Destination-selection attributes for international association meetings: A mixed-methods study

The Egyptian-Greek genial poet C.P. Cavafy wrote a beautiful poem, entitled Ithaca, which was inspired by the journey of Ulysses from Troy to his hometown, the small Greek island of Ithaca. The journey took many years and provided Ulysses with many adventures, over the course of which he became wiser and stronger. Medicine is a scientific discipline, with research as the cornerstone to advancing our understanding of the normal and diseased human body. The final aim (Ithaca) must be to help the patients, who are the centre of the health-care effort, but beyond that, clinical research (the voyage) will help you be a better professional, to acquire new skills, to have a deep understanding of certain fields of knowledge (i.e. to become an expert) and to interact with other people from different professions, from other countries and cultures and with other points of view. As in Cavafy’s poem, clinical research should be a long road ‘full of adventure, full of discovery’.1 Don’t be afraid to embark on the galley and start the journey. This article aims to highlight that a successful clinical research career is a gradual process, a step-by-step, long and wonderful trip that will enlighten you. We have divided clinical research careers into five levels, from Beginner to Legend. We will share with you our personal point of view regarding what to learn, what to look for, what studies to perform, which skills should be developed and the end points for each level. This is not a road map to becoming a Legend. You should achieve the level at which you feel personally and professionally comfortable. First, in our experience, the following advice is important for advancing in your journey. (1) Try to spend a fixed time each day on clinical research. Choose a feasible moment of the day and be constant. (2) Make a list of objectives each month, including not only nearing deadlines, but also time for developing current and future projects. Don’t work without a clear direction and timing, or you will be enslaved by deadlines. (3) Balance your personal life and clinical duties, as success in clinical research is not everything. (4) Be humble, promote collaborative research and share your success. Your team and collaborators are the pillars of the endeavour. To start, you need the basic tools for clinical research and to be able to communicate your findings. The first steps are to take a basic statistics course and to start learning English if it is not your native language. In addition, a Good Clinical Practice course will teach you ethics in research, which is an important part and helps you to understand how an Institutional Review Board works. Remember, the patient is the final aim, not an instrument for your success. Finding a good mentor is the key step for the beginner, as he or she will help you develop your skills and guide you in your first studies. A retrospective study based on patients from your centre is the simplest way to start conducting research. These kinds of studies are only useful for generating hypotheses, but will help you understand the basis of clinical research. The Beginner is a ‘field agent’ who should be good at obtaining data and managing databases. Learn to create databases with Access, Excel, RedCAP and other software. Start playing with statistical software, such as STATA, SPSS, SAS and R. Choose one or two and learn them step by step. Clinical research involves not only obtaining and analysing data, but also communicating your findings. Start working on your communication skills by learning how to do a poster and oral presentation. Start using social media to share articles, cases or professional experiences. Twitter is a very good platform for this. In fact, this article is based on a Tweet and the discussion it subsequently generated.2 This stage should generate your first posters and oral communications at national meetings, and your first retrospective papers as a collaborator. Learn to talk fluently about technical aspects in English. It is also time for an advanced statistics course – there is a world beyond chi-square! Find clinical questions that are interesting to you. Start putting together a team, with a statistical adviser as the first step. Create a group of national collaborators (your friends and colleagues with shared interests) for simple collaborative studies and surveys. Start a prospective observational study at your centre and a multi-centre retrospective study. Again, these studies will only be useful for generating hypotheses, but they are more robust. Meta-analyses are also interesting at this stage. Communication skills: time to start engaging the audience. Your aim is not only to share your research; you want the audience to like your work. During this phase, you must start to develop your leadership skills. Start to collaborate with your national scientific association, make national contacts, learn what studies are feasible. This is more important than it seems, as investing time in an unfeasible study is to waste it. Collaborate in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by other groups as a way to learn how RCTs work. Keep using your social media. If you post good scientific stuff, you will gain interesting followers, some of whom may be your future collaborators. Publish your first observational studies as first author. The two main markers of a good researcher are publications and grants. Try to get your first grants, mainly from your national scientific associations. Grants for young researchers are a good opportunity for this purpose. Make your first communications at international meetings, and increase your proportion of oral communications in national meetings. Train yourself to speak fluently in English about any topic, not only medicine. Learn advanced methodology in research. Look for important, not just interesting, clinical questions to answer. Start putting together your own team, look for mentees, help them advance from Beginner to Competent. Now you need an expert in statistics. Start your own multi-centre prospective studies, as this will help you become a strong leader. Design your first single-centre RCT. Lead the design and development of national guidelines addressing your main field of expertise. Progress in your communication skills – try to fascinate the audience. Make international contacts to be part of more ambitious projects. Start to collaborate with international associations. Share your success with your team and increase their visibility. Use social media to share your work, to gain collaborators and for educational purposes. Publish your first papers as a senior last/corresponding author. This will give visibility to other members of your team as first authors, and being the last senior author is good for future grants and awards (e.g. the UEG Rising Star Award) because it means you are leading the team. Obtain your first large national public grants. Work hard for your national scientific association and apply for positions there. Start your first RCT at your centre. Progress in your English grammar and fluency. You should be able to write manuscripts in English without requiring translators. Develop strategies to deal with a lack of time and maintain balance, as you will be very busy. Look for key questions to answer. Find clever, constructive, imaginative and judicious people to join your team. Design and perform pivotal multi-centre RCTs that will change clinical practice. Promote and develop international guidelines addressing your area of expertise. You have developed great skills for research, but at this point, you need a strong team; it is a phase of advanced team building. You will have to spend a lot of time and develop strategies to obtain resources for your team and your projects. Learn to delegate to your team, which is sometimes difficult, and help the members of your team advance – help them to become, step by step, Champions like you. Apply for large multinational grants (e.g. Horizon 2020 grants from the European Union). Collaborate very closely with international scientific associations and apply for positions there. The main end point for a champion is the publication of pivotal RCTs that change clinical practice. The most important and difficult challenge of a Legend is to learn to deal with your own success. Promote and lead national and international projects involving public health and wider strategies to improve the treatment of patients (e.g. a European programme for early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer). Your priority is to promote studies leading to revolutions in medicine, to integrate different groups and to reach complex end points. Your team (not you) is in charge of international multi-centre RCTs. As a Legend, the most important step is not to fall into dogmatism, stubbornness and egocentrism. You should let the best members of your team become independent and create their own teams. At this point, you are more involved with politics, making contacts with national and multinational (i.e. European Union) governments to be involved in large projects. You are capable of leading an international scientific association. Your team, and other teams under your guidance, are producing good science, and they consider you a mentor, not a boss. You are promoting actions with the aim to improve the health of the general population or wider improvement in the management or early detection of certain diseases in your field. Hope your road is a long one. May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time.1 We thank the UEG Young Talent Group for inviting us to write this Young GI Angle article and to the Princeton University Press for their permission to reproduce part of the poem Ithaca in this article. The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article. The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Most sports men and women would regard competition at the European and international level as one of the high points of a sporting career. In order to organise competitions at European level it is usually a pre-requisite to create a European association to organise the sport. From the earliest days of international sporting competitions in the nineteenth century to the present time, the strategic choices to be made when creating an international sport association have remained constant. These are: where to locate the association, geographically, and what legal form the international association should adopt? These basic questions have to be addressed, not only by those wishing to create new, international sports associations, but also by existing international associations. With regard to existing international sports associations, some of these may have to review their existing structures and locations as a result of expanding national memberships or the increasing commercial and legal pressures on the sports that they govern and represent. This article suggests that there is a strong case to be made for new and existing European sports associations to consider establishing some form of legal presence in Brussels, the administrative and political centre of the European Union. This is because, amongst other things, Brussels is the location where European sporting bodies might be better able to influence the regulatory and political decisions that may affect their various sports. This article then proceeds to consider what form that presence could take. Various options are examined and due attention is given to the special legal structures made available to international not-for-profit sports associations under Belgian law. What is of particular interest in this connection is the new Belgian Law of 2 May 2002 on not-for-profit associations, which came into force in July 2003. It is suggested that this new law provides two improved legal structures that could be valuable to those wishing to create new European sporting associations and to those existing associations who may be reviewing their existing structures to be more effective promoters of their sports.

