To enhance the sustainability of local communities in an aging society, older people have begun independently organizing community activities as social support services. The knowledge created by the ...community-dwelling older people for these community activities is a valuable resource. Although many studies have addressed the motivations of older people to participate in social activities, few studies have explored motivations toward knowledge creation in community activities. The present study investigates how older people are motivated knowledge creation in community activities from the perspective of services marketing. We conducted in-depth interviews with older individuals participating in community activities and identified four scenes (reminiscence, resonance, reuse, and rewarding) by content analysis. These four scenes are associated with specific contexts describing how older people are motivated knowledge creation in community activities. We interpreted these scenes from the axes of the source of motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic) and approaches for psychological well-being (affiliation and power) and developed the 4R model. Our findings add insights to services marketing to enhance the sustainability of local communities through community activities.
To solve the “wicked problems” of sustainability, education for sustainable development (EfSD) that raises the young generation to become change agents is necessary. For this purpose, fieldtrips that ...educate students in the real world about other stakeholders are effective, but since sustainable issues do not have clear solutions, cooperative learning (CL) in which students learn from each other is useful. The purpose of this study is to clarify the influence of the learning process on learning outcomes and their influence on learning objectives in real-world EfSD using CL. A hypothesis model consisting of seven hypotheses was set up, and a questionnaire survey of high school students who participated in the real-world EfSD was conducted. Results of the structural equation modeling of data from 2441 respondents supported all seven hypotheses. Implicit learning as a learning process promotes knowledge acquisition as a learning outcome, while explicit learning enhances self-efficacy. Although knowledge acquisition promotes citizenship development as the learning objective of EfSD, self-efficacy does not promote citizenship development. Self-efficacy affects knowledge acquisition more than implicit learning. This study contributes to EfSD research by clarifying the difference in the effects of the learning process.
•Bio-measurement can track emotional changes in customer journeys.•Thoroughly assessed both service interactions and environment over hours.•Detected emotional peaks in flight services missed in ...traditional self-reports.•Specific interactions by flight attendant evoke strong positive emotions.•Method enhances customer delight insights beyond questionnaire feedback.
Capturing customers’ emotional changes in sequential service should be realized using physiological measurements to assess customer delight. Questionnaire-based customer surveys may miss significant and dissipating emotional responses. This study developed a micro‑meso analysis method of capturing emotional changes for sequential service using electroencephalograph (EEG) measurement, dealing with both service encounters (micro-level) and servicescape (meso‑level) over a couple of hours. Customers’ emotion states were defined based on emotional arousal and valence. Emotional responses caused by human interactions were evaluated, and periods of high positive affect throughout the customer journey were visualized. Experiments in actual flight services demonstrated successful emotion estimation across flight phases using a single-channel EEG measurement over two hours. Analysis results on the measurement data revealed emotional peaks outside service encounters that are not captured in customers’ individual self-reports. The results also statistically revealed that two individual services (asking about a refill and conversations started by flight attendants) evoked high positive affect. Temporal dynamic analyses around high positive affect suggested patterns of interplay between joy and surprise, which are key components of customer delight. Compared with questionnaire-based evaluation, the proposed method contributes significantly to empirical studies on sequential services in marketing and design by enabling the extraction of “high positive affect,” which needs to be identified for customer delight. This study supplements existing research on the interactions among physiology (EEG), behavior (emotional changes), and customer service research.
To enhance the competitiveness of the traditional handicraft industry, providers should offer service experiences using their products (i.e., servitization) instead of merely selling them. Effective ...management for servitization in the traditional handicraft industry must consider the differences in customers’ prior knowledge. Nevertheless, previous studies have overlooked how this knowledge about traditional handicrafts impacts service experiences. This study explores which factors of consumer behavior (during services) and service outcomes (post-services) are affected by customers’ prior knowledge about a traditional handicraft. An organic food restaurant booth was provided at an annual summer festival about pottery as an experiment, and data were collected on customers’ meal experiences with a pottery plate through a questionnaire. The findings suggest that customers’ prior knowledge about a traditional handicraft promotes their search for information from service resources (i.e., organic foods) which are integrated with the traditional handicraft and their creativity during services, thereby changing their understanding of service resources and increasing satisfaction with service experience. This study contributes to services marketing by identifying the factors of during and post-services that are affected by customers’ prior knowledge about a traditional handicraft in the context of servitization.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the style of work. In adapting to the changing work environment, human augmentation technologies (HAT) can provide employees with new options to support their work. ...However, the agenda for research and development of HAT for the new normal is still unclear. In this study, we set two research questions: (i) what type of technology demand has emerged among employees due to the COVID-19 pandemic; and (ii) what is the nature of job satisfaction experienced by employees during the COVID-19 pandemic? This study aims to clarify the technology demand and job satisfaction of employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed data from in-depth interviews with employees based on a grounded theory approach to answer the research questions and proposed an agenda for the research and development of HAT to enhance employees' well-being in this new normal based on the crosspoint of technology demand and job satisfaction. The theoretical contribution of this study is the development of models of technology demand and job satisfaction of employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. The practical contribution is the development of a crosspoint framework to enable the development of HAT to support work while considering their impact on employees' well-being.
