Older Professionals’ Adaptation to New Information Technologies: A Study in the Context of Non-Standard Employment

Modern workplaces are increasingly reliant on information technologies (IT), which have begun to profoundly affect the technological adaptation behaviors of older workers. Despite globally increasing levels of professional older adult workforce participation and workplace technology use, research in this space is only emerging, particularly in the context of non-standard employment (NSE), work falling outside traditional labor agreements, increasingly adopted by older workers. Using the Self Determination Theory, this qualitative work aims to understand the factors that contribute to professional older workers adaptation to new ITs in NSE. We propose a theoretical framework to explain our findings, suggesting that older professionals’ adaptation to new ITs in NSE are motivated by competence, relatedness and autonomy and moderated by perceived occupational value, IT support, IT-based frustration and generational differences. Our findings offer a comprehensive understanding of motivational dynamics in our research phenomena

Digital service problems: Prevention and user persistence in solving them

The service sector is an important and consistently growing sector of the world economy. It is estimated that the sector will make up two thirds of the total world Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Information Technology (IT) has been an important contributor to the fast and high grow of the sector by increasingly digitising the production, delivery and use of services. IT has enabled multiple parties, including user support service staff, employees (internal IT users) and customers (external IT users) of an organisation, to engage in the production, delivery and use of digital services. Consequently, both users and user support service staff of the organisations have an increased responsibility to both prevent IT problems from occurring, and solve them when they do occur. Problems with ITs can occur at different stages of a digital service value chain (i.e. sequential steps/stages required to produce and deliver a digital service), and may lead to a service failure in the user’s mind. Examples include problems with a self-check-out machine at a library, problems with an online registration system that occurs for university students, or a website that does not include an online payment functionality a user expects. Numerous studies in both Information Systems (IS) and service literature have focused on the role of the service staff in both preventing and solving digital service failures, but few have considered the user’s role in these. This thesis includes four original articles. The first article emphasises that prevention from digital service failures must be considered before establishing effective approaches to solving the problems. The article presents a typology of technologies and technological approaches that customers and businesses can use to support prevention from these failures. The rest of the articles consider situations where an IT-related service problem has occurred, and address the user’s behaviour of persistence in solving their own IT problem. From the user’s perspective, their persistence in solving the problem contributes to achieving a satisfactory outcome, and from the organisational perspective, such an outcome is important for maintaining their user satisfaction. User persistence is important both when trying to solve an IT problem alone, and when using support services. Studying user persistence can help organisations to design their user support services in a way that encourages user persistence, resolves the problems more efficiently and cheaply; and maintains their user satisfaction. The study of user persistence included the use of focus groups for data collection purposes. Surprisingly, qualitative methodology literature has little to say on analytical approaches to focus group data – particularly interactive participant data. Therefore, a focus group analysis framework was designed (presented in the second article) and was used in the analysis phase of the user persistence study. The third article uses the framework in its analysis phase, and (a) presents a conceptual clarification of user persistence in IT problem solving, (b) identifies the factors that contribute to user persistence, (c) develops a theory to explain that why a user decides to persist with a method of solving IT problems, and (d) develops a theory to explain that why the user decides to persist with the overall process (collective methods) of solving the problem. The fourth article presents the results of evaluating the robustness of the two theories and shows that the two theories are confirmed. The thesis concludes with the ‘contributions and conclusion’ chapter where it presents a summary of the contributions of the four articles to IS theory, methodology and practice

A Critical Analysis of Inter-Coder Reliability Methods in Information Systems Research

High failure rates appear to be a norm in introductory programming courses. Many solutions have been proposed to improve the high failure rates. Surprisingly, the solutions have not brought significant improvements to the performance of students in introductory programming courses. Instead, there appears to be a gap in understanding the relationship between self-efficacy, emotional engagement and the performance of students in introductory programming courses. Enjoyment, interest, and gratification were identified as three emotional engagement factors in introductory programming courses from prior literature and from focus groups. An online survey on 433 students in introductory programming courses showed that the students’ programming self-efficacy beliefs had a strong positive impact on enjoyment, while gratification and interest had a negative impact on programming performance. These findings have implications for course instructors who design and deliver introductory programming courses

A TYPOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGICAL ENABLERS OF WEBSITE SERVICE FAILURE PREVENTION

An increasing range of services are now offered via online applications and e-commerce websites. However, problems with online services still occur at times, even for the best service providers due to the technical failures, informational failures, or lack of required website functionalities. Also, the widespread and increasing implementation of web services means that service failures are both more likely to occur, and more likely to have serious consequences. In this paper we first develop a digital service value chain framework based on existing service delivery models adapted for digital services. We then review current literature on service failure prevention, and provide a typology of technolo- gies and approaches that can be used to prevent failures of different types (functional, informational, system), that can occur at different stages in the web service delivery. This makes a contribution to theory by relating specific technologies and technological approaches to the point in the value chain framework where they will have the maximum impact. Our typology can also be used to guide the planning, justification and design of robust, reliable web services

TECHNOLOGICAL ENABLERS FOR PREVENTING SERVICE FAILURE WITH E-COMMERCE WEBSITES

Problems with digital services still occur at times, even for the most reliable services. Considering the consequences of these failures and their effects on the customer’s overall service quality perception and satisfaction, preventing these failures, and delivering reliable digital services, is a critical business competency. In addition, the fact that digital services are often co-produced by both service providers and their customers, shows the increasing role of both service providers and customers in preventing digital service failures (or service problems). In this study, we view the concept of digital service failure from the perspective of expectation-conformation theory, develop an Archimate architecture model and use it to design a typology of technological enablers (technologies and technological approaches) that can be used by businesses and their customers to prevent service failures at different stages of online purchase via e-commerce websites. The typology is relevant and useful for management information systems (MIS) academics and practitioners, particularly for information technology and digital service management researchers and the practitioner community

