Background Nurses are challenged with many situations that require them to solve ethical dilemmas and make moral decisions based on professional values and a sense of accountability and responsibility. To support their decisions, it is important to know how they perceive and relate their ethical ideology, professional values, and clinical accountability in their workplace. Purpose The study’s aim was twofold: to investigate the ethical ideology and perceived importance of professional values and accountability among nurses. Further, explore the relationship between each (...) of ethical ideology and professional values with nurses’ work accountability. Methods A correlational study was conducted in an Egyptian hospital. All nurses were invited to participate = 192, and 150 nurses (78.3%) completed the study questionnaires. The Ethical Position Questionnaire, the Professional Values Scale, and the Clinical Vignettes Assessment for Clinical Accountability were proven to be reliable study measures. Ethical considerations Ethics Committee approval, written informed consent, data privacy and confidentiality, and participants’ right to voluntary participation and withdrawal were maintained. Results Nurses showed good ethical ideology (75 ± 6.2) and are more idealistic while maintaining professional values (108 ± 10.8). Most nurses believed they were accountable for documenting errors, completing incident reports, and calling physicians to discuss or manage the situations. Ethical ideology and the idealism subscale were positively correlated with overall nurses’ professional values (r = 0.321, p < 0.004, r =0.464, p 0.000), respectively. On the other hand, work accountability showed a partial correlation in some areas with ethical ideology and professional values. Discussion Professional values and nurses' accountability appear to be influenced by ethical positions and ideology. Conclusion Healthcare organizations should provide a supportive work environment to help nurses develop self-awareness, and knowledge of their ethical ideologies, which improve professional values and clinical accountability in their practice. Ethical ideology and professional values should be emphasized more in nursing curricula. (shrink)

BackgroundClinical genomic professionals are increasingly facing decisions about returning incidental findings (IFs) from genetic research. Although previous studies have shown that research participants are interested in receiving IFs, yet there has been an argument about the extent of researcher obligation to return IFs. We aimed in this study to explore the perspectives of clinical genomics professionals toward returning incidental findings from genomic research.MethodsWe conducted a national survey of a sample (n = 113) of clinical genomic professionals using a convenient sampling. (...) A self-administered questionnaire was used to explore their attitudes toward disclosure of IFs, their perception of the duties to return IFs and identifying the barriers for disclosure of IFs. A descriptive analysis was employed to describe participants' responses.ResultsSixty-five (57.5%) respondents had faced IFs in their practice and 31 (27.4%) were not comfortable in discussing IFs with their research subjects. Less than one-third of the respondents reported the availability of guidelines governing IFs. The majority 84 (80%) and 69 (62.7%) of the study participants indicated they would return the IFs if the risk of disease threat ≥ 50% and 6–49%, respectively and 36 (31.9%) reported they have no obligation to return IFs.ConclusionClinical genomics professionals have positive attitudes and perceptions toward the returning IFs from genomic research, yet some revealed no duty to do so. Detailed guidelines must be established to provide insights into how genomics professionals should be handled IFs. (shrink)

In reliability engineering and lifetime analysis, many units of the product fail with different causes of failure, and some tests require stress higher than normal stress. Also, we need to design the life experiments which present methodology for formulating scientific and engineering problems using statistical models. So, in this paper, we adopted a partially constant stress accelerated life test model to present times to failure in a small period of time for Gompertz life products. Also, considering that, units are failing (...) with the only two independent causes of failure and tested under type-I generalized hybrid censoring scheme the data built. Obtained data are analyzed with two methods of estimations, maximum likelihood and Bayes methods. These two methods are used to construct the point and interval estimators with the help of the MCMC method. The developed results are measured and compared under Monte Carlo studying. Also, a data set is analyzed for illustration purposes. Finally, some comments are presented to describe the numerical results. (shrink)

Universities contribute to shaping the identity of a nation with their major university social responsibility in addition to their academic purposes and corporate strategies. In Saudi Arabia with Vision 2030, universities are facing a transformation in adapting to the societal changes and implementing a socially responsible management, considering the satisfaction of their most important stakeholders and the quality of services offered to them. This study aims to explore how USR fulfills the societal changes in Saudi Arabia from the perspective of (...) university students in addition to inspecting USR’s relationships with the students’ satisfaction and the quality of services offered to them. A self-report study was conducted with 350 undergraduate students in the Faculty of Social Sciences in a Social Work program at a University in the Western region of Saudi Arabia. An inside–outside map of USR was applied to investigate the relationships among USR’s aspects. The study results demonstrated a moderate level of agreement by students toward the university’s fulfillment of its USR, quality of services offered to them, and their satisfaction. In contrast, the results of a regression analysis revealed that all USR aspects could explain only 13% of the students’ satisfaction. Legal responsibilities, among all USR aspects, exhibited the highest influence on students’ satisfaction. Gender differences existed in favor of female students’ perceptions toward the university’s fulfillment of its USR. The I–O map provided interesting insights to interpret the correlations among all USR aspects under the influence of societal changes that have occurred under Saudi Vision 2030. (shrink)

