Impact of Marketing Strategy, Customer Perceived Value, Customer Satisfaction, Trust, and Commitment on Customer Loyalty

This research explored the relationships between the marketing mix, customer perceived value, relationship quality (customer satisfaction, trust, and commitment), and customer loyalty for Taiwanese retail stores. The study employed systematic random sampling to select 593 subjects from the Hanshin department store and the 7-Eleven convenience store, as well as the Wellcome supermarket, the Carrefour hypermarket, and the Costco warehouse club. The final number of usable questionnaires was 500. A four-part questionnaire was employed in this study and included customer shopping characteristic variables, the marketing mix scale, the customer perceived value scale, the relationship quality and customer loyalty scale. Data collected from the questionnaire was analyzed with PASW Statistics 18 to test the hypotheses. Descriptive statistics, internal consistency reliability, exploratory factor analysis, Pearson\u27s correlation, multiple regression and ANOVA statistical operations were performed. The results tested the four hypotheses (3 sub-hypotheses per hypothesis) and determined the answers for the research question. The findings indicated that trust, commitment, price deal and perceived quality significantly and positively influenced customer loyalty, word-of-mouth communication, price insensitivity, and purchase intention. Findings also indicated that distribution intensity had a positive relationship, while advertising spending had a negative relationship with customer word-of-mouth communications. Customer satisfaction was a significant factor only for purchase intention. Taiwanese retail store shoppers are highly trustful and committed to the store. Retailers should deliver more value to shoppers through promotion activities (price deals and advertising campaigns) to build a long-term and mutually profitability relationship with shoppers. The limitations and future research recommendations are also included in this study

Hepatic Portal Venous Gas in a COPD Patient

Although hepatic portal venous gas (HPVG) is usually associated with a grave prognosis, favorable outcomes have been reported in some conditions. A rare case demonstrates the transient occurrence of HPVG in a patient with aerophagia when chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) occurred, and disappearance after symptoms resolved. The patient's recovery was uneventful and he did not suffer from any abdominal catastrophe. These findings may support the mechanical theory for the occurrence of benign HPVG

A Study of the Changing Process of Knowledge-Sharing Habits

In this research, we explore the impacts encountered by teachers with respect to sharing their teaching material and knowledge as a college implements the “Faculty-Student Knowledge Sharing Platform (FSKSP).” In addition, we report the experience and progress they acquire when choosing to change their traditional, habitual teaching and sharing modes. The case study focuses on a college of technology well-renowned among universities in Taiwan for its total and integral electronization of teaching. The study shows that sharing knowledge with students through the FSKSP is very different in nature from the long-established verbal knowledge sharing in classroom lectures. In choosing to use the FSKSP and making changes to the interaction between faculty and students, the teachers go through the stages of: Protection of professional dignity and expertise, panic with regard to whether or not to make changes, compromise with respect to the trends in information technology, and hesitation about whether to march forward or turn back. The research findings serve as a good reference for college administrators as they advocate the introduction of information technology to construct the FSKSP

The history and use of music in Chinese Christian schools

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universityhttps://archive.org/details/historyuseofmusi00chu

'Youth': Victim, Troublemaker or Peacebuilder? Constructions of Youth-in-Conflict in United Nations and World Bank Youth Policies

Examination of how the United Nations ('UN') and World Bank construct youth affected by armed conflict and political instability (referred to as 'youth-in-conflict') in their respective youth policies reveals that the UN constructs youth-in-conflict as 'victims' requiring protection. This results in humanitarian/rights-based approaches to youth development. In contrast, the World Bank constructs youth-in-conflict as 'capital' that has potential to bring about economic growth, resulting in economics-driven policies. Such divergent identity constructions are because 'youth' and 'youth identity' are fluid concepts used in various ways by different people in different contexts. In peace and conflict studies, the dominant discourses in relation to youth-in-conflict are that youth are either 'victims' of war or 'troublemakers'. Both discourses are contested by an emerging third discourse of youth as peacebuilders, which challenges the representation of youth-in-conflict as passive victims or as negative threats. While the UN and World Bank’s respective humanitarian/development and neo-liberal economic approaches shape these divergent youth-in-conflict constructions, both institutions are also influenced by the global trends in youth-in-conflict discourses. This 'discursive' relationship means that as the UN and World Bank engage in the global youth debate and are shaped by more complete understandings of youth-in-conflict, they will also have an influential role in perpetuating or challenging dominant discourses

Elevating Baseline Activation Does Not Facilitate Reading of Unattended Words

Previous studies have disagreed the extent to which people extract meaning from words presented outside the focus of spatial attention. The present study, examined a possible explanation for such discrepancies, inspired by attenuation theory: unattended words can be read more automatically when they have a high baseline level of activation (e.g., due to frequent repetition or due to being expected in a given context). We presented a brief prime word in lowercase, followed by a target word in uppercase. Participants indicated whether the target word belonged to a particular category (e.g., "sport"). When we drew attention to the prime word using a visual cue, the prime produced substantial priming effects on target responses (i.e., faster responses when the prime and target words were identical or from the same category than when they belonged to different categories). When prime words were not attended, however, they produced no priming effects. This finding replicated even when there were only 4 words, each repeated 160 times during the experiment. Even with a very high baseline level of activation, it appears that very little word processing is possible without spatial attention