Generalizability in qualitative research has been a controversial topic given that interpretivist scholars have resisted the dominant role and mandate of the positivist tradition within social ...sciences. Aiming to find universal laws, the positivist paradigm has made generalizability a crucial criterion for evaluating the rigor of quantitative research. This positivist echo has led generalizability to acquire a quantitative meaning, inappropriate for describing qualitative studies. The purpose of qualitative research has, thus, been directed toward providing in-depth explanations and meanings rather than generalizing findings. Through a critical review of empirical and theoretical studies, this commentary seeks to show that in qualitative domains, generalizability is possible provided that, first, generalizability is the main objective of the study; second, due precautions concerning the philosophy and terminology selected are taken. Hence, this commentary contributes to the literature on qualitative research by making suggestions for more consistent and unanimous procedures to adopt in qualitative inquiries.
The level of meaning in life not only affects the physical health of individuals, but also is closely related to their mental health. At present, many self-reported questionnaires are being used to ...measure the meaning in life of Chinese adolescents. Using the multivariate generalizability theory, this study investigated the psychometric properties and the internal structure of the Meaning in Life Questionnaires (MLQs), the most widely used questionnaire for assessing the level of meaning in life of Chinese adolescents. The data were sample of 1,951 junior high school students from Guizhou, China. Multivariate random measurement mode
×
° is the primary analytic approach. Results showed that the generalizability coefficient and dependability index of the scale were 0.86 and 0.85, respectively. The generalizability coefficients of presence of meaning and search for meaning were 0.76 and 0.85, respectively, and the dependability indexes were 0.75 and 0.85 for MLQ-P and MLQ-S, respectively. The design of each factor for MLQ is reasonable in terms of score ratio and the number of projects. In brief, the reliability and factor structure of the scale are satisfactory.
In order to be competitive in an era of ethical consumerism, brands are facing an ever-increasing pressure to integrate ethical values into their identities and to display their ethical commitment at ...a corporate level. Nevertheless, studies that relate business ethics to corporate brands are either theoretical or have predominantly been developed empirically in goods contexts. This is surprising, because corporate brands are more relevant in services settings, given the nature of services (i.e., intangible, heterogeneous, inseparable and perishable), and the fact that services settings comprise a greater number of customer-brand interactions and touch points than goods contexts. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to empirically examine the effects of customer perceived ethicality of corporate brands that operate in the services sector. Based on data collected for eight service categories using a panel of 2179 customers, the hypothesized structural model is tested using path analysis. The generalizability theory is applied to test for measurement equivalence between these categories. The results of the hypothesized model show that, in addition to a direct impact, customer perceived ethicality has a positive and indirect impact on brand equity, through the mediators of recognition benefits and brand image. Moreover, brand heritage negatively influences the impact of customer perceived ethicality on brand image. The main implication is that managers need to be aware of the need to reinforce brand image and recognition benefits, as this can facilitate the translation of customer perceived ethicality into brand equity.
A popular goal in psychological science is to understand human cognition and behavior in the 'real-world.' In contrast, researchers have typically conducted their research in experimental research ...settings, a.k.a. the 'psychologist's laboratory.' Critics have often questioned whether psychology's laboratory experiments permit generalizable results. This is known as the 'real-world or the lab'-dilemma. To bridge the gap between lab and life, many researchers have called for experiments with more 'ecological validity' to ensure that experiments more closely resemble and generalize to the 'real-world.' However, researchers seldom explain what they mean with this term, nor how more ecological validity should be achieved. In our opinion, the popular concept of ecological validity is ill-formed, lacks specificity, and falls short of addressing the problem of generalizability. To move beyond the 'real-world or the lab'-dilemma, we believe that researchers in psychological science should always specify the particular context of cognitive and behavioral functioning in which they are interested, instead of advocating that experiments should be more 'ecologically valid' in order to generalize to the 'real-world.' We believe this will be a more constructive way to uncover the context-specific and context-generic principles of cognition and behavior.
Abstraction and Detail in Experimental Design Brutger, Ryan; Kertzer, Joshua D.; Renshon, Jonathan ...
American journal of political science,
10/2023, Letnik:
67, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
Political scientists designing experiments often face the question of how abstract or detailed their experimental stimuli should be. Typically, this question is framed in terms of trade‐offs ...relating to experimental control and generalizability: the more context introduced into studies, the less control, and the more difficulty generalizing the results. Yet, we have reason to question this trade‐off, and there is relatively little systematic evidence to rely on when calibrating the degree of abstraction in studies. We make two contributions. First, we provide a theoretical framework that identifies and considers the consequences of three dimensions of abstraction in experimental design: situational hypotheticality, actor identity, and contextual detail. Second, we replicate and extend three survey experiments, varying these levels of abstraction. We find no evidence that situational hypotheticality substantively changes results in any of our studies, but do find that increased contextual detail dampens treatment effects, and that the salience of actor identities moderates results in our endorsement experiment.
