Program Perceived Value and Program Satisfaction Influences on Store Loyalty: Insights from Retail Loyalty Progam

Investigations to determine whether program perceived value could influence program satisfaction, program card loyalty and store loyalty are critical to elucidate the roles and significance of the constructs and advancing management practice. Accordingly, in line with this research direction, this study aims to assess the effects of program perceived value offered by few leading retail superstores and departmental stores in Malaysia on its members’ loyalty towards the store. The data set utilized in this study has been obtained via quota sampling technique, where a sample of 153 retail loyalty programs’ members was analyzed. An integrative conceptual model was developed and tested using Structural Equation Modeling using AMOS program. The results exemplify that program perceived value is a strong driver of program satisfaction and program card loyalty. Unexpectedly, program perceived value is not a significant predictor of store loyalty but, it has an indirect effect on store loyalty mediated by program satisfaction. Continuous plea in marketing management is to make marketing instruments more efficient. In recent years introduction of customer relationship marketing instruments is strongly advocated, both in marketing theory and practice. Several researchers (e.g., Berry 1983; Berry and Parasuraman 1991; and Gronroos, 1994) have changed the focus of a marketing orientation from attracting short-term, discrete transactional customers to retaining long-lasting, intimate customer relationships. In fact Roberts, Varki, Brodie (2003), further suggested that it is best to describe relationship marketing as the formation of “bonds” between the company and the customer. Achieving an effective relationship in a consumer context is considered to be even more challenging than it is in a business-to-business context, given the generally more polygamous character of consumers as opposed to business customers (Keng and Ehrenberger 1984; Pressey and Matthews 1998)

Device Features and/or Personality Traits? Disentangling the Determinants of Smartphone Nomophobia and Pathology among Urban Millennials

Smartphones have emerged as a mobile device that provides users with "smart" functionalities, aesthetics features and capabilities. These smart devices are the “must have” advanced communication tools and have been assimilated as an integral part of the everyday life. Although academic scholars and practitioners have started to venture into a research stream that focuses on behavioral models to elucidate and predict smartphone consumption trends and behavior, however, there is limited empirical research that attempts to unleash factors that triggered smartphone users to become nomophobia (no mobile phone phobia) and consecutively in turn become pathology (also known as addiction or dependency) user. Henceforth, this work seeks to explore both emerging phenomena by developing and validating a research model which is based on the Media Dependency Theory. The structural equation modelling analysis was conducted using Smart Partial Least Square (SmartPLS3) procedure with a dataset of 272 smartphone users who belong to the urban Millennials generational cohort. Two main predictors are hypothesized, which are the smartphone features (software and hardware) and users’ personality traits (openness, neuroticism, and extraversion). The results suggest that multiple facets of smartphone users’ personalities, particularly neuroticism significantly cause the smartphone users to become nomophobia and subsequently pathological. Whereas, the device hardware features have a positive significance effect on nomophobia, nevertheless not trigger pathology. Surprisingly, software features of the smartphone do not offer evidence of their effect on nomophobia as well as pathology. The key findings uncovered from this exploratory research provide rich insights for theoretical and practical implications

HPLC and anti-inflammatory studies of the flavonoid rich chloroform extract fraction of Orthosiphon stamineus leaves.

The aim of the present study was to verify the anti-inflammatory activity of Orthosiphon stamineus leaf extracts and to identify the active compound(s) contributing to its anti-inflammatory activity using a developed HPLC method. Active chloroform extract of O. stamineus was fractionated into three fractions using a dry flash column chromatography method. These three fractions were investigated for anti-peritoneal capillary permeability, in vitro nitric oxide scavenging activity, anti-inflammatory and nitric oxide (NO) inhibition using carrageenan-induced hind paw edema method. The flavonoid rich chloroform extract fraction (CF2) [containing sinensetin (2.86% w/w), eupatorin (5.05% w/w) and 3'-hydroxy-5,6,7,4'-tetramethoxyflavone (1.101% w/w)], significantly reduced rat hind paw edema, NO and decreased dye leakage to peritoneal cavity at p < 0.05. IC50 of in vitro NO scavenging of CF2 was 0.3 mg/mL. These results suggest that the anti-inflammatory properties of these CF2 may possibly be due to the presence of flavonoid compounds capable of affecting the NO pathway

