• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.30-35
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• 2013

Purpose: One of the current services, providing information to the patients and their guardians by using promotion materials induces positive responses and contributes to the improvement of the hospital reliability. Therefore, the objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of audio visual materials, one of the means of promotion, as a way to give accurate medical information to resolve patient's curiosity about purpose and procedure of their examination and deplete complains about waiting which attributes negative effect to service quality assessment. Materials and Methods: 60 patients(mean age $53.97{\pm}12.24$, male : female = 26 : 34) who had $^{18}F-FDG PET/CT$ scan from July 2012 to August 2012 in Seoul Asan Medical Center were referred to the study. All of the patients having PET/CT scan were asked to watch an informative video material before the injection of radiopharmaceutical ($^{18}F-FDG$) and to fill in a questionnaire. Results: As a result of analyzing the contents of questionnaire, 52% of 60 patients had PET/CT scan for the first time and 72.4% of the patients read the PET/CT guidebook offered from their outpatient department or inpatient wards before their scan. After we searched the level of previous knowledge of the purpose and method of PET/CT scan, the patients answered 25.1% "know well", 34% "not sure", 40.9% "don't know" respectively. And 84.7% of the patients answered that watching the PET/CT guide video before the injection helps understanding what exam they were having and 15.3% of the patients did not. For the question asking ever the patients have experienced using our homepage or smart phone QR code to see the guide video before they visit out PET center, only 3.3% of them answered "yes". Lastly, the patients answered 60.1% "yes", 31.4% "so so" and 8.5% "no" respectively for the question asking whether watching the video makes the patients to fill the waiting time short. Conclusion: It is found that understanding of objective and method of the PET/CT scan and level of satisfaction was improved after the patients watched the guide video whether they had PET/CT scan before and read the PET/CT guidebook or not. Also, watching the video was effective for the reduction of perceptible waiting time. But while displaying the PET/CT guide video is useful for providing information about the scan and shortening the waiting time as one of the medical service, utilization of service was actually very poor because of the passive promotion and indifference of the patients about their examination. Therefore, from now on, it is necessary to construct the healthcare system which can be offered to more patients through the active promotion.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.131-154
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• 2013

New internet technologies have created a revolutionary new platform which allows consumers to make decision about product price and quality quickly and provides information about themselves through the transcript of online reviews. By expressing their feelings toward products or services on virtual opinion platforms, users extend their influence into cyberspace as electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM). Existing research indicates that an impact of eWOM on the consumer decision process is influential. For both academic researchers and practitioners, investigating this phenomenon of information sharing in online website is essential given the increasing number of consumers using them as sources of purchase decisions. It is worthwhile to examine the extent to which opinion seekers are willing to accept and adopt online reviews and which factors encourage adoption. Discerning the most motivating aspects of information adoption in particular, could help electronic marketers better promote their brand and presence on the internet. The objectives of this study are to investigate how online WOM influences a persons' purchase decision by discovering which factors encourage information adoption. Especially focused on the self-efficacy, this research investigates how self-efficacy affects on information usefulness and adoption of online information. Although people are exposed to same review or comment about product or service, some accept the reviews while others do not. We notice that accepting online reviews mainly depends on the person's preference or personal characteristics. This study empirically examines this issue by using cognitive dissonance theory. Specifically, in the movie industry, we address few questions-is always positive WOM generating positive effect? What if the movie isn't the person's favorite genre? What if the person who is very self-assertive so doesn't take other's opinion easily? In these cases of cognitive dissonance, is always WOM generating same result? While many studies have focused on one direct of WOM which indicates positive (or negative) informative reviews or comments generate positive (or negative) results and more (or less) profits, this study investigates not only directional properties of WOM but also how people change their opinion towards product or service positive to negative, negative to positive through the online WOM. An experiment was conducted quantitatively by using a sample of 168 users who have experience within the online movie review site, 'Naver Movie'. Users were required to complete a survey regarding reviews and comments taken from the real movie page. The data reflected user's perceptions of online WOM information that determined users' adoption level. Analysis results provide empirical support for the proposed theoretical perspective. When user can't agree with the opinion of online WOM information, in other words, when cognitive dissonance between online WOM information and users' preference occurs, perceived self-efficacy significantly decreases customers' perception of usefulness. And this perception of usefulness plays an important role in determining users' intention to adopt online WOM information. Most of researches have been concentrated on characteristics of online WOM itself such as quality or vividness of information, credibility of source and direction of online WOM, etc. for describing effect of online WOM, but our results suggest that users' personal character (e.g., self-efficacy) plays decisive role for acceptance of online WOM information. Higher self-efficacy means lower possibility to accept the information that represents counter opinion because of cognitive dissonance, whereas the people that have lower self-efficacy are willing to accept the online WOM information as true and refer to purchase decision. This study suggests a model for understanding role of direction of online WOM information. Also, our result implicates the importance of online review supervision and personalized information service by confirming switching opinion negative to positive is more difficult than positive to negative through the online WOM information. This implication would help marketers to manage online reviews of their products or services.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.103-118
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• 2018

