Thesis (M.Sc. (Clinical Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

Abstract Sales work is an occupation which constantly is available for people. Salespeople are always wanted, but only few of them can reach exquisite performance. For most people, selling is easy. However, it also brings the harshest challenge to human nature. Sales representatives could easily lose their resolution of achieving goals when they are encountered customers¡¦ endless problems and sales resistance. They always face tremendous achievement pressure, which could destroy their strong will in no time. In most people¡¦s impression, a professional sales manager has to be a person and a rich speaker. However, holding the same position, and having close observation toward numberless business chargers, I possess different opinion. A successful sales manager is usually prudent, self-disciplined, and achieves goals through effort of the whole team members. He learns humbly, and accumulates wisdom through his team group, as well as foster excellent ability, and great fortitude from failure experience. Thus, he becomes a top manager in his field. This paper discusses the resulted problems and their processing strategies when a sales manager confronts his customer. The author takes his past work experience as a sales manager in a British lubricant oil company as examples. Using the narrative analysis and participant observation method, this paper illustrates living challenges and work experiences on the managements of business and sales. Moreover, the great wisdom and excellent experience from above mentioned cases are respectively verified by the strategic problems solution models of Mckinsey and Company. Keywords: Qualitative Research¡BNarrative Analysis¡BParticipant Observation Method

The primary purpose of this research is to study the marketing strategies for the real estate industry in Taiwan. After literature review, the aspects of 4Ps and 4Cs are used as the framework of this study. Qualitative research method is used to generate perception understanding of real estate industry phenomena and the interpretations behind each of them. Two real estate corporates are selected and interviewed with one store manager in each of them. Marketing strategies and directions are found from the interviews; by analyzing the answers through 4Ps and 4Cs. Moreover, recommendations are presented at the last chapter of this study.

This is a study to answer ¡§who am I ?¡¨ in educational context. ¡§Who am I ? ¡¨ is the beginning of self identity. Identity uncover one¡¦s images of himself as a way of understanding his practice, explicitly seeking a link between image and practice. By concerning identity and education, this study focus on preservice teacher¡¦s identity. The purposes are investigating preservice teacher¡¦s identity and the factors influencing it. The participants are five elementary preservice teachers. This study employs the qualitative research as the methodology for this study. The qualitative research is base on the way of one-year interview to collect the information and use the interview document to record the feeling and experience by writing word to word. The main findings are summarized as follows: 1. Preservice teacher¡¦s identity is constructed by interaction between self and others in practical training. 2. Preservice teacher¡¦s identity includes multiple role performances. 3. Facing the identity confusion, preservice teacher presents passive resistance. 4. Preservice teacher¡¦s identity affects perfprmances in practical training and obtaining teacher identity. 5. Colleagues help a lot in practical training. This study show the model and the pictures (role performances) of preservice teacher¡¦s identity. the model provides a framework to realize preservice teacher¡¦s identity. Finally, some suggestions are proposed for student teachers, teacher preparation system and future studies.

One diagnostic criterion to identify individuals as having an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that their communication patterns, social reciprocity, and interactional competence show qualitative impairment (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). And yet, my experience as an individual who was once diagnosed as ASD and my investigations of Internet websites run by and for autistic individuals led me to see that individuals who identify as ASD are not only interested in communicating with others but highly articulate in self-advocating through the affordances of online communication. My research was focused on exploring the communicative experiences of individuals who participated in two websites designed by and for autistic individuals as a means of self-advocacy, WrongPlanet and AspiesforFreedom. The method used to study the two websites was that of participant-observer. Having joined the online groups by introducing myself, I was able to peruse archived postings and current threads available on the websites. I analyzed threads of postings for themes being discussed and for features showing evidence of what Herring (2004) described as online community. Some of the postings were triangulated by interviewing participants. These interviews revealed more personal information about how one chooses to self-advocate and create community online. Results indicated that the forum posts of these two autistic-run websites demonstrated evidence of shared community and self-advocacy through the topics discussed. The autistic individuals I studied seemed to want to be seen as having a difference not a deficit. They acknowledged their struggles, but posited that individuals with ASD have strengths that are uncommon and are currently being under-utilized by society. Their use of the Internet demonstrates how autistic individuals are capable of communicating about a wide variety of topics, and are capable of contributing to the conversation about what makes them similar and different from those whom they call Neurotypical. The significance of this study is that insights I present have a different validity than other studies of autistic individuals conducted by non-autistic researchers. Also, by challenging stereotypes of the capabilities of autistic individuals, a path is created whereby all may benefit from the strengths, talents, and insights they are able to provide. / text

