Framing COVID-19: Fear appeal messaging in print media in Namibia and South Africa

Fear appeals are persuasive messages that attempt to arouse fear to motivate or influence behaviour change and are widely used in health promotion. This chapter analyses how fear appeal messaging was used by the Namibian and South African mainstream print media to communicate COVID-19 during the two countries' main waves of the pandemic. Specifically, we examine the framing strategies that the media used to persuade behaviour change. Mainstream media has enormous potential to influence health-related behaviour and perceptions. Therefore, it is compelling to examine the mainstream media's framing of COVID-19. This study draws on framing theory to examine media frames and the use of fear appeal in the coverage of COVID-19 in the top English-language newspapers in the two countries. We argue in this chapter that using fear appeals in public health communication by the media may be counterproductive as a tool of persuasion. © 2022 by Sarah Chiumbu, Nkosinothando Mpofu and Konosoang Sobane.

Promoting Employees' Mental Health in the Post-COVID New Normal: Using a Peer Support Model

It is evident that stress and mental health conditions can negatively affect employees' job performance and productivity, work engagement, communication, physical capability, and daily functioning. Employer organizations have implemented several innovative methods to improve in-person and virtual workplace mental health promotion programs. In 2019, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a guideline on Mental Health in the Workplace. However, there is limited research on using a peer support model in organizations as an alternative and complementary approach to promote employee psychological well-being. The history and principles of a peer support model will be introduced and implied as an effective resource to employees. An overview of the evidence-based practice in a peer support program in mental health promotion will be provided. Finally, ethical principles, legal issues, and best practices of the peer support program will be presented, especially in a virtual format and in a social media platform. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Human Resource Considerations for Supporting Employees with Neurological Disorders: Multiple Sclerosis and Spinal Cord Injury

It is important for human resource (HR) teams to have the ability to appropriately identify and support the transition-to-work accommodation needs of employees with neurological disabilities as they return to work post-coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This chapter discusses the potential biopsychological areas of consideration for human resource teams to focus their support on employees with spinal cord injury (SCI) or multiple sclerosis (MS), whose experience of work or the symptoms of these conditions have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting lockdowns. Potential short-term and long-term considerations in a post-COVID-19 workplace that focus on health-related work accommodations are discussed. The resulting effectiveness or success of such transition-to-work outcomes that focus on employees with neurological disorders (ewNDs) are suggested to be better evaluated by human resource teams using the lens of employee organizational commitment as it impacts employee retention. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Data wrangling for virtual attendance : A conceptual model

With the onset and increase in the number of online courses and blended mode of delivery owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a need for an accurate and consolidated online attendance registers that can easily be queried at Botswana Accountancy College. As the attendees switch access devices or when the experience connectivity issues during a remotely conducted class, multiple entries of the same attendee are logged to the Microsoft Teams attendance registers. Additionally, the format of the downloaded attendance registers is different from the current attendance management systems, making attendance accounting a cumbersome task. A data wrangling model therefore will assist in the restructuring of the downloaded registers by eliminating duplicates, reshaping the same for ease of querying and consolidation. The success of the wrangling model will simplify attendance reporting, free-up the lecturers of the manual task of attendance accounting and coincidentally eliminating the human error element.