This study would provide the basic data informative for establishing a VMD strategy, covering design and marketing for business owners and prospective entrepreneurs, including the persons concerned with the food and beverage industries by investigating the relationships of the impacts of several factors in the cognitive dimension factors of VMD in food and beverage stores on consumers' emotional response and behavior intention and the mediating effect of emotional responses, applying the concept of VMD to the food and beverage industries. To check this research purpose, data were collected through a survey, conducted with various consumers in their 20s through 60s who have experienced the use of food and beverage stores. The period of the survey was from September 20 through October 10, 2017, 202 copies of questionnaires were collected without missing values and used as data for the final analysis. As for the analysis of the data, using SPSS statistical software, frequency analysis and descriptive statistics, analysis of reliability and validity, correlation analysis, single and multiple regression analysis were conducted. According to the results of this study, first, the relationship of the impact between the VMD cognitive dimension of food and beverage stores and customers' emotional responses was statistically significant. In concrete, all factors of VMD cognitive dimension, including the factors of suitability and daily escape had positive (+) impacts on positive emotions. Second, as a result of an analysis of the impact of emotional responses felt in the process of visiting the food and beverage stores on customers' behavior intention, it turned out that positive emotions had a positive (+) impacts on visit intention and recommendation intention while negative emotions did not have any impacts on visit intention and recommendation intention. Third, as a result of an analysis of the impact of VMD cognitive dimension on behavior intention, the suitability and balance of the VMD cognitive dimension had positive (+) impacts on visit intention while daily escape and functionality had positive (+) impacts on recommendation intention. Fourth, as a result of checking if emotional responses had a mediating effect in the relationship between the VMD cognitive dimension and behavior intention, positive emotions had a full mediating effect while there was no mediating effect of negative emotions between the VMD cognitive dimension and behavior intention. In conclusion, this study found that the VMD cognitive dimension of food and beverage stores affected consumers' emotional responses and that emotional responses were a factor affecting behavior intention and proved that consumers' emotional responses differed depending on the factors in the cognitive dimension. Thus, in food and beverage stores, it would be necessary to make effective designs of the stores and differentiate the presentation of them through utilizing detailed factors of the cognitive dimension of VMD. Also, the results of this study could be utilized as the appropriate marketing tools for customers in food and beverage stores and as the basic data for establishing the strategy.

• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.291-298
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• 2009

This study was carried out to evaluate the consumer recognition with regard to the safety management for imported foods. In order to evaluate the effect of the prgram on consumer education, the program was practiced for 89 female college students in Seoul, Korea. The participants were given an instruction with materials on imported food safety, including the safety management of imported foods and their distribution. The results showed that the participants achieved a greater understanding of imported foods. In particular, they had firmly grasped the importance of expiration date in selecting imported foods. Before the instruction, 50.6% of total participants blamed the Korean government for the problems arising from imported foods; only 18.0% placed the blame on individuals or businesses importing from foreign countries. After the instruction, 39.3% had blamed the individuals or businesses importing from foreign countries. Furthermore, 36.0% had disapproved of the foods that are imported from China before the instruction, while 32.6% found objectionable the views on the illegally distributed foods; 29.2% criticized the junk foods that target children (after the instruction). In addition, the level of participant satisfaction via-a-vis imported foods safety supervision had improved from $2.76{\pm}1.59$(before the instruction) to $3.37{\pm}1.58$(after the instruction). The results indicate that consumers are concerned with the imported foods that contain adulterated or forbidden substances and the illegally distributed foods from foreign countries. Thus, consistent and informative educational programs on imported food safety could help consumers in choosing safer products, resulting in an improvement in the consumer confidence with respect to imported foods.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.45-67
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• 2016