International meetings (either conferences or other forms of meetings) that are held certainly have implications for the image of the host. The organization of the event represents the destination/country that acts as the host. The potential to organize international meetings can come from several market segments, one of which is the association market segment, especially professional associations affiliated with international or world-class associations. The main reason for preparing the Ambassador Program is that the majority of international association meetings that occur periodically and alternate between countries require a kind of competitive bidding process involving local or national contacts to submit proposals or invitations (ICCA, 2012). This research was conducted to increase the number of international association conferences held in order to improve Indonesia's competitiveness as a MICE Destination. The method that will be used is the exploratory method by conducting desk research and respondent surveys to professional associations affiliated with international associations. Keyword: Ambassador Program, Bidding, Association Conference, MICE

Editorial - An international association of forest economics

In the increasingly competitive tourism market, Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) play a pivotal role in shaping the perception of destinations through visual content shared on social media platforms. However, research has highlighted significant gaps in how DMOs strategically utilize these visual tools to effectively promote destination image. Many DMOs fail to align their social media content with tourist expectations, peak travel seasons, or strategic branding efforts, resulting in underutilized opportunities to influence tourist decision-making processes. This study addresses this gap by analyzing the visual representation strategies employed by DMOs in five major Mexican tourist destinations—Mexico City, Oaxaca, Puebla, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán. By examining a sample of 7,717 photographs shared on Facebook and Instagram, the research seeks to determine the types of visual content used, assess the correlation between posting frequency and seasonal tourist arrivals, and conduct a semiotic analysis of the images to reveal their deeper symbolic meanings. The findings offer practical insights for improving the effectiveness of visual representation in tourism marketing, with a focus on optimizing DMO strategies to better engage potential tourists and enhance destination image

