41 research outputs found
The Measurement Invariance of Customer Loyalty and Customer Experience across Firms, Industries, and Countries
Research on cross-national (and cross-group) measurement invariance is now well developed in the social and behavioural sciences, but this research has yet to engage research practitioners whose focus is measuring and modelling customer loyalty and customer experience. This is a notable gap in existing research on cross-group comparisons, especially considering the reliance of business decision-makers on customer feedback. Though standard measures of customer experience and loyalty are used in every industry, their measurement invariance across industries has not been subject to extensive testing. This article brings current thinking about cross-group comparisons and modern tools of multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) to the measurement of customer loyalty and customer experience across firms, industries, and countries, drawing on original large-scale survey data from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada
Proximity, Politics and Policy Attitudes in the North American Context
The study of mass public opinion and political behaviour has developed a substantial corpus of theoretical claims and empirical results linking political, attitudinal and demographic variables to different policy attitudes. Still, the research literature has, to date, paid scant attention to how space â that is, proximity and distance to salient geographic features â influences policy attitudes. Research in political behaviour has long proceeded as though policy attitudes among mass publics âcome from nowhere.â The unifying argument of the four articles comprising this thesis is that mass public opinion does indeed come from somewhere: spatial dynamics matter for policy attitudes in a variety of domains. The articles develop the argument that spatial proximity to geographic features act as an indirect measure of intergroup contact, localized knowledge, issue awareness, and issue salience. The articles deal with three substantive topics: the CanadaâUnited States relationship, attitudes toward energy transportation infrastructure, and attitudes toward immigration policy. Specifically, the thesis draws on survey data to investigate: (1) the mutual perceptions of the Canadian and American publics, (2) Canadian attitudes toward North American integration, (3) attitudes toward the Keystone XL pipeline in the United States, and (4) American attitudes toward illegal immigration. The major finding in each article is an interactive relationship between proximity and political attitudes: depending on the political context, proximity serves to either amplify or mute the effects of political party identification or ideology on policy attitudes. An innovative aspect of this research is the integration of spatial data through geocoding (appending latitudeâlongitude coordinates to) respondent-level data and calculating distances to relevant geographic features (e.g., the CanadaâUnited States border, oil pipelines and the United StatesâMexico border)
The structure of foreign policy attitudes in transatlantic perspective: comparing the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany
While public opinion about foreign policy has been studied extensively in the United States, there is less systematic research of foreign policy opinions in other countries. Given that public opinion about international affairs affects who gets elected in democracies and then constrains the foreign policies available to leaders once elected, both comparative politics and international relations scholarship benefit from more systematic investigation of foreign policy attitudes outside the United States. Using new data, this article presents a common set of core constructs structuring both American and European attitudes about foreign policy. Surveys conducted in four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) provide an expanded set of foreign policyârelated survey items that are analysed using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM). Measurement equivalence is specifically tested and a common fourâfactor structure that fits the data in all four countries is found. Consequently, valid, direct comparisons of the foreign policy preferences of four world powers are made. In the process, the fourâfactor model confirms and expands previous work on the structure of foreign policy attitudes. The article also demonstrates the capability of ESEM in testing the dimensionality and crossânational equivalence of social science concepts
Estimating the size of âanti-vaxâ and vaccine hesitant populations in the US, UK, and Canada : comparative latent class modeling of vaccine attitudes
Vaccine hesitancy is a significant impediment to global efforts to vaccinate against the SARS-CoV-2 virus at levels that generate herd immunity. In this article, we show the utility of an inductive approachâlatent class analysis (LCA)âthat allows us to characterize the size and nature of different vaccine attitude groups; and to compare how these groups differ across countries as well as across demographic subgroups within countries. We perform this analysis using original survey data collected in the US, UK, and Canada. We also show that these classes are strongly associated with SARS-CoV-2 vaccination intent and perceptions of the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, suggesting that attitudes about vaccines to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic are well explained by latent vaccine attitudes that precede the pandemic. More specifically, we find four substantive classes of vaccine attitudes: strong supporters, supporters with concerns, vaccine hesitant, and âanti-vaxâ as well as a fifth measurement error class. The strong âanti-vaxâ sentiment class is small in all three countries, while the strong supporter class is the largest across all three countries. We observe different distributions of class assignments in different demographic groupsâmost notably education and political leaning (partisanship and ideology)