Given the recent development of smart devices, users are producing, sharing, and acquiring a variety of information via the Internet and social network services (SNSs). Because users tend to use multiple media simultaneously according to their goals and preferences, domestic SNS users use around 2.09 media concurrently on average. Since the information provided by such media is usually textually represented, recent studies have been actively conducting textual analysis in order to understand users more deeply. Earlier studies using textual analysis focused on analyzing a document's contents without substantive consideration of the diverse characteristics of the source medium. However, current studies argue that analytical and interpretive approaches should be applied differently according to the characteristics of a document's source. Documents can be classified into the following types: informative documents for delivering information, expressive documents for expressing emotions and aesthetics, operational documents for inducing the recipient's behavior, and audiovisual media documents for supplementing the above three functions through images and music. Further, documents can be classified according to their contents, which comprise facts, concepts, procedures, principles, rules, stories, opinions, and descriptions. Documents have unique characteristics according to the source media by which they are distributed. In terms of newspapers, only highly trained people tend to write articles for public dissemination. In contrast, with SNSs, various types of users can freely write any message and such messages are distributed in an unpredictable way. Again, in the case of newspapers, each article exists independently and does not tend to have any relation to other articles. However, messages (original tweets) on Twitter, for example, are highly organized and regularly duplicated and repeated through replies and retweets. There have been many studies focusing on the different characteristics between newspapers and SNSs. However, it is difficult to find a study that focuses on the difference between the two media from the perspective of supply and demand. We can regard the articles of newspapers as a kind of information supply, whereas messages on various SNSs represent a demand for information. By investigating traditional newspapers and SNSs from the perspective of supply and demand of information, we can explore and explain the information dilemma more clearly. For example, there may be superfluous issues that are heavily reported in newspaper articles despite the fact that users seldom have much interest in these issues. Such overproduced information is not only a waste of media resources but also makes it difficult to find valuable, in-demand information. Further, some issues that are covered by only a few newspapers may be of high interest to SNS users. To alleviate the deleterious effects of information asymmetries, it is necessary to analyze the supply and demand of each information source and, accordingly, provide information flexibly. Such an approach would allow the value of information to be explored and approximated on the basis of the supply-demand balance. Conceptually, this is very similar to the price of goods or services being determined by the supply-demand relationship. Adopting this concept, media companies could focus on the production of highly in-demand issues that are in short supply. In this study, we selected Internet news sites and Twitter as representative media for investigating information supply and demand, respectively. We present the notion of News Value Index (NVI), which evaluates the value of news information in terms of the magnitude of Twitter messages associated with it. In addition, we visualize the change of information value over time using the NVI. We conducted an analysis using 387,014 news articles and 31,674,795 Twitter messages. The analysis results revealed interesting patterns: most issues show lower NVI than average of the whole issue, whereas a few issues show steadily higher NVI than the average.

• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.21-42
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• 2006