In the current socioeconomic environment, brands increasingly need to portray societal and ethical commitments at a corporate level, in order to remain competitive and improve their reputation. ...However, studies that relate business ethics to corporate brands are either purely conceptual or have been empirically conducted in relation to the field of products/goods. This is surprising because corporate brands are even more relevant in the services sector, due to the different nature of services, and the subsequent need to provide a consistent high-quality customer experience across all the brand-customer interactions and touch-points. Thus, the purpose of this article is to study, at a corporate brand level and in the field of services, the effect of customer perceived ethicality of a brand on brand equity. The model is tested by structural equations, using data collected for eight service categories by means of a panel composed of 2179 customers. The test of measurement equivalence between these categories is conducted using generalizability theory. Confirmatory factor analysis marker technique is applied in order to check for common method variance. The results of the hypothesized model indicate that customer perceived ethicality has a positive, indirect impact on brand equity, through the mediators of brand affect and perceived quality. However, there is no empirical evidence for a direct effect of customer perceived ethicality on brand equity.
•The Bayesian best-worst method (BWM) is introduced for the group decision-making problem.•The proposed method reads the input to the BWM using probability distributions, which preserves the ...underlying idea of the BWM.•Credal ranking is introduced for ranking the criteria with respect to the preferences of multiple DMs.
The best-worst method (BWM) is a multi-criteria decision-making method which finds the optimal weights of a set of criteria based on the preferences of only one decision-maker (DM) (or evaluator). However, it cannot amalgamate the preferences of multiple decision-makers/evaluators in the so-called group decision-making problem. A typical way of aggregating the preferences of multiple DMs is to use the average operator, e.g., arithmetic or geometric mean. However, averages are sensitive to outliers and provide restricted information regarding the overall preferences of all DMs. In this paper, a Bayesian BWM is introduced to find the aggregated final weights of criteria for a group of DMs at once. To this end, the BWM framework is meaningfully viewed from a probabilistic angle, and a Bayesian hierarchical model is tailored to compute the weights in the presence of a group of DMs. We further introduce a new ranking scheme for decision criteria, called credal ranking, where a confidence level is assigned to measure the extent to which a group of DMs prefers one criterion over one another. A weighted directed graph visualizes the credal ranking based on which the interrelation of criteria and confidences are merely understood. The numerical example validates the results obtained by the Bayesian BWM while it yields much more information in comparison to that of the original BWM.
While utilizing Twitter data for crisis management is of interest to different response authorities, a critical challenge that hinders the utilization of such data is the scarcity of automated tools ...that extract geolocation information. The limited focus on Location Mention Recognition (LMR) in tweets, specifically, is attributed to the lack of a standard dataset that enables research in LMR. To bridge this gap, we present IDRISI-RE, a large-scale human-labeled LMR dataset comprising around 20.5k tweets. The annotated location mentions within the tweets are also assigned location types (e.g., country, city, street, etc.). IDRISI-RE contains tweets from 19 disaster events of diverse types (e.g., flood and earthquake) covering a wide geographical area of 22 English-speaking countries. Additionally, IDRISI-RE contains about 56.6k automatically-labeled tweets that we offer as a silver dataset. To highlight the superiority of IDRISI-RE over past efforts, we present rigorous analyses on reliability, consistency, coverage, diversity, and generalizability. Furthermore, we benchmark IDRISI-RE using a representative set of LMR models to provide the community with baselines for future work. Our extensive empirical analysis shows the promising generalizability of IDRISI-RE compared to existing datasets. We show that models trained on IDRISI-RE better tackle domain shifts and are less susceptible to change in geographical areas.
•We release IDRISI-RE, the largest English tweet Location Mention Recognition dataset.•IDRISI-RE contains both location mention and location type annotations.•Thorough evaluation of representative LMR models shows that BERT-based model is superior.•Empirically, IDRISI-RE is the best domain and geographical generalizable LMR dataset.•The geographical coverage and data size are the top influencers on generalizability.
The Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) has been extensively used in science education research for more than two decades. This study examines the fairness of MATE items based on ...religious convictions and academic majors. The multidimensional item response theory and differential item functioning analyses were run on data collected from 619 Korean undergraduate students. These participants included non-religious and Christian groups, as well as biology and non-biology majors. The results supported the two-dimensional model of MATE, consisting of the constructs of fact and credibility. The results indicated that all items were psychometrically sound. Further, the MATE instrument was a reliable measure of students' acceptance of the evolutionary theory. Additionally, DIF analysis showed that several MATE items were interpreted differently by students from different subgroups. Specifically, we found four religion-related DIF items and two academic major-related DIF items. The effect of DIF items on the estimated individual scores showed that DIF items widened the gaps between the MATE scores of the subgroups. The findings underscore the importance of the generalizability of an instrument, particularly the acceptance of the evolutionary theory, to achieve more accurate interpretations of the scores generated by the instrument.
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