• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.34 no.3
• /
• pp.977-987
• /
• 2014

Since 1960's, international construction market have explosively increase and have reached up to 600 Bil. US$ through active participation of construction firms and steady support of government. Nevertheless, owners, clients and financial institutions required reasonable criteria to effectively assess the overseas business capabilities of construction firms. However, the existing methods for construction firms rarely considers the perspective of overseas business capabilities. To overcome these problems, this study proposes an evaluation system for overseas business capabilities of construction firms. First, the needs for new evaluation system is derived through FGI, and the direction of new evaluation system is presented by reviewing the limitations of existing methods. Also, the capabilities that are required for the performances for overseas businesses were analyzed through expert interviews. Finally, 31 primary evaluation indices consisting of 3 criteria - appropriateness of index, possibility of quantification, possibility of data gathering - are derived under 9 categories and 3 perspectives through surveys and consultation meeting. The preliminary investigation of 24 Korean construction firms are conducted for comparing the existing evaluation systems and to verify its applicability. The proposed method could provide a rational criterion to evaluate the construction firms, improve internal capacity of firms, and ultimately supports the success of the construction industry.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.468-476
• /
• 2011

A lack of basic academic skills of junior college students has negatively impacted on the quality of vacational education and student dropout prevention, and yet it is true that there still are unclear alternatives or solutions to come up with that concern. As a way to find out the actual levels of basic academic skills of junior college students and educational efforts to improve these skills, the study investigated prior studies and benchmarked strengths and weaknesses of the related educational programs and supporting systems operated by ten junior colleges around the nation. Further, the study addressed emerging issues and challenges related to basic academic skills, based on the case study of D college. Major research methodologies included literature review, surveys for students and faculty members and focus-group interviews of faculty members in order to examine the states of students' basic academic skills in the area of language, in particular. Accordingly, the study proposed several suggestions with which educational practitioners could assist in supporting students to acquire improved basic academic skills(such as the development of a competence-based curriculum, implementation of reliable diagnosis tools and supporting educational systems for evaluating students' basic academic skills and upgrading of diverse teaching and learning resources and methods).

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
• /
• v.10 no.7
• /
• pp.20-32
• /
• 2020

This study is to develop and provide a personal information protection framework that enables IoT service providers to safely and systematically operate personal information of IoT service subjects in the overall process of providing IoT devices and services. To this end, a framework for personal information framework was derived through literature survey, and FGI with experts, it was divided into three stages, each of three stages: IoT service provision process and IoT personal information processing process. The study conducted an e-mail survey of related experts using AHP techniques to determine the importance of the components of the selected personal information protection framework. As a result, in the IoT service provision process, the IoT product and service design and development stage (0.5413) is the most important, and in the IoT personal information processing process, personal information protection in the collection and retention of personal information (0.5098) is the most important. Therefore, based on this research, as the IoT service is spreading, it is expected that a safe personal information protection framework will be realized by preventing security threats and personal information infringement accidents.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.30-41
• /
• 2022

With the advent of autonomous driving, personal mobility, drones, and smart roads, it is necessary to respond to changes in the road traffic environment in the road guidance system. However, the use of road signs to guide the road is decreasing compared to the past due to the advent of devices such as navigation and smartphones. Therefore, in this study, a large-scale survey was conducted to derive road sign issues and usage plans to respond to future changes. Based on this, this study presented a strategy to diversify road sign functions by analyzing the factors affecting the use of road signs by citizens. As a result, first, it is necessary to provide real-time variable road guidance information that reflects user needs such as traffic, weather, and local events. Second, it is necessary to informatize digital road signs such as reflecting maps with precision. Third, it is necessary to demonstrate road guidance in a virtual environment that reflects various future mobility and road environments.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.138-144
• /
• 2010