Public Service Values and Chatbots in the Public Sector: Reconciling Designer efforts and User Expectations

Chatbots are deployed across a wide range of public services, frequently to manage the increased volumes of online service requests. The appropriateness of many chatbot initiatives is often challenged. One reason for this is these initiatives are largely driven by agency centric goals, often neglecting the expectations of other public stakeholders. A public service value perspective – founded on the notion of public value – offers an avenue to represent the views of other public stakeholder groups. We examine the public service values of two key stakeholder groups – designers and users and discuss how they can be reconciled

Developing a Methodology for Online Service Failure Prevention: Reporting on an Action Design Research Project-in-Progress

The increasing use of online channels for service delivery raises new challenges in service failure prevention. This work-in-progress paper reports on the first phase of an action-design research project to develop a service failure prevention methodology. In this paper we review the literature on online services, failure prevention and failure recovery and develop a theoretical framework for online service failure prevention. This provides the theoretical grounding for the artefact (the methodology) to be developed. We use this framework to develop an initial draft of our methodology. We then outline the remaining phases of the research, and offer some initial conclusions gained from the project to date

Lived experiences of participants of factors affecting the Drug stability(Narcotics Anonymous)

Introduction: Drug use has many psychological and behavioral consequences. The elimination of psychological dependence on drugs is much more difficult than that of physical dependence and it requires the passage of time and different stages, and internal care. The purpose of this study was the identification of factors affecting drug withdrawal stability among Narcotics Anonymous (NA) members. Method: This research was conducted using qualitative methods and focus groups interviews. The statistical population included all members of NA who lived in Isfahan, Iran, in 2011 and at least two years had passed since their drug withdrawal stability. For this purpose, data were collected from 18 NA members using purposive sampling. Data were collected and analyzed using content analysis method in 3 stages of conceptualization, interview, and data analysis. Results: The 2 major themes of "social relations and support received from them" and “individual character and identity" were extracted. The former theme consisted of 2 subcategories of “the quantity and type of relationship” and “social support network”. The later theme included the subcategories of “cognition”, “emotion”, and “dignity”. Instance and themes of each subcategory was explained in detail. Conclusion: The findings indicate that the most effective factor in drug withdrawal stability is receiving cognitive support from sympathizers (other members of the association). This support results in the changing of attitudes and self-awareness. Other factors that have impact on drug withdrawal stability included reforming family relationships, receiving emotional support and support regarding dignity from family members, increasing of confidence, and recovery of social status.. Keywords: Drug withdrawal stability, Social support, Narcotics Anonymous (NA

Population Size Estimation of Tramadol Misusers in Urban Population in Iran: Synthesis of Methods and Results

Background: Estimating the population who use drugs is essential for planning, monitoring, and evaluation of substance use prevention and treatment. This study aims to estimate the population who misuse tramadol in urban population in Iran. Methods: We used the wisdom of the experts (WOTE) and network scale-up (NSU) methods to calculate the population of tramadol misusers in 10 provincial capitals of Iran, in 2016. The WOTE was conducted among pharmacists in drugstores and the personnel of traditional medicinal herbs stores. They guessed the best estimation of tramadol misusers population in their cities. The NSU method was conducted among the general population and participants were questioned about ever and daily, non-medical use of tramadol during last 12 months in their network. The median of the methods was used to calculate the proportion of the adult population (15-49 years old). Findings: The population size of tramadol misusers in studied cities was 83300 [95% uncertainty limits (UL): 47960-256220]. This corresponded to 6.6 per 1000 (95% UL: 3.88-20.30) of the 15-49-year-old population. The projected number of tramadol misusers for all 31 provincial capitals was 118290 (95% UL: 68100-363130840) and 212440 (95% UL: 122310-653410) for all urban areas. NSU also estimated the number of people who misuse tramadol on daily basis. These numbers were 52000 (95% UL: 19940-176570) for studied cities, 73840 (95% UL: 28320-250740) for all 31 provincial capital cities, and 132610 (95% UL: 50860-450310) for all urban areas in Iran. Conclusion: This study presents information on high prevalence of tramadol misuse in urban population. We need national control measures and demand reduction programs to control tramadol misuse

A Fine-grained Data Set and Analysis of Tangling in Bug Fixing Commits

Context: Tangled commits are changes to software that address multiple concerns at once. For researchers interested in bugs, tangled commits mean that they actually study not only bugs, but also other concerns irrelevant for the study of bugs. Objective: We want to improve our understanding of the prevalence of tangling and the types of changes that are tangled within bug fixing commits. Methods: We use a crowd sourcing approach for manual labeling to validate which changes contribute to bug fixes for each line in bug fixing commits. Each line is labeled by four participants. If at least three participants agree on the same label, we have consensus. Results: We estimate that between 17% and 32% of all changes in bug fixing commits modify the source code to fix the underlying problem. However, when we only consider changes to the production code files this ratio increases to 66% to 87%. We find that about 11% of lines are hard to label leading to active disagreements between participants. Due to confirmed tangling and the uncertainty in our data, we estimate that 3% to 47% of data is noisy without manual untangling, depending on the use case. Conclusion: Tangled commits have a high prevalence in bug fixes and can lead to a large amount of noise in the data. Prior research indicates that this noise may alter results. As researchers, we should be skeptics and assume that unvalidated data is likely very noisy, until proven otherwise.Comment: Status: Accepted at Empirical Software Engineerin