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The purpose of this paper is to assess the validity of the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) in an Iranian population to determine its efficacy in identifying children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who parents have Persian-speaking parents.

A case–control study was performed in March until July 2020 in Hamadan city, Iran. The case group was children were examined by the clinicians used a coding scheme based on the DSM-IV criteria for ASD. The control group was all children in the family, including healthy siblings, were asked to participate in the study. The reliability, content and face validity were performed to assess the psychometric properties of the tool. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to evaluate the four-dimensional structure of the tool (Scores A, B, C and D). Statistical analysis was performed using AMOS for SPSS 21, and the statistical significant level was less than 0.05.

The quantitative content validity analysis revealed that the mean of content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI) for all domains was 0.94 and 0.91, respectively. For CFA, four domains A, B, C and D were used and demonstrated a good fit (CFI = 0.92 and RMSEA = 0.06). The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) in domains A, B (verbal), C and D were 100%. For domain B (non-verbal), the sensitivity, specificity, PPV and NPV were 86.7%, 100%, 100% and 88.2%, respectively.

This study showed that ADI-R has sufficient ability to discriminate between children with ASD and those with no psychiatric diagnosis, and it is a reliable tool in Iran. The sensitivity and specificity for correctly diagnosing ASD was high, regardless of the age and cognitive level of the examiner.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper on psychometric properties of ADI-R in children with ASD.

Understanding the factors that influence individuals’ adherence to social distancing is critical to effective policymaking in respiratory pandemics such as COVID-19. This study aims to explore the role of social factors in relation to social distancing measures.

Stratified convenience sampling was used in this survey research, involving 450 adults residing in both rural and urban areas of Aligodarz County, Lorestan, Iran.

The findings showed that approximately 14% of participants did not adhere to any of the assessed social distancing behaviors, while only around 30% adhered to all four assessed behaviors. On average, participants reported having 5.13 (SD = 3.60) close physical contact within the 24 h prior to completing the questionnaire. Bridging social capital and gender emerged as the most frequently observed predictors across the assessed social distancing measures. Additionally, age, employment status and residential setting were identified as influential factors for some of the evaluated measures.

This study contributes to the field by highlighting that the likelihood of non-adherence to social distancing measures tends to increase among male participants, those aged above 60, employed individuals, urban residents and those with a higher level of bridging social capital.

The purpose of this study is to identify factors that affect teachers’ motivation to use information and communications technology (ICT) in the classroom. The study aims to determine the extent to which selected variables, such as personal experience, school environment and technological factors, influenced teachers’ tendency to accept and utilize ICT in teaching.

The study used primary data sources from Mazandaran, Iran, that included field notes and semi-structured interviews.

Results revealed that adequate support from administrators, directives to teachers to use ICT, appropriate ICT skills and knowledge as well as adequate resources were important factors that influenced the utilization of ICT in the classroom. Findings also showed that insufficient technical support discouraged teachers from using ICT in teaching, while increasing adequate equipment and technical support in schools encouraged teachers in this respect.

Because this study was conducted on a small number of participants, its findings may not apply fully to other educational institutions.

The results from this study would be helpful to educational departments and institutions in their formulation of policies to encourage the use of ICT in education. The findings would also give a better insight of what constitutes an environment that is conducive for learning where ICT is integrated into the classroom.

By focusing on teachers’ intention, this study provides important insights into which factors influence teacher attitude to use ICT into classroom. As a result, the finding will help the development of e-learning quality enhancement and assurance strategies.

Load forecasting is important to any electrical grid, but for the developing and third-world countries with power shortages, load forecasting is essential. When planed load shedding programs are implemented to face power shortage, a noticeable distortion to the load curves will happen, and this will make the load forecasting more difficult.

In this paper, a new load forecasting model is developed that can detect the effect of planned load shedding on the power consumption and estimate the load curve behavior without the shedding and with different shedding programs. A neuro-Fuzzy technique is used for the model, which is trained and tested with real data taken from one of the 11 KV feeders in Najaf city in Iraq to forecast the load for two days ahead for the four seasons. Load, temperature, time of the day and load shedding schedule for one month before are the input parameters for the training, and the load forecasting data for two days are estimated by the model.

To verify the model, the load is forecasted without shedding by the proposed model and compared to real data without shedding and the difference is acceptable.

The proposed model provides acceptable forecasting with the load shedding effect available and better than other models. The proposed model provides expected behavior of load with different shedding programs an issue helps to select the appropriate shedding program. The proposed model is useful to estimate the real demands by assuming load shedding hours to be zero and forecast the load. This is important in places suffer from grid problems and cannot supply full loads to calculate the peak demands as the case in Iraq.

The purpose of this research is to explore a possible relationship between the presence of authentic organisational leadership and the leadership development experience.

This study uses a qualitative exploratory hybrid research design which draws on data from multiple sources. Data were collected by means of semi-structured interviews, document analysis and non-participant observations across two case study organisations in Saudi Arabia.

The authors' findings suggest that the presence of authentic leadership (AL) within an organisation is a significant factor in the leadership development experience. This study also highlights the key importance of advancing leadership development theory that is holistic and comprehensive.

The study was conducted as case studies within a specific social context. Findings cannot be generalised but offer valuable direction for future research.

The research advances leadership development theory by highlighting the inadequacy of the person-focussed perspective and offering exploratory evidence for the role of social context, organisational leadership and organisational artefacts in the leadership development process.

Education is a human right and access to high quality education is key to sustainable socioeconomic development. Improving the quality of higher education institutes is essential for generating the productive human resources. Assessing the quality of higher education from the students’ perspective can be considered a crucial factor in the monitoring of service quality in universities. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the quality of educational services in a higher education institute, the Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences (KUMS), in the west of Iran.

A multistage sampling method was used to select 346 students from the KUMS, who were enrolled in the second semester of the academic year 2015-2016. The SERVQUAL questionnaire was used to gather data on students’ perceptions and their expectations about the quality of educational services. The authors used a statistical significance level of 0.05 to examine the gap between the students’ expectations and their perceptions of service quality in five dimensions, namely tangibles, responsiveness, reliability, empathy and assurance.

The results showed that there was a negative service quality gap in all five dimensions. The overall mean score of students’ expectations and their perceptions was 3.19±0.44 and 2.4±0.45, respectively. The score gap between the overall mean score of perceptions and expectations of students was −0.79, which was statistically significant (p<0.0001). The highest and lowest quality gaps were related to the assurance (−0.84) and tangible (−0.70) dimensions, respectively.

The study indicated that the quality of educational services provided in the KUMS did not meet students’ expectations in five dimensions of service quality. Thus, it warrants further investigations to determine how to improve the quality of educational services in higher education institutes such as the KUMS.