The object of this research is to analyze the contents and amount of articles on gifted education in major daily newspapers dated January 1990 to December 2003, and to review the trend of social perception of gifted education with the passage of time. Following are the research question : 1. How many articles belonging to the same category appeared in the newspapers within the period of time covered by the study? 2. What kinds of articles appeared in the newspapers within the period of time covered by the study? To arrive at the answers to the problems mentioned above, 714 articles on gifted education. The period from 1990 to 2003 were divided into time frames of 5 years to facilitate the analysis of social consciousness regarding gifted education before and after the enforcement of the Early School Entering Law in 1995 and the Law for Promotion of Gifted Education in 2000. The researcher defined Period I as the years from 1990 to 1994, Period II from 1995 to 1999, and Period III from 2000 to 2003. The articles were classified by content which were significance and trend of gilled education, current policies on gifted education, information on gifted education, and social environment of gifted education. The results of the analysis are as follows: (1) The articles from 1990 to 2003 totalled 714. 130 articles were found within Period I, 213 within Period II, and 371 within Period III. Since the year 2000, when the Law for Promotion of gifted education was enforced, the amount of articles considerably increased. The articles on the trend of gifted education numbered 42 within Period I, 49 within Period II, and 81 within Period III, showing a huge increase in the last period. The articles on current policies numbered 56 within Period I, 77 within Period II, and 143 within Period III, numbering the most in the last period. This means that, even before the Law for Promotion of gifted education was enforced, there has been much interest in and discussion of the appropriate educational system for gifted children in preparation for the legal and institutional foundation of such system. Since the enforcement of the law, many institutions were established and the problem became an important social issue. The articles that most frequently appeared were about current policies on and status of gifted education. This category showed the largest numbers through all the three periods and on all the subjects. This subject represented 43.1% of the articles on gifted children within Period I, 36.2% within Period II, and 38.6% within Period III. As to the significance and trend of gifted education, this subject showed a decrease from 32.3% within Period I, 23% within Period II, and 21.8% within Period III. However, the articles in the category of information on gifted education gradually increased from they represented 5.4% of the articles on brilliant children within Period I, 7.5% within Period II, and 8.4% within Period III. The social environment articles showed an increase from Period I to Period II-- from 19.2% to 33.3%, but it went down to 31.3% within Period III. (2) As to articles on the trend of gifted education, there were many such articles found, mainly on researches and trends in other countries. As greater importance is accorded to gifted children and as the recognition of the necessity of providing specific education for them grows, more related studies are conducted and people try to adopt new trends from other countries. For the articles on the current policies of gifted education, most of them were about institutions. This means that many educational institutions have been established since the Law for Promotion of Gifted Education was enforced. Informative articles on gilled education were mostly about distinctive features of gifted children and how to tell who the brilliant children are. This fact shows the importance of identifying gifted children in order to educate them systemically and effectively.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.1644-1650
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• 2012

The aim of this study was to screen the polymorphisms and distribution of each genotype of insertion/ deletion (indel) markers which were found in a preliminary comparative study of bovine genomic sequence databases. Comparative bioinformatic analyses were first performed between the nucleotide sequences of Bovine Genome Project and those of expressed sequence tag (EST) database, and a total of fifty-one species of indel markers were screened. Of these, forty-two indel markers were evaluated, and nine informative indel markers were ultimately selected for population analysis. Nucleotide sequences of each marker were re-sequenced and their polymorphic patterns were typed in six cattle breeds: Holstein, Angus, Charolais, Hereford, and two Korean native cattle breeds (Hanwoo and Jeju Black cattle). Cattle breeds tested in this study showed polymorphic patterns in eight indel markers but not in the Indel-15 marker in Charolais and Holstein. The results of analysis for Jeju Black cattle (JBC) population indicated an observed heterozygosity (Ho) that was highest in HW_G1 (0.600) and the lowest in Indel_29 (0.274). The PIC value was the highest in HW_G4 (0.373) and lowest in Indel_6 (0.305). These polymorphic indel markers will be useful in supplying genetic information for parentage tests and traceability and to develop a molecular breeding system for improvement of animal production in cattle breeds as well as in the JBC population.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
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• v.39 no.10
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• pp.1555-1564
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• 2010

This study investigated consumer's recognition of food labeling in order to contribute to the development of food labels which are more informative to consumers. The questionnaires had been collected from 120 male and female customers living in Seoul with the age between 10's and 60's from November 2nd to November 7th 2009. For checking the food label at the time of purchase, 58.3% of the consumers checked the food label and the main reason for checking the food label was to confirm sell-by date (60.1%). Sixty percent of the consumers were satisfied with the current food labeling. Among those who are not satisfied, 30.6% complained about difficult terms to understand and 25.8% were dissatisfied with insufficient information. In every age group, most people were not satisfied with labeling on food ingredient and additives, followed by date of manufacture and sell-by date. 53.1% of consumers demanded to label date of manufacture and sell-by date together. For more clear information, consumers wanted use-by date (47.5%) rather than sell-by date (23.3%). 56.7% of consumers was dissatisfied with warning information such as allergic warning and the reasons for dissatisfaction were poor visibility (37.5%) and insufficient information (33.4%). Moreover most consumers (90.0%) showed little knowledge on irradiation. To improve of the food labeling standards into consumer-oriented standards, both amendment of the food labeling standards and consumer education will be necessary.

