Influence of country and city images on students’ perception of host universities and their satisfaction with the assigned destination for their exchange programmes

ABSTRACT: This research focuses on the effect that country image, city image and university image has on students’ a priori satisfaction with the assigned destination for their international exchange programme (Bachelor and Master). In particular, this study establishes six hypotheses related to the causal relationships among the different typologies of image and their effects on students’ satisfaction with the assigned destination to study at least one semester in a host university. In order to contrast these hypotheses, a quantitative research was carried out in the Spanish city of Santander (Spain), by obtaining a sample of 245 international students who participated in an exchange programme at the University of Cantabria. The research findings are: (1) students’ satisfaction with the assigned destination is positively influenced by the university image; (2) the university image is positively influenced by the city image; and (3) the city image is positively influenced by the country image

Mapping the World of Consumption: Computational Linguistics Analysis of the Google Text Corpus

This article describes a method that develops overviews to bring out the relationships between any loosely connected set of actors/objects. The study examines 37 principal actors involved in the processes of consumption (consumers, brands, ads, stores…), and how they are described on the internet in the Google corpus of linguistic data. The verbs used with each actor constitute a profile of the behaviors that people ascribe to that actor. The analysis synthesizes these profiles into pictures using multidimensional scaling. Separate analyses examine actors as (a) the subject of the verbs, and (b) the object of the verbs. This reliability check reveals highly congruent pictures of the relationship between actors. The paper subsequently examines the most distinctive behaviors of contrasting actors to further understand selected parts of the picture (e.g., how products differ from services). Web chatter is unrestricted in topic, which is produced by people and for people. Therefore, the corpus is a rich source of data, not just for marketing research - as illustrated here - but for almost any branch of research into human affairs