Factors associated with influenza vaccination uptake among healthcare workers in tertiary hospitals in Perak / Rosidah Omar

Influenza is the leading cause of respiratory illness worldwide and has a substantial medical, social and economic impact. Healthcare workers (HCWs) are at high risk of infection and can easily spread the disease. Hence, the influenza vaccination is an important preventive action that can be taken to stop the transmission of this disease. However, the uptake among HCWs remains low, and many HCWs were doubt about the effectiveness of the vaccine. Thus, the factors associated with the uptake and the effectiveness of the influenza vaccination need to be studied to understand the reasons behind the poor uptake. Therefore, the objective of this study is to measure the prevalence of influenza vaccination and to determine the factors associated with influenza vaccination uptake and the effectiveness of the vaccination on influenza-related work absenteeism among HCWs in tertiary hospitals in Perak, Malaysia. The study was conducted in two phases. In Phase 1, knowledge (KQ), behavioural determinants (BDQ) and health literacy (HLQ) questionnaires were piloted among 100 HCWs in a tertiary hospital in Selangor, Malaysia to determine content validity, internal consistency and testretest validity. As a result, the KQ was reduced from 11 to eight items, and the BDQ was reduced from 46 to 40 items. The 14 items in the HLQ were retained. The revised questionnaires had adequate consistency and reliability and were used in Phase 2 of the study. In Phase 2, a cross-sectional study was carried out in two specialist hospitals in Perak. It involved 775 nurses and assistant medical officers who were selected using simple random sampling. The study used a self-administered questionnaire that contained a section on sociodemographic characteristics, the KQ, BDQ, HLQ and the number of influenza-related sick days in 2017. The vaccination uptake was based on the iv immunization records for the period between 1 November 2016 and 31 December 2016. The results revealed that the prevalence of influenza vaccination uptake among HCWs was 25.5%. A multivariate logistic regression showed that the factors associated with influenza vaccination were increasing age (Odds ratio (OR) 1.04; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.01,1.08; p-value 0.015); working in an emergency department (OR 7.20; 95% CI 1.45,35.69; p-value 0.016) or obstetrics & gynaecology (O&G) department (OR 0.17; 95% CI 0.04,0.85; p-value 0.003) compared to other departments, and working as a community nurse compared to an assistant medical officer (OR 8.48; 95% CI 1.33,54.0; p-value 0.024). With regards to absenteeism, there was no significant difference in the mean number of cumulative sick days per person (p=0.3881). However, the total number of workday lost among non-vaccinated was 1.44 times higher than among the vaccinated group. In conclusion, influenza vaccination coverage was found to be low (25.5%). The above-identified factors and the effectiveness of the vaccination should inform future vaccination campaigns and the development of targeted intervention programmes to increase influenza vaccination uptake

PROGRAM PERCEIVED VALUE AND PROGRAM SATISFACTION INFLUENCES ON STORE LOYALTY Insights from Retail Loyalty Progam

