THE EVALUATION OF TOURISM DESTINATION BRAND EQUITY FROM THE FEMALE TOURIST'S PERSPECTIVES (STUDY OF 16 CITIES IN IRAN)

Despite the surge in interest in research on tourism destinations, little attention has been paid to investigating and comparing destination brand equity that implies conceptualizing how tourists evaluate a destination brand is complex. This study examined empirical information to compare and identify the status of destination brand assets of 16 Iranian cities. In recent years feminist tourism is largely neglected in Iran, accordingly the present study aims at evaluating the status of the tourism destination brand equity from the female tourists’ perspective in several cities in Gilan province, northern Iran. The statistical population of the study consists of the total number of female tourists visiting different cities in Gilan province. However, regarding the large statistical population, the sample size was determined using random sampling and 380 female tourists were chosen from the population. Since women tend to be more precise and accurate than men in visual fields and accordingly in evaluating a destination, we decided to use a female population in this study. Data were collected by questionnaires measuring variables such as awareness, mental image, perceived quality and loyalty. The data analysis were conducted using SPSS through cluster analysis and logistic regression tests. The results indicate that the status of the tourism destination brand equity in this region is promising; besides, the image of brand was the most influential and the dimension of loyalty was the least influential in promoting the tourism destination brand equity in this region

Evaluating the role of the image of the destination on the loyalty of Zanjan tourists with a data mining approach

Introduction: Knowing what the loyalty of tourists in tourist destinations depends on and how it is formed has become a principle for managers of companies and tourist destinations. A tourist destination, like any organization, must identify, attract and retain its target market. Creating any transformation and standardization of tourism services in Zanjan city requires knowing tourism capacities, conducting comparative studies, knowing the experiences of other successful countries in the world and localizing these experiences. Zanjan city has not been able to attract tourists like many of them, despite having significant tourist attractions in comparison with the cities of neighboring provinces.Data and Method: The type of research is applied and descriptive-analytical in nature. The statistical population of this research includes tourists with at least one night stay in three and four star hotels in Zanjan city, and 281 tourists were investigated using Cochran's formula. The method of collecting information is library and field.Results: The results of the research show that in the final analysis of the factor analysis of the image of the destination, it has the greatest to the least effect on the novelty of the trip, the cost of the trip, the financial cost, and the number of trips, respectively, with the factor load values of 0.481, 0.354, and 0.301. and has 0.247 on the loyalty of tourists.Conclusion: Zanjan province is in its initial stages in terms of life cycle in the field of tourism and the sensitivity of the issue is due to the fact that this percentage can act as ambassadors who give information to others about this destination and a kind of free word-of-mouth advertising. They will do for Zanjan and depending on the image of Zanjan formed in their minds, these advertisements can be positive or negative

An EXPERIME TAL STUDY on the KI EMATICS of a SKILLED SERVICE in PLAYI G TE IS

ABSTRACT This paper studies the effective parameters of a skilled service in playing tennis and determines their relationship with skill deals. Effective service in tennis plays an important role in gaining more desirable result and the most important factor of success in getting scores depends on the player's skills in serving an effective service. The characteristics of a good service are the high speed of the ball and the precision of landing the ball. The several parameters affecting on these two characteristic in the service, are studied in this paper. Therefore, the Kinematic parameters of 8 Iranian professional tennis athletes of first division tennis league and also 8 non-professional Iranian athletes who exercise about 3 sessions a week were extracted. After land marking these athletes, by use of two high-frequency cameras, pictures were recorded when the tennis players were serving the services. The investigation on the results of these tests is performed by three dimensional motion analyses. The pictures are analyzed with the WinAnalyze software. Therefore, in this paper, the most important effective parameters in serving a successful service are detected

A Comparative Study of Intra-Articular Knee Injection of Leukocyte-Poor Platelet-Rich Plasma Compared to Corticosteroids and Local Anesthetics in Patients with Knee Osteoarthritis