Purpose: Despite the rapidly changing healthcare environment, healthcare organizations have recognized the importance of patient safety management. But patient safety management has the problem of the lack of participation of members due to the process of focusing on the follow-up service and punishment. The department of nuclear medicine in Uijeongbu St. Mary's Hospital started this research to reduce the near miss and prevent patient safety accidents by both initiating the participatory near-miss-proof activities as an advance management and constructing a system without disadvantages of reporting. In addition, this research aims to establish a differentiated patient safety management system in the department of nuclear medicine. Materials and Methods: 1. Colleting cases of team members' past and present near miss and accidents(First data collection). 2. Quantifying the cases of near miss and accidents after identifying the degree of importance and urgency through surveys(Second data collection). 3. Quantifying cases and indentifying important points of contact through data analysis. 4. Making and standardizing a manual for important points of contact, and initiating participatory activities to prevent errors. 5. Activating web-based community for establishing the report system of near miss. 6. Estimating the result of before and after activities through surveys and focus group interviews. Results: 1) Quantified safety accidents and near miss in the department of nuclear medicine. About 50 near misses a month and one safety accident a year. 2) Establishing improvement measurements based on quantified data. About 11 participatory activities, the improvement of process, a manual for standardization. 3) Creating a system of safety culture and high participation rate of team members. Constructing a report system, making a check list and a slogan for safety culture, and establishing assessment index. 4) Activating communities for sharing the information of cases of near misses and accidents. 5) As the result of activities, the rate of near miss occurrence declined by 50% and the safety accident did not happen. Conclusion: The best service in the department of nuclear medicine is to provide patients with safety-guaranteed high-quality examination and cure. This research started from the question, 'what is the most faithful-to-the-basics way to provide the best service for patients?' and team members' common answer for this question was building a system with participation of all members. Building a system through the participatory improvement activities for preventing near miss and creating safety culture resulted in the 50% decline of near miss occurrence and no accident. This is a meaningful result from the perspective of advance management for patient safety. Moreover, this research paved the way for creating a culture to report and admit near miss or accidents by establishing a report system with no disadvantage of reporting. The system which sticks to the basics is the best service for patients and will form a patient safety culture system, which will lead to the customer satisfaction. Therefore, all members of the department of nuclear medicine will develop a differentiated patient safety culture with stabilizing the established system.

• Asia Marketing Journal
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.27-54
• /
• 2011

This research attempted to present the efficiency of culture marketing to the organizations producing culture-art products and to the companies utilizing art and suggest the practical viewpoints to the culture and art policy agencies. The methodology used was to take an in-depth look at the consumer value cognition and benefits of culture-art products in contemporary consumption culture from a social context by conducting a total of 12 Focus Group Interviews, consisting of 58 males and females in their 10s~50s who can represent culture-art product consumers. The culture-art products refer to the artist's spiritual, actual act of creating or to the end products with economic exchange value. They are also sense goods and merit goods that affect the mental state of consumers. By looking at culture-art products as consumer merit goods, this research examined consumer value cognition of culture-art products based on the characteristics culture-art products. As a result, this research determined that consumers view culture-art products largely as 'aesthetic and sensuous merit goods', 'actual and individual merit goods', and 'social public property'. As 'aesthetic and sensuous merit goods', culture-art products are considered as the products of an artist's creative activities; as 'social public property', culture-art products have a public value in terms of ownership; and as 'actual and individual merit goods', culture-art products act on the spirit and reality of a consumer in terms of consumption. As a result of analyzing the benefits of culture-art products based on the above-mentioned consumer value cognition, it was observed that the benefits of culture-art-product consumption are chiefly divided into 'aesthetic character-oriented', 'social relationships-oriented', and 'individual benefits-oriented' depending on how consumers see culture-art products. A 3-conceptional structures model was constructed according to the relationship between consumer value cognition of culture-art products and the benefits. This research revealed that consumers who pursue the aesthetic value or sense of beauty as the central reason experience culture-art products themselves, enjoy intellectual quests, and pursue their satisfaction by expressing affection for and interests in culture-art products. On the other hand, consumers who pursue social value as the central reason as a means of communication by perceiving culture-art products as a public property of society, pursue sympathy with people close to them through the symbolic power of culture-art product consumption or the joy of self-display. Consumers who perceive art products as spiritual and actual merit goods and pursue consumer value as a central reason want to express their own personality, develop themselves, and differentiate themselves or identify themselves with others in the context of social relations for the ultimate goal of living a happy and satisfied life while pursuing to satisfy imminent and actual necessities as emotional stability and rest. The fact that culture-art product benefits could vary according to how a consumer perceives them implies that consumer value cognition of culture-art products and their benefits significant affect consumers' decision in choosing and consuming various culture-art products. It turned out that such benefits from the consumption of culture-art products reflect the complex contemporary consumption culture of rational consumption, symbolic consumption, experiential consumption, and social reflective consumption. This research identified conceptional structures of consumer value cognition on culture-art products and benefits that can be used for studying and understanding culture-art products consumers who pursue a variety of consumption values. They can also be used by private companies in utilizing art, as well as by national agencies in enhancing the population's quality of life. However, since this research could only conceptually grasp consumer perception of culture-art products and reveal the dimension of classification due to its own limitations arising from characteristic investigation, quantitative data on the benefits of culture-art product consumers should be measured in future studies through a quantitative investigation, while using the value cognition of culture-art products and the individual characteristics of consumers as variables based on this research.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.141-170
• /
• 2010

