronic under-resourcing, yet the psychological burden they carry remains poorly understood. This study explored how they experience and cope with mental health challenges during and after emergency response. Methods A qualitative study used semi-structured interviews with 42 purposively sampled frontline health workers across three districts and eight professional cadres. Sample size was guided by information power rather than saturation. Data were analysed using the Framework Method, indexing all transcripts into a matrix of 42 participants by 17 categories. Reporting followed the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research. Results Charting produced 17 categories under four themes: the weight of witnessing, stigma and social fracture, coping in the margins, and institutional abandonment. Distress was patterned rather than uniform: accounts of stigma between cadres came mainly from burial and laboratory staff, and accounts of enforced family separation from those deployed away from home. Two categories, both specified in advance, were populated across the whole sample: fear of infection, and absent or token formal support; no participant described employer-provided psychosocial support as adequate and sustained. Conclusions Frontline health workers in Sierra Leone described heavy and largely unaddressed psychological burdens, and asked directly for prompt hazard pay and sustained recognition. Read with the conceptual frameworks and literature, their accounts make a case for building structured psychosocial support into emergency preparedness and universal health coverage planning, as an obligation to the workforce and a condition of its retention.
Glosses, as brief definitions provided for words in reading texts, have been extensively investigated regarding their usefulness in promoting second language vocabulary learning during meaning-focused reading. Supported by the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001), this study proposes self-supplied glosses as a novel type of gloss and compares their effectiveness with the traditionally examined single-meaning and multiple-choice glosses. 174 Chinese college-level learners of English participated in the study; each participant completed a reading task with a text containing 16 target words under one of the three glossed conditions or with no gloss. Vocabulary learning was measured through an immediate vocabulary posttest as well as a delayed posttest one week later in the form of meaning recall. The results generally show the effectiveness of all the three gloss types in facilitating vocabulary acquisition, both in the immediate and delayed posttests, although vocabulary retention dropped in the delayed posttest. Self-supplied glosses were found to be most effective of the three gloss types, and the effectiveness of single-meaning and multiple-choice glosses did not differ. Self-supplied glosses generated vocabulary gains that were prominently higher than those reported for the general effect of glosses in previous studies. The findings of this study are discussed in light of the Involvement Load Hypothesis as well as previous related research.
Research indicates that children want parents to seek consent before taking or sharing photos online, yet parents rarely engage in such practices despite acknowledging their importance. This proof-of-concept study developed and tested the implementation of a novel Child-Initiated Consent Protocol (CICP) to examine whether young children (ages 4–8) could influence parental consent-seeking behavior through brief role-play training. Ten mother-child dyads participated in pre- and post-training photo-taking interactions. Children found public sharenting practices less acceptable than private photo-sharing. Following CICP implementation, children showed increased photo refusal behaviors, and one child successfully reminded their mother to seek permission, eliciting responsive maternal behavior. However, explicit consent reminders remained rare despite training. Mothers reported minimal embarrassment and maintained perceived control throughout interactions. The study demonstrates both feasibility and limitations of the CICP approach, contributing to understanding positive child effects on parental behavior and informing family-centered digital privacy interventions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are increasingly used in higher education, but it remains unclear whether factors associated with perceived trustworthiness are also associated with students' intentions to adopt them. Drawing on an extended UTAUT2 framework, this study examines how chatbot-specific attributes are associated with trustworthiness, performance expectancy, and hedonic motivation, and how these appraisals, together with UTAUT2 factors, relate to behavioral intention. Survey data from 604 university students in Vietnam were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results show that ethics (β = 0.294, p < .001) and design (β = 0.458, p < .001) were positively associated with perceived trustworthiness, while social influence was not. Design and interactivity were positively associated with performance expectancy and hedonic motivation. However, perceived trustworthiness (β = 0.043, p = .153), hedonic motivation, and effort expectancy were not significantly associated with behavioral intention. Instead, behavioral intention was most strongly associated with price value (β = 0.408, p < .001), performance expectancy (β = 0.281, p < .001), social influence, and facilitating conditions, and was strongly associated with students' self-reported continued-use tendency (β = 0.754, p < .001). Perceived trustworthiness was not independently associated with behavioral intention in the present model, whereas price value and performance expectancy showed the largest positive associations with intention. This pattern highlights the value of considering trustworthiness alongside instrumental, social, and institutional evaluations when explaining AI-chatbot adoption. The study extends UTAUT2 by integrating these adoption evaluations with an assurance-oriented appraisal of the AI system.
As a sub-category of virtual tourism technologies, wildlife webcams offer tourists an experience that is distinct from other virtual technologies through non-intrusive, real-time, and non-simulated live streams. Despite the increasing popularity of webcam-based virtual wildlife tourism, research on tourists' motivations for using this technology remains scarce. This study draws on the uses and gratifications theory (UGT) to identify, conceptualize, and empirically examine the motivations that users seek to fulfill through wildlife webcams. The study, conducted in four stages, adopted a mixed-method, multistage design. First, semi-structured interviews with experienced wildlife webcam users recruited from online wildlife enthusiast communities in China through convenience and snowball sampling were used to identify potential motivations. Next, three online surveys administered to eligible users recruited through similar communities were utilized to refine the items, identify the gratification dimensions, and examine their associations with intention to use wildlife webcams. Eight motivation dimensions were identified: conservation, safety, convenience, authenticity, playfulness, price value, social interactivity, and informativeness. The confirmatory assessment provided initial support for the reliability of the dimensions and the proposed eight-dimensional measurement structure. All eight dimensions were positively associated with use intention. By clarifying the gratification structure underlying wildlife webcam use, this study extends the application of UGT to virtual tourism and provides practical recommendations for wildlife webcam platform managers.
