Personal Health Records (PHRs) allow patients to access and in some cases manage their own health records. Their potential benefits include access to health information, enhanced asynchronous communication between patients and clinicians, and convenience of online appointment scheduling and prescription refills. Potential barriers to PHR use…

This study investigated socio-economic impacts of land use change, giving explicit attention to the relationships between independently observed land use change and associated socio-economic changes, perceived land use change and socio-economic change, attributed cause of change, and experienced impacts of change. Using a case study region in…

This paper investigates the nature and causes of vulnerability to bushfires in the Wulgulmerang district of East Gippsland, Victoria, in south-eastern Australia. In 2003 bushfires devastated the small population of this isolated farming district, destroying homes, agricultural assets and public infrastructure. The fires also adversely affected the…

Training is a key tool for community development processes in rural areas. This training is made difficult by the characteristics of the rural areas and their population. Furthermore, the methods used by traditional training bodies are not adapted to the peculiarities of these areas. This article analyses the training methodology used by the…

Postsecondary education is a fundamental tool for achieving upward mobility and economic growth. Students with an associate's or bachelor's degree earn substantially more in a lifetime and experience better working conditions and job benefits than students with only a high school diploma. This study examines differences in public college…

Farmers have traditionally been perceived as having a deep attachment to land and place that contrasts with the mobility of modern society. In this paper, we use this work as a starting point for analysing new forms of attachments among a cohort of Australian farmers who are highly mobile in their business activities. In response, we devise a new…

The massification and globalization of higher education, combined with the widespread adoption of processes underpinning accreditation and quality control of university programs, have tended to result in learning contexts that are increasingly narrowly conceived and tightly controlled. Underlying many quality control measures is a "one size…

The marginality of rural life, understood in structural, economic, political and geographic terms, has been an underlying theme in both historical and contemporary studies of the Russian countryside. Much less attention has been paid to marginality as relational and the moral discourses of (un)belonging and (un)deservingness through which moral…

Information and communication technology (ICT)-enhanced research methods such as educational data mining (EDM) have allowed researchers to effectively model a broad range of constructs pertaining to the student, moving from traditional assessments of knowledge to assessment of engagement, meta-cognition, strategy and affect. The automated…

This paper offers a critical review of the international literature on gender, disaster and rural masculinities. Empirical reference is made to bushfires in Australia, offering new evidence from the State of Victoria. Bushfires loom large in the Australian imagination and there is an increasing amount of research now being conducted in relation to…

Research on rural youth in Russia shows that keeping qualified and ambitious young people in the rural economy will require creating conditions for young people to exercise initiative in the rural economy and diminishing the gap in quality of life between rural and urban environments. Only in this way can the pessimism of rural youth be overcome.

Many students will arrive at college speaking a dialect that is considered non-standardized or stigmatized due to the socially stratified nature of language. In the United States, where there are commonly held ideologies about the type of language that is considered "correct" or "proper," students who speak non-standardized…

This article examines high superintendency turnover through rural community members' perceptions of such attrition in their districts. Findings indicate that community members perceived high turnover as negative and believed that turnover was created by financial pressures, rural community resistance to educational trends, and bias against…

This article examines the imagery and imaginaries of islander identity and makes an original contribution to the fields of gerontology and nissology. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews with 19 older residents of two small-island communities located off the island of Ireland, we address the central roles played by older people in…

This paper examines the attempts made by the renewing kibbutzim to maintain their way of life as much as possible through the adjustment of their gating mechanisms. In this type of a rural gated community, sorting procedures and admittance criteria of nonmembers are the most notable elements. Background material and interviews with informants at…