User created content (UCC) is created and shared by common users on line. From the user's perspective, the increase of UCCs has led to an expansion of alternative means of communications, while from the business perspective UCCs have formed an environment in which an abundant amount of new contents can be produced. Despite outward quantitative growth, however, many aspects of UCCs do not meet the expectations of general users in terms of quality, and this can be observed through pirated contents and user-copied contents. The purpose of this research is to investigate effective methods for fostering production of creative user-generated content. This study proposes two core elements, namely, reward and motivation, which are believed to enhance content creativity as well as the mediating factor and users' committement, which will be effective for bridging the increasing motivation and content creativity. Based on this perspective, this research takes an in-depth look at issues related to constructing the dimensions of reward and motivation in UCC services for creative content product, which are identified in three phases. First, three dimensions of rewards have been proposed: task dimension, social dimension, and organizational dimention. The task dimension rewards are related to the inherent characteristics of a task such as writing blog articles and pasting photos. Four concrete ways of providing task-related rewards in UCC environments are suggested in this study, which include skill variety, task significance, task identity, and autonomy. The social dimensioni rewards are related to the connected relationships among users. The organizational dimension consists of monetary payoff and recognition from others. Second, the two types of motivations are suggested to be affected by the diverse rewards schemes: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation occurs when people create new UCC contents for its' own sake, whereas extrinsic motivation occurs when people create new contents for other purposes such as fame and money. Third, commitments are suggested to work as important mediating variables between motivation and content creativity. We believe commitments are especially important in online environments because they have been found to exert stronger impacts on the Internet users than other relevant factors do. Two types of commitments are suggested in this study: emotional commitment and continuity commitment. Finally, content creativity is proposed as the final dependent variable in this study. We provide a systematic method to measure the creativity of UCC content based on the prior studies in creativity measurement. The method includes expert evaluation of blog pages posted by the Internet users. In order to test the theoretical model of our study, 133 active blog users were recruited to participate in a group discussion as well as a survey. They were asked to fill out a questionnaire on their commitment, motivation and rewards of creating UCC contents. At the same time, their creativity was measured by independent experts using Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Finally, two independent users visited the study participants' blog pages and evaluated their content creativity using the Creative Products Semantic Scale. All the data were compiled and analyzed through structural equation modeling. We first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis to validate the measurement model of our research. It was found that measures used in our study satisfied the requirement of reliability, convergent validity as well as discriminant validity. Given the fact that our measurement model is valid and reliable, we proceeded to conduct a structural model analysis. The results indicated that all the variables in our model had higher than necessary explanatory powers in terms of R-square values. The study results identified several important reward shemes. First of all, skill variety, task importance, task identity, and automony were all found to have significant influences on the intrinsic motivation of creating UCC contents. Also, the relationship with other users was found to have strong influences upon both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Finally, the opportunity to get recognition for their UCC work was found to have a significant impact on the extrinsic motivation of UCC users. However, different from our expectation, monetary compensation was found not to have a significant impact on the extrinsic motivation. It was also found that commitment was an important mediating factor in UCC environment between motivation and content creativity. A more fully mediating model was found to have the highest explanation power compared to no-mediation or partially mediated models. This paper ends with implications of the study results. First, from the theoretical perspective this study proposes and empirically validates the commitment as an important mediating factor between motivation and content creativity. This result reflects the characteristics of online environment in which the UCC creation activities occur voluntarily. Second, from the practical perspective this study proposes several concrete reward factors that are germane to the UCC environment, and their effectiveness to the content creativity is estimated. In addition to the quantitive results of relative importance of the reward factrs, this study also proposes concrete ways to provide the rewards in the UCC environment based on the FGI data that are collected after our participants finish asnwering survey questions. Finally, from the methodological perspective, this study suggests and implements a way to measure the UCC content creativity independently from the content generators' creativity, which can be used later by future research on UCC creativity. In sum, this study proposes and validates important reward features and their relations to the motivation, commitment, and the content creativity in UCC environment, which is believed to be one of the most important factors for the success of UCC and Web 2.0. As such, this study can provide significant theoretical as well as practical bases for fostering creativity in UCC contents.