Investigations to determine whether program perceived value could influence program satisfaction, program card loyalty and store loyalty are critical to elucidate the roles and significance of theconstructs and advancing management practice. Accordingly, in line with this research direction, this study aims to assess the effects of program perceived value offered by few leading retail superstores and departmental stores in Malaysia on its members loyalty towards the store. The data set utilized in this study has been obtained via quota sampling technique, where a sample of 153 retail loyalty programs members was analyzed. An integrative conceptual model was developed and tested using Structural Equation Modeling using AMOS program. The results exemplify that program perceived value is a strong driver of program satisfaction and program card loyalty. Unexpectedly, program perceived value is not a significant predictor of store loyalty but, it has an indirect effect on store loyalty mediated by program satisfaction. Continuous plea in marketing management is to make marketing instruments more efficient. In recent years introduction of customer relationship marketing instruments is strongly advocated, both in marketing theory and practice. Several researchers (e.g., Berry 1983Berry and Parasuraman 1991and Gronroos, 1994) have changed the focus of a marketing orientation from attracting short-term, discrete ansactional customers to retaining long-lasting, intimate customer relationships. In fact Roberts, Varki, Brodie (2003), further suggested that it is best to describe relationship marketing as the formation of bonds between the company and the customer. Achieving an effective relationship in a consumer context is considered to be even more challenging than it is in a business-tobusines context, given the generally more polygamous character of consumers as opposed to business customers (Keng and Ehrenberger 1984Pressey and Matthews 1998)

Contextualizing injury severity from occupational accident reports using an optimized deep learning prediction model

Background This study introduced a novel approach for predicting occupational injury severity by leveraging deep learning-based text classification techniques to analyze unstructured narratives. Unlike conventional methods that rely on structured data, our approach recognizes the richness of information within injury narrative descriptions with the aim of extracting valuable insights for improved occupational injury severity assessment. Methods Natural language processing (NLP) techniques were harnessed to preprocess the occupational injury narratives obtained from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from January 2015 to June 2023. The methodology involved meticulous preprocessing of textual narratives to standardize text and eliminate noise, followed by the innovative integration of Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and Global Vector (GloVe) word embeddings for effective text representation. The proposed predictive model adopts a novel Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) architecture and is further refined through model optimization, including random search hyperparameters and in-depth feature importance analysis. The optimized Bi-LSTM model has been compared and validated against other machine learning classifiers which are naïve Bayes, support vector machine, random forest, decision trees, and K-nearest neighbor. Results The proposed optimized Bi-LSTM models’ superior predictability, boasted an accuracy of 0.95 for hospitalization and 0.98 for amputation cases with faster model processing times. Interestingly, the feature importance analysis revealed predictive keywords related to the causal factors of occupational injuries thereby providing valuable insights to enhance model interpretability. Conclusion Our proposed optimized Bi-LSTM model offers safety and health practitioners an effective tool to empower workplace safety proactive measures, thereby contributing to business productivity and sustainability. This study lays the foundation for further exploration of predictive analytics in the occupational safety and health domain

Factors Associated with COVID-19 among Healthcare Workers in Kedah in 2021: A Cross-Sectional Study

This study aimed to examine the characteristics of HCWs infected with COVID-19 and factors associated with healthcare-associated infection. A cross-sectional study, using secondary data of COVID-19 HCW cases from a registry developed by the Occupational and Environmental Health Unit (OEHU) in Kedah State Health Department, Malaysia, was analysed using Excel and STATA version 14.0. Descriptive analysis and multiple logistic regression were conducted to identify the factors for healthcare-associated COVID-19 infection. A total of 1679 HCWs tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 January 2021 and 19 September 2021. The infection was mainly non-healthcare-associated (67.0%), with healthcare-associated cases contributing to only 33% of the cases. The significant factors associated with healthcare-associated transmission were the following: doctor (aOR = 1.433; 95% CI = 1.044, 1.968), hospital setting (aOR = 1.439; 95% CI = 1.080, 1.917), asymptomatic (aOR = 1.848; 95% CI = 1.604, 2.130), incompletely or not vaccinated (aOR = 1.400; 95% CI = 1.050, 1.866) and CT-value ≥ 30 (aOR = 2.494; 95% CI = 1.927, 3.226). Identifying factors of healthcare-associated infection would help in planning control measures preventing healthcare-associated transmission in the workplace. However, more than half of COVID-19 cases among HCWs involved non-healthcare-associated COVID-19 infection, and, thus, requires further study to identify high-risk behaviours