Segmenting Australian online panellists based on volunteering motivations

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to seek to assess whether online commercial panel volunteering can be segmented based on their motivations, using the volunteer functions inventor. The authors also investigate whether segments exist which differ in demographic characteristics.Design/methodology/approach– The authors survey 484 Australian online panel volunteers using a adapted version of the 30 item of the volunteer function inventory (VFI) scale developed by Clary et al. (1998). Data were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and cluster analysis, as well as ANOVA and χ2 test comparisons of demographics between clusters.Findings– CFA verifies that the VFI scale is suitable instrument to gauge online participants’ motivations. Cluster analysis produced a five-cluster solution, where respondents with low motivations overall comprised the largest grouping. Segments are interpreted by assessing the difference between the total sample average and the segment profile. The examination also identifies that the only demographic factor that varies across the five clusters is “respondents” employment status”.Research limitations/implications– Future research could explore if differences in segments result in differences in online participation. The high number or respondents with low motivations may explain the relatively high levels of churn that take place within online panels and as a result panel operators would need to continually attract new members. Further research could also investigate whether the levels of motivation change over time and if so what effect such variation would produce on respondents’ retention.Originality/value– Research on online panel respondents’ motivation is still limited and investigating online panellists’ motivation as volunteers is very important as it unveils, as in the study herein reported, that alternative types of respondents may be driven by different factors when joining an online panel (or completing a given survey). Recruitment strategies could, therefore, be shaped to suit the motivation of the different segments. By refining the matching between volunteers’ profiles and their motivation, managers could improve how volunteers are recruited, managed and retained.

Typology of alcohol mixed with energy drink consumers: motivations for use

Background: Previous research on alcohol mixed with energy drinks (AmED) has shown that use is typically driven by hedonistic, social, functional, and intoxication-related motives, with differential associations with alcohol-related harm across these constructs. There has been no research looking at whether there are subgroups of consumers based on patterns of motivations. Consequently, the aims were to determine the typology of motivations for AmED use among a community sample and to identify correlates of subgroup membership. In addition, we aimed to determine whether this structure of motivations applied to a university student sample. Methods: Data were used from an Australian community sample (n = 731) and an Australian university student sample (n = 594) who were identified as AmED consumers when completing an online survey about their alcohol and ED use. Participants reported their level of agreement with 14 motivations for AmED use; latent classes of AmED consumers were identified based on patterns of motivation endorsement using latent class analysis. Results: A 4-class model was selected using data from the community sample: (i) taste consumers (31%): endorsed pleasurable taste; (ii) energy-seeking consumers (24%): endorsed functional and taste motives; (iii) hedonistic consumers (33%): endorse pleasure and sensation-seeking motives, as well as functional and taste motives; and (iv) intoxication-related consumers (12%): endorsed motives related to feeling in control of intoxication, as well as hedonistic, functional, and taste motives. The consumer subgroups typically did not differ on demographics, other drug use, alcohol and ED use, and AmED risk taking. The patterns of motivations for the 4-class model were similar for the university student sample. Conclusions: This study indicated the existence of 4 subgroups of AmED consumers based on their patterns of motivations for AmED use consistently structured across the community and university student sample. These findings lend support to the growing conceptualization of AmED consumers as a heterogeneous group in regard to motivations for use, with a hierarchical and cumulative class order in regard to the number of types of motivation for AmED use. Prospective research may endeavor to link session-specific motives and outcomes, as it is apparent that primary consumption motives may be fluid between sessions.