The focus of this investigation is on the promotional strategies and obstacles encountered by Tourism Trade Practitioners (TTPs) and Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) in their efforts to promote Cape Coast as a tourism destination. Using qualitative research methods, it identifies critical promotional activities, including festival promotion, social media use, and digital platforms. It also emphasises problems such as low community engagement, insufficient resources, and bureaucratic constraints. To strengthen Cape Coast's competitive position, recommendations emphasise the adoption of digital marketing tools, the promotion of local participation, and the enhancement of stakeholder collaboration. For practitioners seeking to increase tourist arrivals in Ghana, this research provides actionable insights and contributes to the destination marketing literature.

Despite convincing evidence of a relationship between breath-hold diving and decompression sickness (DCS), the causal connection is only slowly being accepted. Only the more recent textbooks have acknowledged the risks of repetitive breath-hold diving. We compare four groups of breath-hold divers: (1) Japanese and Korean amas and other divers from the Pacific area, (2) instructors at naval training facilities, (3) spear fishers, and (4) free-dive athletes. While the number of amas is likely decreasing, and Scandinavian Navy training facilities recorded only a few accidents, the number of spear fishers suffering accidents is on the rise, in particular during championships or using scooters. Finally, national and international associations (e.g., International Association of Free Drives [IAFD] or Association Internationale pour Le Developpment De L'Apnee [AIDA]) promote free-diving championships including deep diving categories such as constant weight, variable weight, and no limit. A number of free-diving athletes, training for or participating in competitions, are increasingly accident prone as the world record is presently set at a depth of 171 m. This review presents data found after searching Medline and ISI Web of Science and using appropriate Internet search engines (e.g., Google). We report some 90 cases in which DCS occurred after repetitive breath-hold dives. Even today, the risk of suffering from DCS after repetitive breath-hold diving is often not acknowledged. We strongly suggest that breath-hold divers and their advisors and physicians be made aware of the possibility of DCS and of the appropriate therapeutic measures to be taken when DCS is suspected. Because the risk of suffering from DCS increases depending on depth, bottom time, rate of ascent, and duration of surface intervals, some approaches to assess the risks are presented. Regrettably, none of these approaches is widely accepted. We propose therefore the development of easily manageable algorithms for the prevention of those avoidable accidents.

The International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) is one of the seven international associations comprising the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG). Each Association has its own domain, but the boundaries between them are artificial. The Earth is undisciplined, and it does not recognize our academic subjects. In the US Academy Report “Solid-Earth Sciences and Society”, published in 1993, a number of broad objectives and major research areas were set up in a matrix which provided a research framework. A remarkable number of high-priority research opportunities in the “solid-Earth Sciences” are concerned with water, the subject of IAHS. Water is a critical material for society and indeed in nearly every topic in Earth science research. Our priorities for the next century must be based on the beautiful science which arouse our curiosity, but we must also give weight to societal problems. Examples of burning recent problems can be found in many of the world's megacities that are situated in locations threatened by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, floods, and rising sea level.

Achieving accuracy, generalization-to-contexts, and complexity in theories of business-to-business decision processes

The purpose of this study was to provide a comparison between the demand and supply aspects of live music performances in order to establish whether any differences exist between those aspects regarded as important by management and those critical success factors that visitors regard as important in achieving a memorable visitor experience. This research employed qualitative (supply aspect) and quantitative (demand aspect) research methods. The surveys concerning the visitors (demand) were conducted at six musical events representing diverse genres: classical, R&B, rock, blues, pop, and Afrikaans, where a total of 4,110 questionnaires were administered for all six genres. To determine the critical success factors in terms of what the visitors regarded as being important for a memorable visitor experience, a factor analysis was employed. The qualitative research method was applied by means of interviews to obtain the relevant information from the selected participants. All the data collected in the process were transcribed into text and presented in a narrative form. Creswell's six steps for data analysis and interpretation were utilized to analyze the data. Two themes were identified from the analysis; each of these was differentiated in terms of various categories and subcategories. The results from both the demand and the supply sides were compared with one another and significant differences were identified. The results of this research contribute greatly to existing literature and to the music industry as a whole, as this was the first time that research has been conducted on both the demand and the supply side. Moreover, this was also the first occasion on which both a qualitative and a quantitative research method was employed in research conducted at live music performances and where these were subsequently compared to one another.

