<p>Transition has been the major focus of educational institutions. The focal argument of the majority of research into student transition deals with the challenges that students faced when they moved from high school to first year at university. Not much focus has been placed on the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate studies. Postgraduate enrollment rates have steadily grown over the past few years in Higher Education Institution`s (HEI). Support systems have been put in place to assist students. In spite of these available support systems, postgraduate students still find themselves facing challenges when engaging with postgraduate studies. The primary aim of this study was to investigate the academic transitional challenges postgraduate students&rsquo / experience as reflected by the inconsistencies in the enrollment and throughput rates. Secondly, to determine whether students utilised available support systems, e.g. the Academic Writing Centre and the Postgraduate Enrolment and Throughput (PET) programme at the Faculty of Community and Health Science at University of the Western Cape. This was a quantitative study. A cross sectional survey has been conducted by means of a computerised self-administered questionnaire (CSAQ). The study population was postgraduate students in the Faculty of Community and Health Science at masters&rsquo / level. Both course work and research students were included in the study. No sampling method was employed due to the small size of the population. Data was collected to explore the academic preparedness of postgraduate students, and there primary motivations for studying and the utilization of available support services at the University of the Western Cape.</p>

Platser utvecklas, nya destinationer upptäcks ständigt. Människor finner varje år nya resmål att besöka av olika orsaker. Turismen är en viktig inkomstkälla för många länder och under 2008 fanns det 922 miljoner internationella turister. Turismen är den största och snabbast växande ekonomiska sektorn i världen. China Outbound Tourism Development påstår att världen kan räkna med upp till 54 miljoner kineser under detta år, 2010. Det uppskattas att cirka 6,68 miljarder dollar kommer spenderas under resorna.  Författarna av denna uppsats har utfört en studie av kinesiska turisters motiv och resebeslut till att resa till Sverige.  Syftet med uppsatsen var att ta reda på varför kineser väljer att resa till just Sverige, och vad det är som lockar de till att välja ett land, långt ifrån Kina. Uppsatsen utgick från kvalitativa intervjuer och intervjuerna utfördes genom semistrukturerade frågor. Intervjuerna utfördes på kinesiska, som sedan översattes till svenska av författarna. För att få svar på intervjufrågorna valde uppsatsförfattarna att utföra intervjuer med kinesiska turister på olika attraktiva platser i Stockholm. Dessa var bland annat Stadshuset, Gamla Stan och Vasamuseet.  I empirin kommer läsarna att kunna läsa om bland annat vad respondenterna ansåg om Sverige och vad deras reseanledningar var, samt ifall de har planer på att återbesöka Sverige. Utifrån analyserna som har gjorts kan författarna konstatera att det är viktigt att ständigt vara uppdaterad om vad som eftertraktas på marknaden. Det är även viktigt att erbjuda det som önskas för att kunna bli en önskad destination att besöka. Resultatet av studien ledde till flera slutsatser. Utifrån intervjuerna och dess svar kunde författarna skapa ett mönster, vilket skapar en förståelse för varför besökare väljer att komma till Sverige. Dessutom fick författarna en inblick i om hur de kinesiska turisternas uppfattningar skiljer sig innan resans start och under resans gång. Nyckeln ligger i att veta vad besökaren är ute efter, vad som får denne att vilja besöka just en specifik plats och förhoppningsvis sedan göra ett återbesök till destinationen. / Places are developing, new destinations are constantly discovered. People find each year, new destinations to visit for different reasons. Tourism is an important source of income for many countries and during 2008 there were 922 million tourists. Tourism is the biggest and fastest growing economic sector in the world. China Outbound Tourism Development claims that the world can count on up to 54 million Chinese tourists who travel during this year, 2010. It is estimated that approximately 6, 68 billion dollars will be spent during the travels.  The authors of this thesis have conducted a study of Chinese tourists' travel motives and decisions to travel to Sweden. The mission was to find out why Chinese choose to travel to Sweden, and what it is that attracts those to choose a country far away from China. The thesis was based on qualitative interviews, and the interviews were carried out by semi-structured questions. The interviews were conducted in Chinese, which then was translated into Swedish by the authors. In order to receive a response the authors of the essay chose to conduct interviews with Chinese tourists at various attractive places in Stockholm, including the City Hall, Old Town, and the Vasa Museum.  The readers will in the empirical part be able to read about what respondents felt about Sweden and what their reason was for travel, and if they have plans to visit Sweden again. Based on the analysis that is done, the authors’ note that it is important to be constantly updated about what is in demand at the market.  It is also very important to offer what is desired in order to become a preferred destination to visit. The results of the study led to several conclusions. From the interviews and the responses the authors could create a pattern, creating an understanding of why visitors choose to come to Sweden, how their perceptions differ before starting the journey and after the voyage. The key is to know what visitors are looking for, and what they may want to visit at a specific location, and then hopefully do a return visit to the destination.

