Tian Meng

Arts-Based Research Methods for Educational Researchers is a book for early-career and established scholars who aim to use the arts to spark new ideas and empower participants in educational research. It will allow readers to conduct arts-based research and phenomenography research in their own projects. The book starts with a brief history of the arts in research, going on to provide an in-depth understanding of the philosophical foundations of arts-based research - different research designs, material preparation, ethical considerations, data collection, analysis and reporting. Chapters highlight the impact of arts-based research, how it can be used to facilitate positive changes in educational research, practice, and policymaking. Tian suggests avenues for those who want to further develop these methods, guiding readers to reflect on their positionality and ethical issues involved in the research process. This insightful book is ideal for early career and experienced educational researchers who use qualitative methods in their inquiries. It offers a reader-friendly guide to methodology for scholars, educators as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students.

The sudden outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 has caused a huge impact on the Chinese residents' health and economic level. In the pandemic background, the country and its institutions have introduced pandemic-related insurance to stabilize the national situation. At this stage, insurance has played an increasingly important role in social life. With the popularization of insurance, the idea of buying insurance to avoid risk has gradually become popular among people. Among them, the New Rural Cooperative Medical System has been farmers' common choice. The NRCMS, a mutual aid system created by farmers spontaneously in the country, plays a great role in guaranteeing farmers access to basic health services, alleviating poverty caused by disease and returning to poverty due to disease, and promoting poverty alleviation and rural revitalization. Given this backdrop, we study the efficiency of the NRCMS that can effectively promote poverty alleviation and rural revitalization and ensure the people's happy life. Implementing the Data Envelopment Analysis, we find that technological progress is one of the main factors influencing the efficiency of the NRCMS. Therefore, it is important to improve the technology for providing the efficiency of the NRCMS and promoting the happiness of the society.

This paper proposes the models of allocating defense and recovery resources for spatially embedded networks, respectively, both of which consider the length of links as the allocation cost. In the defense model, the amount of defense resources required for each zone depends on the total length of the links they contain. It is found that dispersed allocation performs better and that parameters that allow for a uniform distribution of link lengths produce better results. In the recovery model, a shortest link hierarchical recovery strategy is proposed and proved to be more effective. In this strategy, the number of repaired links plays a decisive role in the recovery results, while the total length of the links does not seem to matter when the number is constant. In addition, a number of different parameters are adopted to validate the qualitative conclusions. These models might yield insights into studying and protecting spatial infrastructure systems.