Manufacturers of consumer goods often conduct surveys to determine customer satisfaction as well as guide the design of future products. In order to make use of the information it is necessary to determine the most important underlying common factors in the survey results. However, inconsistency in data obtained from humans is often problematic for conventional linear statistics. Conducting sur...

A key player in the current policy debate over tively-designed public education including basic chemical use in food production is the consumer. In principles of toxicology and risk assessment, agrithe last few years we have witnessed that consumer cultural production, economics, and public policy. activism has been able to force policy change in a Finally, despite substantial uncertainty in ma...

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are a common data gathering tool. We extend the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) framework to a collection of MCQ surveys. Topic discovery is turned into group discovery based on survey response patterns. Question choices are equivalent to vocabulary words and are conditioned on the question and the latent group that is used to cluster the survey responders. Th...

this study aims to examine the content of isps' websites in two countries, iran and malaysia. the sample contained 31 iranian and 19 malaysian websites. each website was content analyzed for use of various interactivity functions in three dimensions of consumer – message, consumer – marketer and consumer – consumer interactivity. our findings indicate that iranian websites tend to emphasiz...

BACKGROUND Ratings on the quality of healthcare from the consumer's perspective need to be adjusted for consumer characteristics to ensure fair and accurate comparisons between healthcare providers or health plans. Although multilevel analysis is already considered an appropriate method for analyzing healthcare performance data, it has rarely been used to assess case-mix adjustment of such data...

It has become common for healthcare providers to offer e-health services to patients and other consumers. Experts suggest these services are desired by users, and this has been confirmed generally through empirical research. However, most empirical studies of e-health adoption have focused on demographically homogeneous populations and have been implemented through cross-sectional designs. This...

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Researchers are increasingly using internet instruments such as email and online surveys as data-collection methods. However, web survey response rates are fairly low, which threatens the efficiency of weh surveys. To use weh surveys to gather data effectively, it is thus critical to improve the response rate of participants without compromising the low-cost advantage of this approach. The goal...