There are a growing number of authors arguing the case for integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods within research projects. A study was carried out to identify the amount of published work integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods and to assess the quality of the outcomes of studies purporting to use both methods. Electronic searches of the health literature and critical appraisal of a random sample of papers retrieved was undertaken as well as a hand search of five journals. Over one-quarter (130, or 27%) of the papers from the electronic searches were theoretical discussions about the merits of mixing research methods, 22% (110) were papers purporting to have used mixed methodologies. Critical appraisal of the sample papers showed the qualitative and quantitative elements varied. Where the results of the different parts of the study were integrated, the outcomes from the research were more convincing than they might otherwise have been. Other papers had little discussion about the balance or integration of the different types of results. Hand searching revealed very few mixed method papers. Further work is required to refine and develop ways to mix methods to generate the evidence required to support practice.

<em>This study aims to analyze the effect of Product Branding, Product Quality and Marketing Strategy on Purchasing Decisions on the Batik Creative Industry (Case Study at the Batik MSME Center in Pati Regency). This study uses quantitative research methods with convenience sampling techniques. Convenience Sampling is a way of choosing who is suitable by chance found by researchers who are seen as data sources by distributing questionnaires to consumers of batik SMEs in Pati Regency as many as 100 respondents. The data analysis method used is a test technique, with SPSS 26 statistical test tool. It is found that partially product branding has no significant effect on purchasing decisions, product quality partially has a positive and significant effect on purchasing decisions, and partially marketing strategy has a positive effect. and significant on purchasing decisions. Together, product branding, product quality and marketing strategy have a positive and significant effect on purchasing decisions. The magnitude of the coefficient of determination is 0.407, this means that 40.7% of purchasing decisions can be explained by product branding, product quality and marketing strategy, while the remaining 59.3% is explained by other variables not examined in this study. It is recommended to maintain good product branding, optimize product quality and marketing strategies to improve purchasing decisions</em>

As global citizens, we need to develop environmental awareness to protect the environment. This study aims to compare students’ environmental awareness before and after implementing film circles and investigate their attitudes towards the use of film circles in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom. The participants were 30 dual program students in education and social development, also regarded as pre-service social studies teachers. A mixed-method study, using the one-group pre-test-post-test design, was conducted. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were included. The instruments included film circle lesson plans, an environmental awareness assessment with 3 domains, including environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviours, and an attitude towards film circles questionnaire. The findings revealed that the students believed that their environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviours improved. They also had positive attitudes towards the use of film circles in raising their environmental awareness in the ESP classrooms. This study appears to echo the integration of environmental issues or themes into English classrooms.

This study aimed to analyse and evaluate the functioning of long-term at-home nursing care (LTHNC) based on the opinions of its service providers. Long-term at-home nursing care is a form of care for patients who do not need hospital treatment but need systematic nursing care because of their health problems. LTHNC in Poland involves guaranteed care services financed from universal health insurance contributions pursuant to contracts with the National Health Fund (NHF); the program has existed since 2004. A sequential-explanatory mixed-method design was used. The study was carried out using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. A questionnaire was distributed amongst 1119 care providers (the response rate was 38.2%). The qualitative research comprised semi-structured interviews with ten care providers, namely three nurses managing LTHNC facilities and seven nurses directly providing services as part of LTHNC. The STROBE checklist was used in reporting this study. We found that the main reasons for contracting LTHNC services were the increasing demand for this form of care, financial motives and an opportunity to introduce new organisational solutions. Our study shows that LTHNC is beneficial not only for the patients, but also for the nurses who provide the care. On the one hand, LTHNC provides positive results for patients and their caregivers (family members), and on the other hand, it affords a sense of satisfaction to the nurses and contributes to the development of their professional independence. According to care providers, improving accessibility through increasing the number of contracted services as well as raising the pay for 1day of care per patient may improve the functioning of LTHNC. The results of our study are a source of information for those who organise health care and administer resources on how to improve the functioning of LTHNC.

Metadiscourse marker is one of determining indicators of the quality of the writers� writing. Metadiscourse markers enable the writers to interact with the readers effectively. What commonly happens to many undergraduate students studying English as a foreign language is that they are not able to develop an engagement between themselves, their texts, and their readers. Thus, this study investigates the types of metadiscourse markers used by Unimus EFL learners in final project introduction sections, and markers that are frequently used by them in their writing. By using qualitative and quantitative research method, seven introduction sections of final project of Unimus EFL learners focusing on qualitative and qualitative research methods were chosen purposively. As result, the study revealed that in writing introduction sections, the students used various metadiscourse markers, including interactive resources (transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, and code glosses) and interactional resources (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mensions). Among those categories, interactive resources were found to be frequently used by the learners rather than interactional resources. It means that the writers tended to give attention to and guided the readers through the text by establishing their interpretations explicitly rather than involving the readers in the argument through the use of markers in interactional dimension.