Justice has a high status in Islamic societies, and as one of the most important human ideals, has long been the focus of thinkers and researchers. In fact, when the citizens do not understand the presence of justice in the behaviour of the officials of their society, their trust in the current procedures, and consequently the public participation will be affected. Considering the importance of the subject, the present study has been conducted with the aim of investigating the effect of (...) perception of justice on citizens’ trust and participation in the creation of a democratic Islamic society. The statistical population of this research included 3578 Indonesian Muslim citizens in 2022, and the research questionnaires were distributed among them. Data analyses were done using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and Linear Structural Relations (LISREL) statistical software. The results of statistical analyses indicated that the perception of Islamic justice does not have a significant effect on the participation of Muslims in creating a democratic Islamic society. In addition, the perception of Islamic justice has a positive effect on the trust in officials of the Islamic society. Moreover, trust in the officials of the Islamic society positively affects the citizens’ participation in creating a democratic Islamic society.Contribution: According to the results of this research, it is necessary for the officials of the Islamic society to use all their efforts in creating a justice-oriented Islamic society in order to create trust among the citizens, and to involve Muslims in development decisions and to establish democratic Islamic society. (shrink)

Papyrus rolls, hundreds of thousands of rolls, carefully stacked in niches or in precious containers, also men, learned librarians or their erudite hosts, men who read books in order to write others, hardly paying heed to the vile rumblings of Alexandria, the unruly city, dreaming rather of tomorrow's lesson with the crown prince, their pupil, or even admiring from afar, protected by the shade of a portico, the silhouette of some queen, Cleopatra or Arsinoe or a Berenice counting her locks… (...) it is now a little over two thousand years since then, men and books, the Library of Alexandria. It did not even lack a dramatic conflagration in 48 B.C. when it found itself on fire by the wind that blew from the burning fleet set ablaze by the foot soldiers of Julius Caesar, general, scholar and old beau of political love. But probably, the Library soon recovered. (shrink)

Economic burden of private supplementary tutoring is increasing around the world. Demand for private supplementary tutoring, contributing factors, and their effects are investigated in the study. For this purpose, data were collected through questionnaire, and multistage non-probability technique was used. Hurder model was used to find the factors affecting demand for private supplementary tutoring at the higher secondary level. Linear regression model was used to find the economic burden of family and factors affecting the demand for private tutoring. The findings (...) showed that several factors have a significant effect on the demand for private supplementary tutoring, and some of them significantly impact on the economic burden. The study recommends regulating the market of shadow education because of differentiated tuition fee in different tuition centers to cut down the burden of private tutoring for households. (shrink)

The aim of this study was threefold: First, to examine the dimensionality of the construct of General Academic Ability at the subscale level providing additional insights over and above on the conceptualization of the construct. Second, to explore different degrees of measurement invariance of the GAA across gender using more recent advancements in the examination of Measurement Invariance. Third, to examine gender differences across the different facets of the GAA at the latent mean level. The sample consisted of 1,800 high (...) school graduates who applied for higher education in Saudi Arabia. The results from the analysis indicated that the hierarchical model with one higher-order factor and four lower-order cognitive factors exhibited an excellent fit to the data. In terms of the measurement invariance hypothesis, it was found that the hierarchical model exhibits full configural and metric invariance and partial scalar invariance. Finally, using the Latent Mean Difference procedure, the results showed gender differences in the Verbal and GPA domains. Although significant differences were also found in the Scholastic aptitude domain, this finding is not stable due to several non-invariant items within the domain. In both cases, females scored higher than males. Finally, regarding the higher-order factor, the results showed that females scored higher than males. There were no significant differences in the Quantitative domain. (shrink)

Deaf-mute people have much potential to contribute to society. However, communication between deaf-mutes and non-deaf-mutes is a problem that isolates deaf-mutes from society and prevents them from interacting with others. In this study, an information technology intervention, intelligent gloves (IG), a prototype of a two-way communication glove, was developed to facilitate communication between deaf-mutes and non-deaf-mutes. IG consists of a pair of gloves, flex sensors, an Arduino nano, a screen with a built-in microphone, a speaker, and an SD card module. (...) To facilitate communication from the deaf-mutes to the non-deaf-mutes, the flex sensors sense the hand gestures and connected wires, and then transmit the hand movement signals to the Arduino nano where they are translated into words and sentences. The output is displayed on a small screen attached to the gloves, and it is also issued as voice from the speakers attached to the gloves. For communication from the non-deaf-mutes to the deaf-mute, the built-in microphone in the screen senses the voice, which is then transmitted to the Arduino nano to translate it to sentences and sign language, which are displayed on the screen using a 3D avatar. A unit testing of IG has shown that it performed as expected without errors. In addition, IG was tested on ten participants, and it has been shown to be both usable and accepted by the target users. (shrink)