Like father, like son: Justin Trudeau and valence voting in Canada's 2015 federal election
Canada's 2015 federal election was an exiting, as well as a nostalgia provoking, contest. After nine years in office, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the governing Conservatives were defeated by the resurgent Liberals led by Justin Trudeau. Trudeau is the son of Pierre Trudeau, perhaps Canadaâs best known prime minister. Analyses of national survey data demonstrate that party leader imagesâa major component of the "valence politics" model of electoral choiceâwere important in both cases. Unlike his father, Justin Trudeau was castigated as a "lightweight" and "just not ready." However, articulating plausible policies to jump-start Canada's sluggish economy and espousing "sunny ways," the younger Trudeau was warmly received by many voters. In contrast, Harper's image of managerial competence was tarnished by bad economic news, and his attempt to refocus the campaign on emotionally charged cultural issues failed. The result was a Liberal majority government and a prime minister named Trudeau
Some people just want to watch the world burn: the prevalence, psychology and politics of the âNeed for Chaosâ
People form political attitudes to serve psychological needs. Recent research shows that some individuals have a strong desire to incite chaos when they perceive themselves to be marginalized by society. These individuals tend to see chaos as a way to invert the power structure and gain social status in the process. Analysing data drawn from large-scale representative surveys conducted in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, we identify the prevalence of Need for Chaos across Anglo-Saxon societies. Using Latent Profile Analysis, we explore whether different subtypes underlie the uni-dimensional construct and find evidence that some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to âwant to watch the world burnâ
Party identification, contact, contexts, and public attitudes toward illegal immigration
Illegal immigration is a contentious issue on the American policy agenda. To understand the sources of public attitudes toward immigration, social scientists have focused attention on political factors such as party identification; they have also drawn on theories of intergroup contact to argue that contact with immigrants shapes immigration attitudes. Absent direct measures, contextual measures such as respondents' ethnic milieu or proximity to salient geographic features (such as borders) have been used as proxies of contact. Such a research strategy still leaves the question unanswered-is it contact or context that really matters? Further, which context, and for whom? This article evaluates the effects of party identification, personal contact with undocumented immigrants, and contextual measures (county Hispanic population and proximity to the US-Mexico border) on American attitudes toward illegal immigration. It finds that contextual factors moderate the effects of political party identification on attitudes toward illegal immigration; personal contact has no effect. These findings challenge the assumption that contextual measures act as proxies for interpersonal contact
Party identification, local context, and Australian attitudes toward immigration and asylum policy
The acceptance of newcomers as either immigrants or asylum seekers has been a recurring issue in Australian politics. Both the size of Australia's intake of economic migrants and the resettlement of asylum seekers held offshore have been contentious political issues. Research in other immigrant-receiving countries has identified numerous factors shaping attitudes toward immigration and asylum policy. These include political factors (such as party identification) and local demographic context â both immigrant concentration and change in immigrant concentration over time. Still, few studies of Australia have considered the effects of genuinely local demographic context, or how local context moderates the effects of political factors on attitudes toward immigration and asylum policy. Drawing on survey data from the Australian Election Study (2010â2016) and local-level census data, this article advances an explanation of Australiansâ attitudes toward immigration and asylum policy centring on the roles of party identification, local demographic context, and their interaction
Friends, neighbours, townspeople and parties: explaining Canadian attitudes toward Muslims
The 2015 Canadian federal election campaign put into focus relations between Muslim communities in Canada and wider Canadian society, featuring debates around banning the niqab, and a barbaric cultural practices hotline. At the same time, challenges in relations between Muslims and majority-group Canadians were not a new development in 2015: they had in the past faced periodic strains due to terrorism-related events, and attacks targeting Muslims in Canada. The Canadian case is in fact reflective of a challenge in intergroup relations facing several Western democracies. In light of this, what accounts for majority-group Canadians' attitudes toward Muslims in Canada? Drawing on data from the 2011 and 2015 Canadian Election Studies and theories linking outgroup perceptions to intergroup contact (friends), local demographic context at both the micro-level (neighbours) and meso-level (townspeople), and political factors (parties), this article seeks to explain why majority-group Canadians hold alternately positive or negative views of Muslims