Lynne Lee’s research while affiliated with Ming Chuan University and other places

This study explores the challenges faced by Peruvian women entrepreneurs during COVID-19 pandemic, their emotional responses, and coping mechanisms. Structured interviews with 51 women entrepreneurs were analysed using thematic analysis, framed by social cognitive theory. Seven main challenges emerged: disruptions to operations, financial instability, health and safety concerns, business model adaptation, workforce management, external factors, and emotional impacts. Resilience and adaptability were demonstrated through community support, digital tools, and innovative resource management. Findings suggest the need for tailored financial support, enhanced digital literacy, robust support networks, mental health resources, and adaptive leadership strategies. Policy recommendations include the development of gender-sensitive policies and simplified regulatory procedures. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of women's entrepreneurial journeys during a global crisis, offering insights into unique challenges and adaptive strategies to inform future support systems and policies for women entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Many universities around the world were forced to lock down and students had to continue their learning in online environments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers thus had to adopt effective and appropriate online teaching pedagogy integrated with related educational technologies to help their students achieve satisfactory learning outcomes in these courses. In addition, the world-wide problems of high failure level and dropout rates in programming courses challenge both teachers and students. Aiming to develop students’ practical programming skills, commitment to learning, and reduce learning disengagement, the researchers behind this study adopted two teaching approaches, integrating online partial pair programming (PPP) and socially shared metacognitive regulation (SSMR), to explore their effects on students’ learning performance in an online programming course. A quasi-experiment was implemented to explore the effects of online PPP and SSMR. The participants comprised three classes of students, all from non-information or non-computer departments taking a compulsory course titled ‘Programming Design’. The experimental groups included the first class (G1) simultaneously receiving the online PPP and SSMR intervention and the second class (G2) receiving only the online SSMR intervention. The third class (G3) received a traditional teaching method (non-PPP and non-SSMR) delivered online and served as the control group. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. Experimental results show that the SSMR group (G2) demonstrated significantly better development of programming skills and commitment to learning than the control group (G3). However, the expected effects of online PPP on improving students’ learning were not found. The implications of designing pedagogies with PPP and SSMR in an online programming course for decision-makers in governments and universities, researchers, and teachers implementing online courses, particularly programming courses, are provided and discussed.

The study aims to prioritize critical climate components for school improvement. A psychometrically validated instrument named the Chinese “Organizational Climate Diagnostic Instrument for Junior High Schools” (OCDI-JH) was used to diagnose climate factors through expert judgments and fuzzy DEMATEL-based ANP. Results of the study identified the six factors clustered under the two dimensions of ‘Safety’ (D1) or ‘Academic emphasis’ (D2) should be given particular attention for school effectiveness. The established climate diagnosis appraisal computed by fuzzy DEMATEL-based ANP can be extended to other school regions for systematically developing school climate based on contextually specific needs and concerns. Future research studies are expected to provide incremental and value-added contributions to the competitive advantages of Taiwan’s junior high school education.

Cause-related marketing (CRM) has become increasingly popular and widely adopted by large companies. However, not much attention has been paid to the effect of CRM on small or unknown online retailers. As ethical concerns about the Internet continue to rise, consumers' perceptions regarding the ethics of online retailers (CPEOR) become important when making a purchase decision. This research uses the self-signaling theory to examine how online retailers’ information management and promotional strategy (CRM vs. Price Discount) may emit signals and impact on the consumers’ repurchase intention. It was assumed that a high CPEOR would work better with a CRM-based strategy, which is fundamentally aligning in ethics. However, the experimental results surprisingly revealed that when CPEOR was high, the consumers’ repurchase intention increased in the case of a Price Discount-based promotion when compared to a CRM-based promotion; the effect was the opposite when consumers’ CPEOR was low. ANCOVA was used to analyze the data while setting certain variables as covariates. This research is a meaningful contribution to the literature and serves as an important reference for e-commerce practitioners to understand how they can wisely manage the information on the online storefront to signal their consumers and create an incremental value for the business.

The study was designed as a linked two-phase investigation, aiming to psychometrically develop and validate a Chinese version of the “Organizational Climate Diagnostic Instrument for Junior High Schools” (OCDI-JH) for use in Taiwan. Through extensive literature reviews, the complex phenomena of school climate were decomposed into a priori school climate construct in the first phase of the study. The data were collected from two separate samples of 287 junior high school principals/teachers/administrators for exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and 295 for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), which were performed to scrutinize the psychometric properties of the OCDI-JH comprising 22 items clustered under five dimensions of (a) Safety (three items), (b) Academic (three items), (c) Relationships (seven items), (d) Institutional Environment (five items), and (e) Leadership (four items). Importance-Performance and Gap Analysis (IPGA) was applied in the second-phase elicitation study on 15 school faculty members to detect climate factors to be strengthened in a selected junior high school for school improvement. Focusing explicitly on contextually specific evaluation that facilitate school improvement, the OCDI-JH offers promise as a robust school climate diagnostic appraisal with practical implications for improving school effectiveness and implications for future research directions.