Background: Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common reason for orthopedic secondary care referral. And it is one of the main causes of disability in adults worldwide. It is estimated to affect between 10 to 25% of patients over the age of 60. Intra-articular corticosteroid injection (IA CS) and physical therapy were the two choices in an attempt to provide symptomatic management or deferred surgery. There is a growing trend is intra-articular platelet-rich plasma (IA PRP) injection to reduce pain and improve function in OA patients. PRP is divided into two types: leukocyte-poor platelet-rich plasma (LP-PRP) and leukocyte-rich platelet-rich plasma (LR-PRP). It was shown that LR-PRP increases pro-inflammatory factors and also decreases anti-catabolic mediators, and LP-PRP has the opposite aspect. Methods: In our research 40 patients were divided into two equal groups, IA corticosteroid and leukocyte-poor platelet-rich plasma (LP-PRP) 40 cc of blood from the basilic vein of the upper limb is used with two step centrifugation. The final samples were 4 millilitres product injected intra-articular. group two (corticosteroid (CS)) received an intra-articular injection of triamcinolone acetate (Kenalog) 40 mg/ml along with 4 ml of lidocaine 0.02% (Abureyhan Co.) for a total of 5 ml. The needle used is a 22-gauge pencil-point Quincke needle (Dr. Japan Co, Ltd), which is performed with the Sonosite Edge II ultrasound guide and in an anterior-lateral manner in the knee joint. Pain was assessed on a visual analogue scale (VAS range 0-10 points) before, one week, one month, two month and 3 months after the operation. The WOMAC questionnaire was also filled before injection and three months following injection and other variables were examined. Results: There were no significant differences between the groups across all the baseline parameters including age, sex, body mass index and comorbidities including high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking. Both injection groups were effective in reducing patients' pain from one week to three months after injection. The level of pain in the first week after injection was significantly lower in the corticosteroid group than in the PRP group. In the first month and the third month after the injection, the pain reduction according to mean scores of VAS was the same in both groups. Conclusion: In short, one injection of PRP can reduce the pain of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee as much as corticosteroids during a three-month treatment process. Considering the possible side effects of corticosteroids, this alternative treatment can be considered with further investigation

Time to Recurrent Relapses Analysis in Schizophrenic Patients by Using Recurrent Events Model

Objective: Schizophrenia is to be emphasized due to its high prevalence, severity of symptoms and frequent recurrences. In this study the hazard of recurrence of Schizophrenia was analyzed by using recurrent events models. Materials & Methods: This study was an observational prospective study. Data was gathered from 159 registered schizophrenia patients at Razi Psychiatric Center. The type II conditional model and the frailty model were used for analyzing times of recurrence. SAS (version 9.1) and R (version 2.11.0) were used for analysis of data. Significance level for the statistical tests was considered to be 0.05. Results: In the type II conditional model, age at onset of disease (P=0.021) and marital status (P<0.001) only significantly affected the hazard of the first relapse. The effects of age at onset of disease, sex, marital status, how the disease began, history of head trauma and family history of schizophrenia were not significant on the hazard of the second relapse. History of head trauma had significant effect only on the hazard of the third relapse (P=0.020). In the frailty model only the effects of sex (P=0.014) and history of head trauma (P=0.014) were significant on the hazard of recurrent relapses. Conclusion: The effects of some covariates on the hazard of recurrent relapses were significant under type II conditional model, and some covariates had significant effect under the frailty model. Further research is needed to investigate the effect of other prognostic factors on the hazard of recurrent relapses and time of recurrent relapses

Identifying Some Risk Factors of Time to Relapses in Schizophrenic Patients using Bayesian Approach with Event-Dependent Frailty Model

Objectives: Schizophrenia patients often experience relapses once and even more with no limit on number of relapses. The time among relapses are rarely considered in studies. The aim of this study was to identify some risk factors of time to elapses in schizophrenic patients with recurrent events model in survival analysis. Methods: In a retrospective longitudinal study, the medical records of 159 schizophrenic patients who referred to Razi hospital in Tehran from 2003 to 2005 were conveniently sampled, investigated and followed until the end of 2009. The time to recurrent relapses were considered in weeks. The patients with at least one relapse in this duration were included in the study. Event-dependent frailty model, using Bayesian approach, was applied to fit the data and identify the risk factors of time to relapses. Results: In this recurrent failure time model, the effects of age of onset (95% CI = (0.058, 0.086)), gender (95% CI = (0.146, 0.686)), marital status (95% CI = (0.475, 0.965)) and family history (95% CI = (0.115, 0.543)) were significant on the hazard time to relapses. According to the credible interval of frailty variance, elapsed time to relapse is dependent on patients’ characteristics (95% CI = (0.084, 0.369)). Subsequent relapses are likely to be influenced by the occurrence of the first relapse, too (95% CI = (2.504, 3.079)), with decreasing hazard of time to relapse. Conclusions: Subsequent relapses are likely dependent on the first and previous relapses. Age of onset, gender, marital status and family history are important risk factors influencing hazard of time to relapses. More studies are required to clear out the effect of other covariates with this model