Can creative web survey questionnaire design improve the response quality?

The main goal of this experimental research is to explore the opportunities and challenges when taking a creative approach to web survey questionnaire design in order to improve the response rate and quality of responses. Two versions of a questionnaire related to attitudes toward academic procrastination are created; a conventional one and a questionnaire with a popup text message at the end describing the levels of procrastination of each student depending on the scores of the answers and grades of each student. Each student of a total population of 3030 receives randomly an e-mail invitation with a link to one of the two web survey questionnaires. A comparison on response rate and quality of responses between these two questionnaires is conducted. Even though no significant statistical increase of response rate appears to be in the second questionnaire, quality of responses in terms of dropouts is significant lower

Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch

On stock price overreactions: frequency, seasonality and information content

© 2019 The Author(s). This paper explores the frequency of price overreactions in the US stock market by focusing on the Dow Jones Industrial Index over the period 1990–2017. It uses two different methods (static and dynamic) to detect overreactions and then carries out various statistical tests (both parametric and non-parametric) including correlation analysis, augmented Dickey–Fuller tests (ADF), Phillips-Perron (PP) tests, Granger causality tests, and regression analysis with dummy variables. The following hypotheses are tested: whether or not the frequency of overreactions varies over time (H1), is informative about crises (H2) and/or price movements (H3), and exhibits seasonality (H4). The null cannot be rejected except for H4, i.e., no seasonality is found. On the whole, it appears that the frequency of overreactions can provide useful information about market developments. A sharp increase in the number of overreactions occurs in crisis periods. The frequency of overreactions is linked to the VIX index and therefore could be used as an alternative measure of market sentiment and market fear, and it also affects stock returns. Further, our findings provide evidence supporting market inefficiency since price predictability can allow investors to design profitable trading strategies; in addition, the fact that the frequency of overreactions varies over time is consistent with the Adaptive Expectations Hypothesis.The second-named author gratefully acknowledgesfinancial support from the Ministry ofEducation and Science of Ukraine [0117U003936]