Television is the most important media in modern life. Recently, the rapid development of information and telecommunication technology has created opportunities for new media usage. In order to expedite the adoption of digital technology,the government has initiated the ¡§challege2008- national important development¡¨project. Mobile television is one item included in the project. So far, not much research has investigated issues related to the adoption and use of this new media. The purpose of this research is to investigate motivations and factors that influence people¡¦s willingness to use mobile digital TV. Potential motivations, including fashion, information, mobility, social and entertainment, and their effects on the perceived usefulness and attitude are investigated. The research used quantity analysis, Snowball Sampling and convinence sampling to collect 316 samples. The data were analyzed using LISREL, the structural equation modeling tool. The result shows that information and fashion are two major motivations that had positive influence to the perceived usefulness. Social motivation and entertainment motivation had positive influence on attitudes. Attitudes and the perceived usefulness had positive influence on the intention to adopt mobile TV. Social norm did not have significant effect on the intention. The implications of the findings and research limitations are discussed.

This Project Research is the result of our Master Thesis, which concerns the attitude of sharing knowledge among managers and employees across countries inside a  Multinational Corporation. This thesis deals with the question of how multinationals work with knowledge embedded in people which must be transferred within the company itself and among this latter and its subsidiaries. According to the premise that knowledge is arguably one of the most important factor in today's economy, the key challenge for companies, therefore, is to develop, apply and then transfer knowledge, in order to improve the competitive advantage. On the bases of it, we would like to analyze the overall transfer knowledge process and from a human resources management point of view, we would like to individuate the stones which block this process and then to discuss the probable implications for multinationals. We have chosen PROACT Group, a consultancy services, support and systems firm in the fields of storage and archiving as our case study. This study involves a survey on thirty-two participants among managers and employees from the eight international subsidiaries of the PROACT Group. We have used a multilevel analysis, including top line level and bottom line level to retrieve comprehensive data on knowledge sharing to do an in-depth analysis of the staff's knowledge sharing in the organization. At bottom line level, this research tries to identify the employee's cognitive feelings of shared knowledge. At top line level, the manager's knowledge sharing behaviours with employees and the factors affecting knowledge sharing behaviours in teams. We also test moderating factors in both levels in order to get the willingness to share their knowledge in the organization. This study examines three keys aspects which include transfer knowledge process, culture influences and incentives to deal with the barriers.

Cette recherche s'intéresse à l'influence d'une caractéristique de l'être humain quasi ignorée par la recherche en marketing jusqu'à présent : la spiritualité. Inscrite dans un contexte démographique et économique où la compréhension du comportement de consommation des seniors revêt des intérêts majeurs, elle étudie l'influence de la spiritualité des personnes âgées sur leurs motivations à voyager. Le premier chapitre présente les caractéristiques du comportement touristique des personnes âgées et leurs motivations à voyager. Une étude qualitative complète les conclusions de la revue de littérature et aboutit à l'identification de sept catégories de motivations à voyager. Le second chapitre propose un cadre conceptuel de la spiritualité incluant une définition du concept, présente un état de l'art de l'influence de la spiritualité en comportement du consommateur et caractérise la spiritualité des personnes âgées via la théorie de la gérotranscendance. Le troisième chapitre présente la modélisation théorique de l'influence de la spiritualité des personnes âgées sur leurs motivations à voyager, les hypothèses de recherche associées et le design de la recherche. Les quatrième et cinquième chapitres décrivent les études empiriques mises en oeuvre sur un total de 645 retraités Français âgés de 60 à 85 ans pour répondre aux objectifs de la recherche. Les résultats obtenus sont analysés. Les apports théoriques de cette recherche résident dans son inscription dans les cadres d'analyse du consommateur âgé et du vieillissement réussi, contribuant ainsi à mieux comprendre le vieillissement en l'envisageant comme une continuité de croissance. Un cadre conceptuel clair et complet pour l'étude de la spiritualité en marketing est proposé, accompagné d'un état des recherches sur l'influence de la spiritualité en comportement de consommation. L'élaboration d'une échelle des motivations à voyager des Français âgés constitue un apport méthodologique major de ce travail. Des recommandations d'ordre managérial sont proposées sur la base des résultats de la recherche.

