Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Sociology and Gerontology, 2009. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-156).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Sociology and Gerontology, 2009. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-156).

Changes in mortality behavior in 1950s-1970s pose a fluctuation of Czech population's mortality trend and still have an impact on current level of life expectancy. The thesis focuses on mortality process in that period from cross-sectional and longitudinal approach and tries to identify how the mortality changes affected age intervals older than 30 and influenced cohorts which were in these age intervals in observed period. In the thesis Arriaga's decomposition method was used for quantification of mortality changes in particular age intervals and their affect on changes of life expectancy. The obtained results show that mostly age groups older than 60 were more sensitive to mortality fluctuations.

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Social buying is a recent marketing innovation in which provides Pareto-improving welfare gains to merchants, consumers, and brokers. Consumers benefit from access to significant discounts on advertised products and services, the broker benefits from taking a significant cut in each transaction with very low fixed costs, and merchants are able to reduce their advertising costs, gain access to new markets and drive traffic to their stores. The phenomenal growth of social buying carries commensurate risks for brokers, including increased competition due to a lack of service differentiation and low entry barriers. The complete social buying transaction is completed over two stages: the initial online e-commerce transaction and the subsequent fulfilment transaction where the voucher is redeemed with the merchant. In order to explore the sustainability of the social buying business model, it is necessary to identify the factors which drive loyalty behaviours in social buying, as well as the interrelationships between the factors. This research proposes from the marketing literature Oliver’s (1980) expectancy-disconfirmation theory (EDT) as the main theoretical framework on which to model these relationships. EDT is then successfully synthesised with DeLone and McLean’s (2003) information systems success model to create a framework which can appropriately model both the online and traditional stages of the social buying transaction. This study contributes to the marketing literature by establishing EDT as a suitable framework for investigating social buying. It is believed that this study is the first to do so. Furthermore, it is believed this is the first study examining the social buying innovation in the South African context. / Graduate School of Business Leadership / MBA

The life expectancy development during the past 150 years has been remarkable in many parts of the world. These developments, however, have been very different across countries. In Europe, the diverse historical and political changes lead to clusters of regions that followed different mortality developments. The aim of this study was to examine how countries that entered the European Union in 2004 and 2007 differ in terms of mortality from continuous members of the EU and from Eastern European countries that have never joined the EU. Moreover, I studied a possible convergence in mortality indicators between these groups of countries. The data used to explore mortality conditions in those groups of countries was derived from two sources: The Human Mortality Database and European Health for All Database. Descriptive statistics and calculations of average yearly pace of change for groups of countries have been applied for each mortality indicator. Furthermore, regression models have been conducted to estimate the impact of belonging to a country group on mortality indicators, adjusted for some macro-level indicators of economic progress and health expenditure. The results verified previous research implying the importance of period factors which can affect mortality in the short term. For all mortality indicators, accelerated improvements between 1995 and 1999 have been found in countries who became EU members in 2004. Moreover, life expectancy convergence was observed for life expectancy at birth but not for the older ages which could imply that the positive progress affected older ages to smaller degree. My findings confirm the importance of social environment and imply that the process of joining the EU possibly could reduce social stress and affect mortality conditions positively.

Social software technology has gained considerable popularity over the last decade and has had a great impact on hundreds of millions of people across the globe. Businesses have also expressed their interest in leveraging its use in business contexts. As a result, software vendors and business consumers have invested billions of dollars to use social software to improve business and employee productivity. The purpose of this study was to provide insights to business leaders and decision makers as they shaped their enterprise social software (ESS) delivery plans. A vast body of information exists on the benefits of ESS and its technical implementation, but little empirical research is available on employees' perceptions of ESS expectancy factors (i.e. usefulness and ease of use). This study focused on IT managers' perceptions of ESS expectancy factors to understand their behavioral intent to adopt ESS technology. Additional research was performed to uncover relationships and differences between IT Managers' adoption intentions and employee age, gender, and generational groups. Survey results were analyzed using a correlation research design and demonstrated significant relationships were found between IT managers' expectancy factors and their behavioral intent to adopt ESS technology. Differences were also demonstrated between IT managers' age, gender, and generational cohort groups. The results of this research should help business leaders gain insights into technology adoption factors among IT managers. Lastly, the practical applicability and opportunities for future research are discussed.

This dissertation focuses generally on consumer behavior, and particularly on consumer attitudes toward products of foreign origin for the purpose of developing a theory that will assist in explaining and predicting this phenomenon. Existing research in the area of country of origin effects upon consumer attitudes toward foreign-made products demonstrates significant methodological limitations such as single cue approaches., The major objective of this dissertation is to contribute to the development of a theory based upon the expectancy-value attitude concept to better explain and predict consumer attitudes toward products of foreign origin. To achieve this objective, the research attempts to overcome the limitations identified in attitude research and specific methodological deficiencies in research focusing on attitudes toward products of foreign origin by: 1. utilizing the expectancy-value approach; 2. basing operationalization of the attitude concepts on Likert-like scales and subjective conditional probabilities; 3. measuring the operationalized attitudes both directly and indirectly via beliefs and evaluations; 4. simultaneously including multiple extrinsic cues; 5. including pictorial cues in the questionnaire; and 6. performing and reporting validity and reliability tests. The general model developed in this research, representing the theory of attitudes toward products of foreign origin is the Foreign Product Attitude Model (FPAM). This dissertation will concentrate on an extracted part of the total model, namely the relationships between the informational stimuli cues and the attitudinal response. The informational extrinsic informational cues include the country of origin, the brand name, the store image and an involvement covariate. By concentrating on the above relationships it is hoped that this study will contribute to a better understanding of the direct effects of the informational stimuli upon the attitude toward a product of foreign origin. The country of origin effect and the other extrinsic cues (brand name and store image) were found to have significant effects on consumer attitudes toward products, explaining almost 20 percent of the total variance.

Many people who receive exposure-based treatments for anxiety disorders exhibit a return of fear and avoidance which is often referred to as renewal or relapse. Human and nonhuman research on fear conditioning and renewal has been instrumental in helping understand relapse in anxiety disorders. The purpose of this investigation was to examine renewal of human avoidance and assess whether avoidance may aid in sustaining renewal of fear responses. We adopted a multimodal measurement approach consisting of an approach-avoidance task along with ratings of perceived threat and fear and measures of skin-conductance, a widely used physiological measure of fear. A traditional, single-subject research design was used with six healthy adults. All tasks employed a discrete trial procedure. Experimental conditions included Pavlovian fear conditioning in which increased probability of money loss was paired with a “threat” meter in Context A and later followed extinction in Context B. Fear and avoidance increased to higher threat levels in Context A but not Context B. Renewal testing involved presenting the threat meter on a return to Context A to determine if it evoked fear and avoidance (i.e., relapse). As predicted, renewal testing in Context A showed that increased threat was associated with increased avoidance, ratings of perceived threat and fear, and higher skin-conductance. Moreover, results showed that renewal maintained over six blocks of trials. This is the first investigation of renewal of threat and avoidance in humans that highlights avoidance as a mechanism that may contribute to maintaining fear in anxiety pathology.