I took an interpretive phenomenological approach to examine what it is like to experience sound while playing educational games. I asked six people to play three educational games, for a total of 18 interview sessions. I analyzed 603 pages of interview transcripts and 22.68 hours of video recording using phenomenological research techniques to derive. I used NVivo to identify and code 1,738 meaning units across the three games studied. I organized these meaning units into related clusters and identified constituents of meaning for each game studied. I derived 27 constituents of meaning for Fate of the World, 22 constituents of meaning for Hush, and 27 constituents of meaning for Salamander Rescue. I wrote textural-structural descriptions to describe participant experiences in each game and performed imaginative variation to further provide a context to describe participant experiences. From these results, I derived essential meanings to situate a discussion about sound in each of the games studied and I discussed eight essential meanings that were shared across the three games studied. According to my analysis of these participants’ responses, sound conveyed a sense of the game’s interface in addition to the environment in which play was situated. Sound also supported the presentation of characters in the game and worked to communicate the game’s narrative to the player. Music in the games studied helped to provoke thought and also conveyed an emotional context for play. Sound supported players’ overall engagement in these games, but the absence of sound removed this engagement. Critically, people noticed when the visuals that they saw did not match the sounds that they heard. I present an applied phenomenological framework for sound in educational games to illustrate these essential meanings and to reflect how participants’ experiences were affected by the ways they used game interfaces, interacted with game characters, experienced game narrative, and described the game’s environment. This framework further illustrates the possibility space for potential experiences of sound in gameplay as determined by the choices players make, the game’s state of play, and the degree of synchresis present between what players hear and what they see as they play. / text

As one important experiment in the social or user-generated classification of online cultural heritage resources collections, art museums are leading the effort to elicit keyword descriptions of artwork images from online museum visitors. The motivations for having online viewers - presumably largely non-art-specialists - describe art images are (a) to generate keywords for image and object records in museum information retrieval systems in a cost-effective way and (b) to engage online visitors with the artworks and with each other by inviting visitors to express themselves and share their descriptions of artworks. This paper explores the question of how effective non-specialist art keyworders can be in capturing ("tagging") potentially useful concepts and terms for use in art information retrieval systems. To do this, the paper compares evidence from art museum visitor studies which describe how non-specialist art viewers react to and describe artworks and use museum-supplied information in their initial encounters with artworks. A theoretical model of artwork interpretation derived from art museum visitor research provides a framework with which to examine both the activity and the products of artwork tagging for image and information retrieval.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The volume of qualitative data (QD)available via the Internet is growing at an increasing pace and firms are anxious to extract and understand user's thought processes, wants and needs, attitudes, and purchase intentions contained therein. An information systems (IS) methodology to meaningfully analyze this vase resource of QD could provide useful information, knowledge, or wisdom firms could use for a number of purposes including new product development and quality improvement, target marketing, accurate "user focused" profiling, and future sales prediction. In this paper, we present an IS methodology for analysis of Internet-based QD consisting of three steps: elicitation; reduction through IS-facilitated selection, coding, and clustering; and visualization to provide at-a-glance understanding.

Library and information science education, Hong Kong, Delphi study / This paper reports the results of PhD research into the future needs of library professionals for educa-tion in the digital era with special consideration to the needs of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), Peoples Republic of China (PRC). The research method used was a Delphi study and representatives from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and the United States were chosen as participants in the study. This paper outlines the special features of this method and why it was se-lected, how it was implemented and initial findings from the study. The research attempted to identify an ideal curriculum especially for use in the Hong Kong SAR, China, but also for consideration in other areas of South East Asia. It was conducted using the Delphi technique which is based upon the premise that a decision made by a group is more reliable and thus more desirable than a decision made by an individual.

Throughout the world professional associations in librarianship place considerable emphasis on the professional credentialing of their members. This normally means that educational and training courses of study offering a first professional qualification take up much of this activity. Since this first professional qualification does not normally require emphasis on the research process, but rather in obtaining the required skills and knowledge in order to practice librarianship, it is little wonder that the role of research in the pro-fession has not always been openly encouraged by its associations. Nevertheless, there is evidence that some associations are realizing that research and the research process needs to be better recognized, particularly as library professionals are increasingly undertaking higher level qualifications which include a research com-ponent. Yet if a research qualification is not always necessary for recognition as a professional librarian, the question needs to be asked: why should librarians bother to undertake the rigours of study to achieve it? The paper will discuss the importance or otherwise of research and its processes in the profession of librarianship and consider the role of the professional association in recognizing, enabling and promoting a research cul-ture amongst qualified professionals. The paper will particularly address the Australian context.