Rural areas need support services to help elderly people sustain their ordinary lives, especially in light of today's aging societies. In Japan, nonprofit organizations and residents' associations, ...which are based in local relationships, provide support services aimed at helping the elderly with their daily buying behavior. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of the barriers preventing the use of such support services. We collect 133 respondents from semi-structured interviews through door-to-door visits using snowball sampling to show that there are three such barriers: lifestyle, capability, and trust. Furthermore, we discussed measures to reduce these barriers using our results of correlation analysis and analysis of variance. Our findings have implications for a new direction in social marketing for elderly people. As societies continue to age and highly accessible services become ever more necessary, the insights of our study will be applicable not only in Japan but across the world.
Family caregivers reportedly have a powerful sense of role loss, which is felt when one senses a change in role or responsibility, relationship distancing, or a changed asymmetry. Little is known ...about the impact it has on the caregiving experience, so the purpose of this study was to clarify this in three distinct settings: when an individual’s primary role changed to the caregiver role after the start of caregiving; when their primary role was other than the caregiver role after this start; and when their primary role was the caregiver role before caregiving started. Sixty-six individuals responded to an online survey, and a framework method was employed to organize the collected data and uncover themes for analysis. Our findings shed light on the sense of caregiver role loss and pointed to the possibility of generating it when family caregivers rotate through held roles and the use of it as a tool to maintain or regain a sense of personal choice in life and self-priority. Our study is probably the first to analyze this phenomenon in different caregiving settings based on an individual’s primary role and role transitions and brings to light a new perspective of the phenomenon by understanding how it arises, its nuances, and its impact on the caregiver’s experience.
A great deal of attention is paid to the transformation of current work styles to sustainable ones by means of human augmentation technologies (HATs). However, it is still unclear how HATs would ...satisfy the potential needs for future work styles in the post-COVID era and what HATs need to be further developed in order to satisfy these needs. Drawing on the backcasting-based roadmap design method, this article aims to develop a roadmap to envision future work styles using HATs. For this purpose, we organized an expert workshop to extract various HATs and needs for work styles and identified the gaps between the HATs and work styles. Based on the total of 121 keywords generated during the workshop, we described several storylines using both forecasting and backcasting approaches. The results showed that higher priority is placed on flexibility and diversity in the work style. From a technological viewpoint, communication technologies, digitalization of skills, and agent technologies seem promising to change our work styles to more desirable ones. In addition, diverse work styles in a physical or virtual space will be enabled by HATs, removing time and space limitations. The present study provides a useful framework for developing the research agenda of HATs in the context of work style design.
Current in vitro pancreatic lipase inhibitor screenings are based on previous spectrophotometric lipase assays. Nevertheless, they are with little evaluation of assay conditions. This study focuses ...on the impacts of experimental factors on enzyme activity in the assay with p-nitrophenyl palmitate as substrate by monitoring their effects on the hydrolysis rates. On the results, experimental conditions for lipase inhibitory assay were proposed. Notably, 5 mM sodium deoxycholate as emulsifier not only maintains the assay homogeneity but also enhances lipase activity. Organic co-solvents to dissolve organic inhibitors including DMSO, EtOH, MeOH, IPA, AcCN 0–30% (v/v) was found well tolerated by the enzyme. With 10% (v/v) glycerol, lipase solutions can be stored at –20°C for up to one month without significant loss of activity. The results reported here provide researchers the assay condition sets in which most inhibitors can be dissolved, and lipase activity is not severely affected. This could accelerate the rational development of novel lipase inhibitors.
Background/Objectives
Stevens–Johnson syndrome (SJS) and toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) are medical emergencies. Mainstays of treatment include removal of the offending agent, supportive care, and ...wound care. The use of immunosuppressive agents such as corticosteroids and intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) is controversial. Some case reports and small studies report the successful use of cyclosporin A (CsA) for SJS/TEN in halting disease progression, fostering reepithelialization, and reducing mortality.
Objective
To report on the efficacy of cyclosporine A in the treatment of SJS/TEN in three pediatric patients.
Methods
We describe three pediatric patients seen at a tertiary care hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, diagnosed with SJS/TEN confirmed by skin biopsy who were successfully treated with CsA with improvements seen in time to cessation of disease progression or new lesion formation, reepithelialization, and duration of hospital stay.
Results
The average time cessation of disease progression or new lesion formation after CsA administration was 2.2 days (range 1.5–3 days) and average time to remission or reepithelialization was 13 days (range 10–15 days). The average length of hospital stay was 11.7 days (range 4–19 days).
Conclusions
We describe three pediatric patients treated successfully with CsA and provide evidence for the use of cyclosporine in children with SJS/TEN. These results further support previous observations that CsA use for SJS/TEN produces consistently favorable outcomes. The results in this case series are limited by their observational nature. Additional trials are needed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of CsA use in children.
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