Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a major public health problem. Identifying novel risk factors for CVD, including widely prevalent environmental exposures, is therefore important. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) is a manmade chemical used in the manufacture of common household consumer products. Biomonitoring surveys have shown that PFOA is detectable in the blood of more than 98% of t...

The presence and behavior of private labels add a significant dimension to price competition among the food system’s subsectors. Recent surveys in two college towns in Texas show a larger price difference between national brands and private labels than previous studies. The increase in price differences are attributed to “horizontal” and “vertica]” influences on priCeS and also to advertising a...

This paper reviews information from surveys and focus group studies about how consumers define high-quality care and the types of information they want when making decisions about which health plan to join. The authors also interviewed consumer advocacy groups and persons responsible for disseminating health plan information to Medicare enrollees in various types of managed care plans to learn ...

Patients value the interpersonal aspects of their health care experiences. However, faced with multiple resource demands, primary care practices may question the value of collecting and acting upon survey data that measure patients' experiences of care. The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) suite of surveys and quality improvement tools supports the systematic coll...

This paper presents first results of a research project conducted at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. The focus of the project is to analyze customer perceptions towards Mobile Java Games and to identify gaps in Mobile Java Games research. A major finding is that transaction data typically collected by Mobile Service Providers can deliver only limited explanations...

Significant research challenges must be addressed in the cleaning, transformation, integration, modeling, and analytics of Big Data sources for finance. This article surveys the progress made so far in this direction and obstacles yet to be overcome. These are issues that are of interest to data-driven financial institutions in both corporate finance and consumer finance. These challenges are a...

This study examined the equivalence of the English and Spanish versions of the Medicare Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS) fee-for-service (FFS) survey among 2,996 Hispanic Medicare beneficiaries. Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses indicated that with few exceptions the factor structures were very similar for the English and Spanish surveys. However, item response theory-bas...

Traditionally, businesses spend tons of money performing customer surveys on brands. In the big data age, such insights including both consumer compliments and complaints can be automatically collected from social media such as twitter. The enabling technology is sentiment analysis. It is observed that social media often uses emoticons such as :) and :( mixed with text to express sentiment. Thi...

Nhien To, Eric Figueroa, and Lucilla Tan are research economists in the Branch of Research and Program Development, Division of Consumer Expenditure Surveys, Bureau of Labor Statistics. NHIEN TO ERIC FIGUEROA LUCILLA TAN In designing any survey, it is important to provide respondents with clear instructions and examples. Self-administered expenditure diaries often use cues as examples, not only...

A large segment of consumers appear to value niche products including organic, “non-GM,” “pesticide-free,” and “no antibiotics used” more in fresh products than in processed. About ten percent of the respondents were especially interested in non-GM products. These consumers feel that GM labeling is important, but felt that other types of food labels were relatively unimportant. The non-GM audie...