Ecosystem services and goods are non-market values that are increasingly being accounted through contingent valuation methods and more specifically by studying people’s willingness-to-pay for them. Large ecosystem restoration is an area that benefits from economic valuation because placing a monetary value proves that restoration efforts are justified to preserve resources for future generations, wanted by a community, and even a profitable investment of public funds. However, what determines that a community supports and understands restoration efforts is linked to their social, economic, cultural, and geographic reality. In this study I adopted the idea of willingness-to-pay to examine people’s attitudes towards river flow restoration efforts in the Colorado River Delta. The Colorado River Delta is a resilient ecosystem that has endured severe river flow depravation for more than 70 years now; yet, this ecosystem still provides many environmental services and goods and its restoration is well justified for that. This research mainly reveals that the Colorado River Delta is still an undervalued ecosystem despite its resiliency and the many regional benefits it still provides. This study has two research questions. Fist, I determined what factors influence Mexicali’s willingness-to-pay. Second, I compared willingness-to-pay attitudes between the cities of Mexicali and San Luis Rio Colorado (SLRC); two neighboring Mexican cities of different size and economic structure but of similar social, ecologic and geographical conditions. The instrument to collect field data was a survey that posed a realistic river flow restoration scenario at a range of prices from 10 to 90 pesos in order to test people’s willingness-to-pay; a total of 564 surveys were delivered face to face in Mexicali. Subsequently, I compared Mexicali survey results with a previous SLRC survey. Descriptive statistics, non-parametric analysis, and qualitative analysis were the main instruments to arrive to my conclusions. Within Mexicali, I found that parenthood and the perception of received benefits from the river were the most significant factors that determined people’s willingness-to-pay. Migration was also a salient socio-demographic factor that probably has an influence on people’s attitudes towards river flow restoration. When making comparisons between cities I found that SLRC is more willing to pay than Mexicali, which confirmed my hypothesis that environmental awareness influences willingness-to-pay in each city given that SLRC is a true river city while Mexicali is 64 km away from the river. Pricing was also influential in both cities. People’s exposure to the river varied from one city to the other –SLRC people have more interactions with the river than people from Mexicali do, thus matching again the difference in willingness-to-pay attitudes of each city. Although income, education, frequency of visits, and awareness of dry river conditions were expected to have a clear connection to willingness-to-pay within Mexicali, I found only a marginal statistical relationship that was very close to be significant. This was due to the fact that I analyzed the dependency of those variables for all prices and not at a specific price range where the actual average willingness-to-pay resides. Finding that average and then analyzing the relationships again should clarify this issue. What motivates people to pay was related to resource conservation and the recognition of the river’s ecological importance. What motivates people to not pay relates to negative attitudes such as incredulity and lack of trust in Mexican institutions. My main recommendations are to raise local environmental awareness of river issues with environmental education, to address local negative attitudes towards river restoration, and to explore the analysis of these data with other approaches such as socio-psychological models.