• Asia Marketing Journal
• /
• v.12 no.2
• /
• pp.27-52
• /
• 2010

It is not new that today's business organizations are expected to exhibit ethical and moral management and to carry out social responsibility as a good corporate citizen. Since South Korea emerged as a newly industrialized country during the 1980s, Korean corporations have become active in carrying out their social responsibility as a good corporate citizen to society. In spite of the short history of corporate social responsibility, Korean companies have actively participated in corporate philanthropy. Corporations' significant donations to various social causes, no-lay-off policies, corporate volunteerism and green marketing are evidences of their commitment to corporate citizenship. Corporate social responsibility is now an essential management practice whereby corporation can strengthen its sustainable value creation processes by enhancing the trust assets underlying the relationships between the business and the stakeholders. Much of the conceptual work in the area of corporate social responsibility(CSR) has originated from researches conducted in the management field. Carroll(1979) proposed that corporations have four types of social responsibilities: economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibility. Most past research has investigated CSR and its impact on consumers' attitudes toward the corporations and corporate performances. Although there exists a large body of literature on how consumers perceive and respond to CSR, the majority of past studies were conducted in the United States. The stability and applicability of past findings need to be tested across different national/cultural settings, especially since corporate social responsibility is a reflection of implicit conformation with the expectations and criticism that society may have toward a corporation(Matten and Moon, 2004). In this study, we explored whether people in Korea perceive CSR of Korean corporations in the same four dimensions as done in the United States and what were the measurement items tapping each of these four dimensions. In order to investigate the dimensions of CSR and the measurement items for CSR perceived by Korean people, nine focus group interviews were conducted with several stakeholder groups(two with undergraduate students, two with graduate students, three with general consumers, and two with NGO groups). Scripts from the interviews revealed that the Korean stakeholders perceived four types of CSR which are the same as those proposed by Carroll(1979). However we found CSR issues unique to Korean corporations. For example for the economic responsibility, Korean people mentioned that the corporation needed to contribute to the economic development of the country by generating corporate profits. For the legal responsibility, Koreans included the "corporation need to follow the consumer protection law." For the ethical responsibility, they considered that the corporation needed to not promote false advertisement. In addition, Koreans thought that an ethical company should do transparent management. For the philanthropic responsibility, people in Korea thought that a corporation needed to return parts of its profits to the society for the betterment of society. The 28 items were developed based on the results of the nine focus group interviews, while considering the scale developed by Maignan and Ferrell(2001). Following the procedure proposed by Churchill(1979), we started by developing an item poll consisting of 28 items and purified the initial pool of items through exploratory, confirmatory factor analyses. 176 samples were sued for this analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the 28 items in order to verify the underlying four factor structure. Study 1 provided new measurement items for tapping the Korean CSR dimensions, which can be useful for the future studies exploring the effects of CSR on Korean consumers' attitudes toward the corporations and corporate performances. And we found the CSR scale(17 items) has good reliability, discriminant validity and nomological validity. Economic Responsibility: "XYZ company continuously improves the quality of our products", "XYZ company has a procedure in place to respond to customer complaint", "XYZ company contributes to the economic development of our country by generating profits", "XYZ company is eager to hire people". Legal Responsibility: "XYZ company's products meet legal standards", "XYZ company seeks to comply with all laws regulating hiring and employee benefits", "XYZ company honors contractual obligations to its suppliers", "XYZ company's managers try to comply with the law related to the business operation". Ethical Responsibility: "XYZ company has a comprehensive code of conduct", "XYZ company does not promote a false or misleading advertisement", "XYZ company seems to conduct a transparent business", "XYZ company does a fair business with its suppliers or sub-contractors". Philanthropic Responsibility: "XYZ company encourages partnerships with local businesses and schools", "XYZ company supports sports and cultural activities", "XYZ company gives adequate contributions to charities considering its business size", "XYZ company encourages employees to support our community". Study 2 was condusted for comprehensive validity. 655 samples were used for this anlysis. Collected samples were tested by factor analysis and Crnbach's Alpha coefficiednts and were found to be satisfactory in terms of validity and reliability. Furthermore, fitness of the measurement model was tested by using conformatory factor analysis. χ²=880.73(df=160), GFI=0.891, AGFI=0.854, NFI=0.908, NNFI=0.913, RMR=0.059, RMESA=0.070. We hope that CSR scale could greatly facilitate research on Corporate social resposibility, it is by no means the final answer.