The IUCN red list of ecosystems: motivations, challenges, and applications

In response to growing demand for ecosystem-level risk assessment in biodiversity conservation, and rapid proliferation of locally tailored protocols, the IUCN recently endorsed new Red List criteria as a global standard for ecosystem risk assessment. Four qualities were sought in the design of the IUCN criteria: generality; precision; realism; and simplicity. Drawing from extensive global consultation, we explore trade-offs among these qualities when dealing with key challenges, including ecosystem classification, measuring ecosystem dynamics, degradation and collapse, and setting decision thresholds to delimit ordinal categories of threat. Experience from countries with national lists of threatened ecosystems demonstrates well-balanced trade-offs in current and potential applications of Red Lists of Ecosystems in legislation, policy, environmental management and education. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems should be judged by whether it achieves conservation ends and improves natural resource management, whether its limitations are outweighed by its benefits, and whether it performs better than alternative methods. Future development of the Red List of Ecosystems will benefit from the history of the Red List of Threatened Species which was trialed and adjusted iteratively over 50 years from rudimentary beginnings. We anticipate the Red List of Ecosystems will promote policy focus on conservation outcomes in situ across whole landscapes and seascapes.

Extraordinary television time travel and the wonderful end to the working day

In this article I will present two arguments. First, the argument that the time travel television series historically provided viewers with a spectacular temporal and spatial alternative to the routine of everyday life, the regulation of television scheduling, and the small-world confines of domestic subjectivity. Taking the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, predominantly in a UK viewing environment, I will suggest that the special effect rendering of the time travel sequence expanded the viewer’s material universe, and affectively wrenched the television set free from the strictures of scheduling and realist programming. Further, the time travel series readily and regularly took the domestic space, the ordinary day and the everyman/ person into awesome environments and situations that suggested alternative lifestyles and behaviours, with a different existential tempo and rhythm. At a narrative, thematic, meta- textual, and aesthetically spectacular level, television time travel saw to the wonderful end of the working day. Case studies include Sapphire and Steal, Dr Who, and Quantum Leap. Second, the article will argue that rather than the contemporary time travel television series being an extraordinary alternative to ordinary life, they instead articulate convergence culture, deregulation, multiple channel viewing, and time-shift culture where there is no such thing as an ordinary working day or domestic viewing context.

Exploring the travel behaviors of inbound tourists to Hong Kong using geotagged photos

Insight into tourist travel behaviors is crucial for managers engaged in strategic planning and decision making to create a sustainable tourism industry. However, they continue to face significant challenges in fully capturing and understanding the behavior of international tourists. The challenges are primarily due to the inefficient data collection approaches currently in use. In this paper, we present a new approach to this task by exploiting the socially generated and user-contributed geotagged photos now made publicly available on the Internet. Our case study focuses on Hong Kong inbound tourism using 29,443 photos collected from 2100 tourists. We demonstrate how a dataset constructed from such geotagged photos can help address such challenges as well as provide useful practical implications for destination development, transportation planning, and impact management. This study has the potential to benefit tourism researchers worldwide from better understanding travel behavior and developing sustainable tourism industries.

Discovery of stop regions for understanding repeat travel behaviors of moving objects

GPS trajectory dataset with high sampling-rates is usually in large volume that challenges the processing efficiency. Most of the data points on trajectories are useless. This paper summarizes trajectories using stop points. We define a new concept of stay stability (i.e., time dividing distance or reciprocal of speed) between any two GPS points to detect stop points on individual trajectories. We propose a novel Mining Repeat Travel Behaviors Using Stop Regions (MRTBUSR) method. In MRTBUSR, a stop region is a popular region containing a certain number of close stop points that can be grouped into a cluster. We then retrieve common sequences of stop regions to denote repeat route patterns and further analyze the stop durations on a stop region to find repeat travel behaviors. The experiments on 20 labeled trajectories selected from GeoLife demonstrated the semantic effect, accuracy and near linear efficiency of our proposed method.

May 2008: Travel Tips

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Equity and Efficiency in Education: motivations and targets