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic is triggering a public health emergency and crisis on a large scale, with far-reaching effects and severe damage to all aspects of politics, economy, cultural and social life, and health. Consecutive outbreaks over the past nearly 2 years of “living with COVID-19” have forced most schools to physically close, resulting in the largest educational disruption in human history. In turbulent times of the COVID-19 crisis, school leaders are facing numerous major challenges germane to school governance and (...) leadership. The key objective of the study is to fully explore the prospective challenges principals are encountering in public schools in times of COVID-19. To fulfill the research purpose, a systematic literature review was carried out to investigate the leadership challenges. As a result, a total of 24 challenges were explored through SLR approach. Frequency analysis approach was initially applied to figure out the most significant challenges. Accordingly, seven challenges were found statistically significant as showing frequency ≥ 50 each. Irrevocably, the study works as a contribution to K-12 school leadership by providing guidance for current and future leaders in crisis based on practical investigation, experiences, and recommendations. Policy makers can leverage these findings to make necessary adjustments to school policy to better prepare school leaders for crisis. Additionally, the findings of the current study are believed to have profound implications for future research. These findings expand our current understanding on school leadership in time of crisis that needs further investigation. Subsequent studies can quantitatively and/or qualitatively validate these leadership challenges findings regarding a particular school context. (shrink)

To help ensure the ethical conduct of research, many have recommended educational efforts in research ethics to investigators and members of research ethics committees (RECs). One type of education activity involves multi-day workshops in research ethics. To be effective, such workshops should contain the appropriate content and teaching techniques geared towards the learning styles of the targeted audiences. To ensure consistency in content and quality, we describe the development of a curriculum guide, core competencies and associated learning objectives and activities (...) to help educators organize research ethics workshops in their respective institutions. The curriculum guide is divided into modular units to enable planners to develop workshops of different lengths and choose content materials that match the needs, abilities, and prior experiences of the target audiences. The content material in the curriculum guide is relevant for audiences in the Middle East, because individuals from the Middle East who participated in a Certificate Program in research ethics selected and developed the training materials (e.g., articles, powerpoint slides, case studies, protocols). Also, many of the activities incorporate active-learning methods, consisting of group work activities analyzing case studies and reviewing protocols. The development of such a workshop training curriculum guide represents a sustainable educational resource to enhance research ethics capacity in the Middle East. (shrink)

This volume examines whether the Arab Uprisings introduce a replica of the European Enlightenment or rather stimulate an Arab/Islamic Awakening with its own cultural specificity and political philosophy. By placing Immanuel Kant in Tahrir Square, Cairo, this book adopts a comparative analysis of two enlightenment projects: one Arab, still under construction, with possible progression toward modernity or regression toward neo-authoritarianism, and one European, shaped by the past two centuries.

Background Despite the implementation of codes and declarations of medical research ethics, unethical behavior is still reported among researchers. Most of the medical faculties have included topics related to medical research ethics and developed ethical committees; yet, in some cases, unethical behaviors are still observed, and many obstacles are still conferring to applying these guidelines. Methods This cross-sectional questionnaire-based study was conducted by interviewing randomly selected 331 Lebanese physicians across Lebanon, to assess their awareness, knowledge and attitudes on practice regarding (...) international and national research ethics guidelines and scientific misconduct and misbehaviors. Results Our results revealed that although majority of participants declared familiar with ethical principles governing research that involves human subjects, the overall mean score achieved on their knowledge questions was 46%. Only 27.4% are aware of the presence of the Lebanese National Consultative Committee on Ethics, with only half of them aware of its functions and only 25.7% know about the charter of ethics and guiding principles of scientific research in Lebanon. Significant higher levels of research ethics knowledge were recorded among Ph.D. degree-holding subjects, higher university positions as in professors, research ethics trainings-attendees, and physicians with prior research experience. A significant correlation was observed between knowledge of research ethics principles and positive attitudes toward research ethics principles. Noteworthy, we found that more than one third of participants have reported witnessing scientific misconduct and misbehaviors at some period of their careers. Conclusions The presence of low mean awareness levels regarding research ethical principles among the study population of physicians and high levels of perception of scientific misconduct raises concern on the importance of implementing proper training for physicians on research ethics. (shrink)

Members of the Student Clinical Ethics Committee discussed the ethical issues arising in a case referred for consideration – a homeless man presenting to the emergency department of a busy London hospital with recent self-reported suicide attempts. Should he be admitted overnight in order to address a short-term shelter problem? The case study summarises the reflections of the Committee and focusses on the doctor’s duty of care and patient responsibility, benefits of admission and resource considerations.