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Manpower demand for construction projects is roughly budgeted based on planners’ personal experience. This research study explores an analytical way to characterise project labour demand profiles throughout project duration. Labour multiplier (LM) approach was advanced to characterise the labour demand profiles. Optimistic, most-likely, and pessimistic LM and labour demand profiles at 10 project stages are defined by using manpower and payment data derived from 91 completed public construction projects under 21 project types in Hong Kong. The root-mean-square-error and root-mean-squared-logarithmic-error are used to quantify the difference between the budgeted and the benchmarked manpower. A text-book example is successfully adopted to demonstrate the steps of the proposed approach, validated by two practical projects. This research is the first to study the use of LM to characterise optimistic, most-likely, pessimistic resource demand profiles for validating manpower resource budgets. Also, the approach provides a basis to evaluate the reasonableness of planned resource.

The field of construction labor productivity (CLP) has witnessed a remarkable growth in scholarly research, presenting both opportunities and challenges due to the diverse focus and exponential increase in literature. This study aims to systematically review the burgeoning body of CLP literature, proposing an approach to tackle the complexity of the domain. Utilizing the text mining technique of Hierarchical Latent Dirichlet Allocation (HLDA), an automatic clustering method was developed to analyze and categorize the corpus of CLP research. The methodology involved a comprehensive extraction of 591 scholarly articles from scientific databases. These articles, spanning from 1973 to 2023, were subjected to HLDA topic modeling. This process generated a detailed three-layer, tree-like topic model, comprising three primary topics and 26 sub-topics, organized through the nested Chinese restaurant process (nCRP). The study advances theoretical and practical understanding by applying hierarchical topic modeling to construction project management literature and identifying key industry challenges.

The aim of this study was to examine the internal consistency and factor structure of the Traditional Chinese version of the Impact on Family Scale in order to make cross cultural comparisons. The Traditional Chinese version of the scale was administered to 137 Hong Kong Chinese parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Two short versions of the scale based on 15 and 11 items were examined to investigate whether the single factor of the short scale from the United States could be replicated. The shortened version of the Impact on Family Scale has the potential to be useful for cross-cultural comparisons between United States and Traditional Chinese samples.

Background: This study investigated perceived quality of life (QoL) of community-dwelling middle-aged adults (30-50 years) with an intellectual disability and/or developmental disability living in rural or urban areas in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia. The specific aim of the current paper was to provide a descriptive evidence base of QoL and its specific domains by various key demographic characteristics of middle-aged individuals. This cohort is likely to have either experienced or reached adulthood during and after large-scale deinstitutionalisation in Australia. Methods and procedures: A cross-sectional design was utilised, based on the QoL-Q survey, testing domains of satisfaction; Competence/Productivity; Empowerment/Independence; and social belonging/community integration. The survey included demographic questions and was distributed to participants through disability support agencies across two states. The final sample included 291 respondents. Results: The overall QoL-Q scores ranged from 3.0 to 29.5 (Mean = 20.4, SD , 4.1), with considerable variation in mean scores both across and within domains. The two demographic areas that showed greatest predictive value for QoL were work status and accommodation issues. The loss of agency and control in choice of co-residents influenced perceived QoL for empowerment and independence domain of QoL-Q. Conclusions: The findings highlight QoL issues associated with policy decisions and support programmes for middle-aged adults. The two key recommendations arising from the project are that future planning for post-retirement or reduced working hours needs to commence at a much younger age than currently expected, and more attention needs to focus on facilitating individual decision-making and choice within shared accommodation options.

The present study explored the relationships between student engagement and mathematics achievement for 295,416 15-year-old students from 11,767 secondary schools in 34 countries who participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012. Affective engagement was measured by students' mathematics interest (InterestMath) and perceived usefulness of schooling (PerceptionSch), behavioral engagement by behaviors facilitating mathematics learning (BehaviorMath) and participation in mathematics learning activities (ActivitiesMath), and cognitive engagement by openness (Openness) and perseverance (Perseverance) in problem-solving. Results showed that students who were more engaged had higher levels of academic achievement, with cognitive engagement having the strongest association with achievement. Results also showed that students who were highly engaged in two domains had higher achievement levels than peers who were engaged in only one domain in six pairwise comparisons (InterestMath-BehaviorMath, InterestMath-Openness, InterestMath-Perseverance, PerceptionSch-BehaviorMath, PerceptionSch-Openness, PerceptionSch-Perseverance). These results highlighted the importance of a whole-school based approach in enhancing student achievement.

The efficiency of the traditional concrete curing process on site is low, due to the difficulties in providing continuous supervision and control of the curing environment, leading to considerable variation in the curing regimes experienced by different concrete pours. To enhance concrete curing practice, technologies have been harnessed which eliminate human involvement enabling more rigorous control of the environmental conditions affecting curing, but the potential for Internet of Things (IoT) technologies had yet to be explored in this context. This research study examined an IoT-based concrete curing control system based on sensor technologies invented for monitoring and controlling the moisture content of hardening concrete to the levels appropriate for good quality hardened concrete. Based on on-site experiments, the performance of this IoT-based method was compared with the performance of traditional curing methods. The results indicate that the system invented outperforms the traditional approach both in terms of concrete curing quality and time spent on supervision.

Little is known about the experience of Chinese parents of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) living in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Seventy-five parents of children (aged 6 months-18 years) with ASD diagnoses completed the Family Quality of Life Scale. Forty-five parents from the original surveyed cohort, also participated in semi-structured interviews. Parents' perceptions of their child's disability were influenced both by their cultural background and by the limited and expensive, pre- and post-diagnostic services available. Longer waiting times to diagnosis were associated with lower emotional well-being and perceived disability-related support. Clinicians are encouraged to become part of the support network for parents of children with ASD, to help parents to adjust to caring for their child.

Project risks must be managed to deliver construction projects on time and within budget. In recent years, the New Engineering Contract (NEC) provides an alternate contracting method for procuring construction projects. As stipulated in the NEC contract, NEC risk register must be used to record any project risks. The risk register is designed to record each risk item in the context of textual description, likelihood, and consequence. However, it is time-consuming to identify, quantify, and analyse NEC project risks based on experience, questionnaire, simulation, and data-mining approach. Any method to fully utilise the records of NEC risk registers of past projects for managing NEC project risks remains unexplored. As such, a data-driven approach is proposed to categorise common risks of NEC projects and to analyse risk rating of risk categories by combining the use of text mining analysis and decision tree analysis. A practical case study in Hong Kong is used to illustrate the method of application. Top four common types of NEC project risks, which are ground and utilities, design information, structures, and workmanship, were identified, quantified, and analysed. The new approach helps NEC project planners to identify, quantify, and analyse NEC project risks time-efficiently.