The literature on the travel market has focused on the motivations and activities of different market segments, destination attributes, evaluation of well-being, travel behaviour and characteristics, and demographic information. Some work has been undertaken on seniors’ travel motivations but the majority of this worked reported for North America. Few comparisons have been made between baby boomers’ and seniors’ travel motivations and preferences for domestic trip. This study investigated the domestic travel motivations of baby boomer (age 50 to 60) and senior (age 61 and over) citizens in Tainan, Taiwan. The study objectives were: (1) to present demographic information on senior and baby boomer domestic travelers; (2) to examine the travel motivations, destination attributes, and well-being of senior and baby boomer travelers; (3) to determine the differences in travel-related characteristics between senior and baby boomer travelers; and (4) to investigate whether those who travel more domestically also travel more internationally. A total of 184 citizens (100 baby boomers and 84 seniors) in Tainan, Taiwan, participated in this study. The data were analyzed using simple descriptive statistics, t-tests, cross-tabulations, chi-squared tests and correlation analyses. The open-ended questions were recorded and analyzed for themes. The demographic data revealed that marital status, employment status, education, income and major source of income were significantly different between baby boomer and senior respondents, as were travel motivations. The destination attributes sought and evaluations of well-being were not significantly different between the groups. Some differences were found in travel behaviours and characteristics reported by baby boomer and senior respondents, especially in the likelihood of traveling with an organized party, spending of money on traveling, joining an all-inclusive package tour, willingness to spend extra money on recreation, perceiving that seniors should stay at home or in silver town, and perceiving that travel improves their quality of life. In addition, traveling on overnight international trips influences the frequency of taking domestic trips for both groups. This study contributes to the tourism literature by comparing baby boomer and senior respondents’ travel motivations and preferences in domestic trips. The findings provided new insights into the understanding of tourist motivations, destination attributes, positive/negative affects and tourists’ behaviors, particularly as experienced in domestic trip taken by baby boomers and seniors in Tainan, Taiwan.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) raised from emerging markets (EM) have drawn enormous attention to the world in recent decades. These internationalization activities have not only signaled characterized features of globalization, but also foreseen the future of strengthened “latecomer” global position emerged from developing countries. However, current studies have shown sufficient lack on research towards motivation behind EM MNCs’ internationalization. Many current theories and models were followed by patterns applied within those more developed countries. Nevertheless, EM MNCs appeared to hold different motivations approaching to internationalization. Thus, this paper documents a series of reasons that triggered EM MNCs to internationalize. In particular, studies carried out from this paper have concluded into a 2x2 Model, which characterized that the EM MNCs’ internationalization motives are incorporated from two perspectives (institutional based and resource based) into two approaches (asset seeking and opportunity seeking). Four case studies of multinationals in technological industry from two emerging markets are included in this paper, in order to attest validity of the 2x2 Model; these multinationals are Lenovo (China), Haier (China), Arçelik (Turkey), and Vestel (Turkey). We believe that technological industry is one of the most significant industries from emerging markets that is intensively involved in international activities; the selected firms have shown devoted global strategies and created certain size of impact in the global market, which is genuinely representative towards our studies.

The main aim of this research was to investigate the differences of women’s consumer behavior when shopping for clothes. To investigate these differences quantitative approach was used. In order to collect data for analysis a questionnaire was developed. During the study the following aspects were analyzed: frequency of shopping and expenditure, women’s values, store selection criteria, motivations and sources of information women usually use. After reviewing numerous scientific articles, eleven different hypotheses were developed, in order to be tested in the course of this study: H1: Women’s consumer behavior varies with age H2: Sexual attraction motivation decreases with age H3: Conformity motivation decreases with age H4: Fashion expression motivation decreases with age H3: The importance of comfort increases with age H6: The importance of quality increases with age H7: The importance of knowledgeable staff increases with age H8: Younger women shop clothes more often H9: The influence of impersonal sources of information increases with age H10: Younger shoppers are more price-conscious H11: It is important for older consumer to be known or recognized in the store To test these hypotheses, the data from fifty nine women was collected with the help of the questionnaire. Then, all respondents were divided into five age cohorts in order to structure the results and analyze differences in every age cohort. After having analyzed all the gathered data, five hypotheses were confirmed, while other six hypotheses were rejected. Hypothesis 1 was rather general and it was confirmed in the very beginning. All the other hypotheses were analyzed with the help of regression analysis in Excel. After testing every hypothesis, author of the thesis came to the conclusion that hypothesis 2, hypothesis 5, hypothesis 8 and hypothesis 10 are be confirmed, while hypothesis 3, hypothesis 4, hypothesis 6, hypothesis 7, hypothesis 9 and hypothesis 11 are rejected.

Our society is becoming more restless and mobile, a symbol for this mobility are the backpackers. Backpackers are found everywhere in the world and represent a form of low-cost independent travellers. To experience as much as possible, seems to be a very important issue for backpackers and they have that as a motivation during their travels. Backpackers have been described as ”experiences hungry”. The term experiences, is today being used a lot in the tourism industry. To be able to predict what an experience is, can be hard and the term is hard to define. Mobile technologies are also becoming a permanent part of the our society. Communication technology are something that backpackers use more and more during their travels. This thesis identifies knowledge and design implications for a mobile application to support backpacker´s need when travelling and how backpackers define the notion of travel experiences. The result of the thesis have calumniated in a mobile application prototype that coul contribute in letting backpackers get more out of there journey. This in an interactive and social way, by giving backpackers the opportunity to be social towards each-other share information through a social medium. As the thesis have shown that backpackers wants to meet others on there journey and experience the world.