Profiling Consumers: The Role of Personal Values in Consumer Preferences

Models of consumer choice often fail to explain why individual consumers are drawn towards different products. Yet, with the growing use of personalised marketing, an understanding of individual consumer motivations is increasingly relevant. Where research investigates the effect of psychometrics on consumer choice, the focus often lies on personality. However, the relationship between personality and consumer choice is notoriously spurious. In addition, consumer choice increasingly requires active decision making in today’s rich product environment. Personality offers limited insights into drivers of such consumer decisions. Personal values may be a more suitable psychometric. Theoretical work on values indicates their relevance in decision making and behaviour. Values describe a person’s underlying goals and ambitions, reflecting their core needs and drivers. This thesis explores whether values meaningfully explain why consumers prefer products at the category, product variant and brand level, and investigates the predictive strength of values in different consumer choice scenarios. It does so by examining purchase records, social media activity, and self-report data to test a series of predictive, structural and group differences models. The thesis contributes an original conceptual and methodological framework for assessing the role of values in consumer behaviours. It further contributes a text based measure of values to ease application in consumer settings. Results suggest that: 1. Values are correlated with preference for product category (Chapter 4); 2. Individual differences in values significantly predict product choice in the supermarket (Chapter 5); 3. Individual differences in consumer brand affiliation predict values with moderate accuracy (Chapter 6). These findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the role of values in consumer preference and their feasibility and usefulness for application in personalisation and consumer insight

Scoring a forced-choice image-based assessment of personality: A comparison of machine learning, regression, and summative approaches

Recent years have seen rapid advancements in the way that personality is measured, resulting in a number of innovative predictive measures being proposed, including using features extracted from videos and social media profiles. In the context of selection, game- and image-based assessments of personality are emerging, which can overcome issues like social desirability bias, lack of engagement and low response rates that are associated with traditional self-report measures. Forced-choice formats, where respondents are asked to rank responses, can also mitigate issues such as acquiescence and social desirability bias. Previously, we reported on the development of a gamified forced-choice image-based assessment of the Big Five personality traits created for use in selection, using Lasso regression for the scoring algorithms. In this study, we compare the machine-learning-based Lasso approach to ordinary least squares regression, as well as the summative approach that is typical of forced-choice formats. We find that the Lasso approach performs best in terms of generalisability and convergent validity, although the other methods have greater discriminate validity. We recommend the use of predictive Lasso regression models for scoring forced-choice image-based measures of personality over the other approaches. Potential further studies are suggested

Stronger Together: Personality, Intelligence and the Assessment of Career Potential

Personality and intelligence have a long history in applied psychology, with research dating back more than 100 years. In line, early developments in industrial-organizational psychology were largely founded on the predictive power of personality and intelligence measures vis-à-vis career-related outcomes. However, despite a wealth of evidence in support of their utility, the concepts, theories, and measures of personality and intelligence are still widely underutilized in organizations, even when these express a commitment to making data-driven decisions about employees and leaders. This paper discusses the value of personality and intelligence to understand individual differences in career potential, and how to increase the adoption of theories and tools for evaluating personality and intelligence in real-world organizational contexts. Although personality and intelligence are distinct constructs, the assessment of career potential is incomplete without both

Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?

A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation as the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor reveals several weaknesses in this commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the mismatch between citing and cited documents, the deceptive display of three decimals that belies the real precision, and the absence of confidence intervals. These are minor issues that are easily amended and should be corrected, but more substantive improvements are needed. There are indications that the scientific community seeks and needs better certification of journal procedures to improve the quality of published science. Comprehensive certification of editorial and review procedures could help ensure adequate procedures to detect duplicate and fraudulent submissions.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, 6 table

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Magnetic resonance imaging in children: common problems and possible solutions for lung and airways imaging

Pediatric chest MRI is challenging. High-resolution scans of the lungs and airways are compromised by long imaging times, low lung proton density and motion. Low signal is a problem of normal lung. Lung abnormalities commonly cause increased signal intenstities. Among the most important factors for a successful MRI is patient cooperation, so the long acquisition times make patient preparation crucial. Children usually have problems with long breath-holds and with the concept of quiet breathing. Young children are even more challenging because of higher cardiac and respiratory rates giving motion blurring. For these reasons, CT has often been preferred over MRI for chest pediatric imaging. Despite its drawbacks, MRI also has advantages over CT, which justifies its further development and clinical use. The most important advantage is the absence of ionizing radiation, which allows frequent scanning for short- and long-term follow-up studie