• Archives of design research
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• v.19 no.2 s.64
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• pp.53-62
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• 2006

E-mail has indeed developed from 'a means of instant communication' to an indispensable part of online marketing. Therefore, companies need to implement consistent customer management. Communication with customers and marketing through e-mail is a powerful way of communication and adapting one-to-one marketing strategies to customer trends, habits and taste preferences. Since setting accurate targets is especially important in the fashion industry, e-mail marketing is the most effective way to communicate with customers and one-to-one marketing constitutes a very important strategy. In this study, I will analyze this powerful one-on-one marketing tool, particularly actual e-mail messages sent by an Internet Shopping Mall from June 12 to July 30, 2005, examine the effect of these messages on sales growth and analyze actual feedback received. Regarding e-mail read rates broken down by age and gender, 1 found that females in their late twenties recorded the highest rate at 21.66% and their contribution to sales growth was recorded at 3.5% From actual sales records, found that 28.10% of total sales were attributable to people in their late twenties, showing that the age group that reads e-mails the most also buys the most. Regarding feedback by e-mail title, e-mails from the 'Casual' category seemed to be the most effective, in that most of these e-mails were read. Also, messages sent on Tuesdays were read the most, according to the feedback analysis by weekday. Section e-mails were read more often than regular e-mails. Regarding the view rate according to the time e-mails were sent, messages sent to females in their late twenties at two o'clock in the afternoon were read by 20.93% of recipients, recording the highest read rate. By offering informative content and practical tips, visitors will be attracted to the site and generate site traffic. Therefore, we can conclude that sending e-mail messages can greatly contribute to sales growth and e-mail marketing is very effective. Also, in order to make e-mail campaigns more effective and improve marketing results, we need to analyze actual results and apply our findings in future e-mail campaigns. With this, we get successful marketing results.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.117-129
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• 2015

As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, a large volume of information is posted on the Internet with exponential growth every day. Accordingly, it is not unusual that investors in stock markets gather and compile firm-specific or market-wide information through online searches. Importantly, it becomes easier for investors to acquire value-relevant information for their investment decision with the help of powerful search tools on the Internet. Our study examines whether or not the Internet helps investors assess a firm's value better by using firm-level data over long periods spanning from January 2004 to December 2013. To this end, we construct weekly-based search volume for information technology (IT) services firms on the Internet. We limit our focus to IT firms since they are often equipped with intangible assets and relatively less recognized to the public which makes them hard-to measure. To obtain the information on those firms, investors are more likely to consult the Internet and use the information to appreciate the firms more accurately and eventually improve their investment decisions. Prior studies have shown that changes in search volumes can reflect the various aspects of the complex human behaviors and forecast near-term values of economic indicators, including automobile sales, unemployment claims, and etc. Moreover, search volume of firm names or stock ticker symbols has been used as a direct proxy of individual investors' attention in financial markets since, different from indirect measures such as turnover and extreme returns, they can reveal and quantify the interest of investors in an objective way. Following this line of research, this study aims to gauge whether the information retrieved from the Internet is value relevant in assessing a firm. We also use search volume for analysis but, distinguished from prior studies, explore its impact on return comovements with market returns. Given that a firm's returns tend to comove with market returns excessively when investors are less informed about the firm, we empirically test the value of information by examining the association between Internet searches and the extent to which a firm's returns comove. Our results show that Internet searches are negatively associated with return comovements as expected. When sample is split by the size of firms, the impact of Internet searches on return comovements is shown to be greater for large firms than small ones. Interestingly, we find a greater impact of Internet searches on return comovements for years from 2009 to 2013 than earlier years possibly due to more aggressive and informative exploit of Internet searches in obtaining financial information. We also complement our analyses by examining the association between return volatility and Internet search volumes. If Internet searches capture investors' attention associated with a change in firm-specific fundamentals such as new product releases, stock splits and so on, a firm's return volatility is likely to increase while search results can provide value-relevant information to investors. Our results suggest that in general, an increase in the volume of Internet searches is not positively associated with return volatility. However, we find a positive association between Internet searches and return volatility when the sample is limited to larger firms. A stronger result from larger firms implies that investors still pay less attention to the information obtained from Internet searches for small firms while the information is value relevant in assessing stock values. However, we do find any systematic differences in the magnitude of Internet searches impact on return volatility by time periods. Taken together, our results shed new light on the value of information searched from the Internet in assessing stock values. Given the informational role of the Internet in stock markets, we believe the results would guide investors to exploit Internet search tools to be better informed, as a result improving their investment decisions.