The recently released "Educational PAC" attempts to place basic education at the center of the social debate. We have subsidized this debate, offering a diagnosis of how different education levels can impact individuals' lives through broad and easily interpreted indicators. Initially, we analyze how much each educational level reaches the poorest population. For example, how are those in the bottom strata of income distribution benefited by childcare centers, private secondary education, public university or adult education. The next step is to quantify the return of educational actions, such as their effects on employability and an individual's wages, and even health as perceived by the individual, be that individual poor, middle class or elite. The next part of the research presents evidence of how the main characters in education, aka mothers, fathers and children, regard education. The site available with the research presents a broad, user-friendly database, which will allow interested parties to answer their own questions relative to why people do not attend school, the time spent in the educational system and returns to education, which can all be cross-sectioned with a wide array of socio-demographic attributes (gender, income, etc.) and school characteristics (is it public, are school meals offered, etc.) to find answers to: why do young adults of a certain age not attend school? Why do they miss classes? How long is the school day? Aside from the whys and hows of teaching, the research calculates the amount of time spent in school, resulting from a combination between absence rates, evasion raters and length of the school day. The study presents ranks of indicators referring to objective and subjective aspects of education, such as the discussion of the advantages and care in establishing performance based incentives that aim at guiding the states in the race for better educational indicators.

Motivations for knowledge sharing in virtual social networks: a comparative study between Brazil and France

Sociedades pós-modernas caracterizam-se pela transição de economias baseadas em ativos tangíveis para economias de conhecimento, onde indivíduos vivenciam uma imprescindível conectividade, mas ao mesmo tempo, experimentam um enfraquecimento das estruturas sociais, que tem generado uma crescente necessidade de se criar bases cognitivas e afetivas para a vida (Rheingold, 1992; Wasko & Farah, 2005; Arvidsson, 2008). Nesse cenário se desenvolve o fenômeno das redes sociais virtuais, agregando milhões de pessoas que compartilham mensagens de texto, imagens e vídeos todos os dias (Nielsen, 2012) fazendo com que organizações privadas foquem cada vez mais seus investimentos para acompanhar as novas tendências (McWilliam, 2000; Reichheld & Schefter, 2000; Yoo, Suh & Lee, 2002; Arvidsson, 2008). Consequentemente, uma das mais importantes questões que vem ganhando importância no meio academico e entre profissionais da área é justamente: por que as pessoas compartilham conhecimento online? (Monge, Fulk, Kalman, Flanigan, Parnassa & Rumsey, 1998; Lin, 2001) Por meio de uma metodologia de estudo de caso conduzida no Brasil e na França, este estudo objetiva produzir uma relevante revisão teórica acerca do tema, trazendo novas idéias de diferentes contextos, e propondo um modelo para avaliar as principais motivações que conduzem indivíduos a compartilhar conhecimento em redes sociais virtuais. Essas razões foram estruturadas em cinco dimensões: capital estrutural, cognitivo e relacional, motivações pessoais e razões monetárias (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998; Wasko & Faraj, 2005; Chiu et al, 2006). As evidências sugerem que o processo de participar e compartilhar conhecimento em redes sociais virtuais é resultado de uma complexa combinação de motivações de orientação pessoal e coletiva, que parecem variar pouco de acordo com os diferentes objetivos e contextos dessas comunidades, onde as razões financeiras parecem ser secundárias.

Beyond sea, sun and fun in Rio de Janeiro: understanding exchange students motivations and interests

O objetivo deste estudo é compreender o que leva estudantes de intercâmbio ao Rio de Janeiro, quais são suas motivações e interesses que influenciam na escolha dessa cidade, um destino pouco tradicional para intercâmbios, que recebe um crescente número de intercambistas de países desenvolvidos. Também apresentamos uma discussão mais ampla sobre a educação internacional do século 21, posicionando programas de intercâmbio como uma das possíveis iniciativas para a internacionalização de instituições de ensino superior. Para responder essa questão, 20 estudantes de 11 países foram entrevistados. Os resultados indicam que existe muito mais no Rio de Janeiro além do sol e das belas praias. Há uma grande variedade de interesses que explicam porque estudantes de intercâmbio escolhem esse destino. O clichê sobre sol, praia e carnaval se manifestou em diversas respostas, no entanto, nunca como principal fator. Intercambistas se interessam pela cidade por diversos motivos além das atrações turísticas, como aprender português, melhorar o currículo e estar em uma economia emergente. Recomendações para a internacionalização de instituições de educação e uma agenda de pesquisa para o desenvolvimento desse tópico são apresentadas na parte final.