The temporal pattern of customer satisfaction: a construal-level approach

Customer satisfaction has been traditionally studied and measured regardless of the time elapsed since the purchase. Some studies have recently reopened the debate about the temporal pattern of satisfaction. This research aims to explain why “how you evaluate a service depends on when you evaluate it” on the basis of the theoretical framework proposed by Construal-Level Theory (CLT). Although an empirical investigation is still lacking, the literature does not deny that CLT can be applied also with regard to past events. Moreover, some studies support the idea that satisfaction is a good predictor of future intentions, while others do not. On the basis of CLT, we argue that these inconsistent results are due to the different construal levels of the information pertaining to retrospective and prospective evaluations. Building on the Two-Factor Theory, we explain the persistence of certain attributes’ representations over time according to their relationship with overall performance. We present and discuss three experiments and one field study that were conducted a) to test the extensibility of CLT to past events, b) to disentangle memory and construal effects, c) to study the effect of different temporal perspective on overall satisfaction judgements, and d) to investigate the temporal shift of the determinants of customer satisfaction as a function of temporal distance.

Design, development and first evaluation of a client/server system for managing and querying linguistic corpora

This thesis is concerned with the role played by software tools in the analysis and dissemination of linguistic corpora and their contribution to a more widespread adoption of corpora in different fields. Chapter 1 contains an overview of some of the most relevant corpus analysis tools available today, presenting their most interesting features and some of their drawbacks. Chapter 2 begins with an explanation of the reasons why none of the available tools appear to satisfy the requirements of the user community and then continues with technical overview of the current status of the new system developed as part of this work. This presentation is followed by highlights of features that make the system appealing to users and corpus builders (i.e. scholars willing to make their corpora available to the public). The chapter concludes with an indication of future directions for the projects and information on the current availability of the software. Chapter 3 describes the design of an experiment devised to evaluate the usability of the new system in comparison to another corpus tool. Usage of the tool was tested in the context of a documentation task performed on a real assignment during a translation class in a master's degree course. In chapter 4 the findings of the experiment are presented on two levels of analysis: firstly a discussion on how participants interacted with and evaluated the two corpus tools in terms of interface and interaction design, usability and perceived ease of use. Then an analysis follows of how users interacted with corpora to complete the task and what kind of queries they submitted. Finally, some general conclusions are drawn and areas for future work are outlined.