Radar vision in the mapping of forest biodiversity from space

Recent progress in remote sensing provides much-needed, large-scale spatio-temporal information on habitat structures important for biodiversity conservation. Here we examine the potential of a newly launched satellite-borne radar system (Sentinel-1) to map the biodiversity of twelve taxa across five temperate forest regions in central Europe. We show that the sensitivity of radar to habitat structure is similar to that of airborne laser scanning (ALS), the current gold standard in the measurement of forest structure. Our models of different facets of biodiversity reveal that radar performs as well as ALS; median R² over twelve taxa by ALS and radar are 0.51 and 0.57 respectively for the first non-metric multidimensional scaling axes representing assemblage composition. We further demonstrate the promising predictive ability of radar-derived data with external validation based on the species composition of birds and saproxylic beetles. Establishing new area-wide biodiversity monitoring by remote sensing will require the coupling of radar data to stratified and standardized collected local species data

Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on surgery for indeterminate thyroid nodules (THYCOVID): a retrospective, international, multicentre, cross-sectional study

Background Since its outbreak in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has diverted resources from non-urgent and elective procedures, leading to diagnosis and treatment delays, with an increased number of neoplasms at advanced stages worldwide. The aims of this study were to quantify the reduction in surgical activity for indeterminate thyroid nodules during the COVID-19 pandemic; and to evaluate whether delays in surgery led to an increased occurrence of aggressive tumours.Methods In this retrospective, international, cross-sectional study, centres were invited to participate in June 22, 2022; each centre joining the study was asked to provide data from medical records on all surgical thyroidectomies consecutively performed from Jan 1, 2019, to Dec 31, 2021. Patients with indeterminate thyroid nodules were divided into three groups according to when they underwent surgery: from Jan 1, 2019, to Feb 29, 2020 (global prepandemic phase), from March 1, 2020, to May 31, 2021 (pandemic escalation phase), and from June 1 to Dec 31, 2021 (pandemic decrease phase). The main outcomes were, for each phase, the number of surgeries for indeterminate thyroid nodules, and in patients with a postoperative diagnosis of thyroid cancers, the occurrence of tumours larger than 10 mm, extrathyroidal extension, lymph node metastases, vascular invasion, distant metastases, and tumours at high risk of structural disease recurrence. Univariate analysis was used to compare the probability of aggressive thyroid features between the first and third study phases. The study was registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT05178186.Findings Data from 157 centres (n=49 countries) on 87 467 patients who underwent surgery for benign and malignant thyroid disease were collected, of whom 22 974 patients (18 052 [78 center dot 6%] female patients and 4922 [21 center dot 4%] male patients) received surgery for indeterminate thyroid nodules. We observed a significant reduction in surgery for indeterminate thyroid nodules during the pandemic escalation phase (median monthly surgeries per centre, 1 center dot 4 [IQR 0 center dot 6-3 center dot 4]) compared with the prepandemic phase (2 center dot 0 [0 center dot 9-3 center dot 7]; p<0 center dot 0001) and pandemic decrease phase (2 center dot 3 [1 center dot 0-5 center dot 0]; p<0 center dot 0001). Compared with the prepandemic phase, in the pandemic decrease phase we observed an increased occurrence of thyroid tumours larger than 10 mm (2554 [69 center dot 0%] of 3704 vs 1515 [71 center dot 5%] of 2119; OR 1 center dot 1 [95% CI 1 center dot 0-1 center dot 3]; p=0 center dot 042), lymph node metastases (343 [9 center dot 3%] vs 264 [12 center dot 5%]; OR 1 center dot 4 [1 center dot 2-1 center dot 7]; p=0 center dot 0001), and tumours at high risk of structural disease recurrence (203 [5 center dot 7%] of 3584 vs 155 [7 center dot 7%] of 2006; OR 1 center dot 4 [1 center dot 1-1 center dot 7]; p=0 center dot 0039).Interpretation Our study suggests that the reduction in surgical activity for indeterminate thyroid nodules during the COVID-19 pandemic period could have led to an increased occurrence of aggressive thyroid tumours. However, other compelling hypotheses, including increased selection of patients with aggressive malignancies during this period, should be considered. We suggest that surgery for indeterminate thyroid nodules should no longer be postponed even in future instances of pandemic escalation.Funding None.Copyright (c) 2023 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved