• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.31-49
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• 2023

TikTok, as a leading short video platform, has attracted many users, and the resulting attention generates immense business value as a platform to diffuse knowledge. As a qualitative and explorative approach, this study reviews the knowledge payment industry and discusses the influential factors of users' payment decisions regarding knowledge products on TikTok. By conducting in-depth interviews with ten participants and observing 95 knowledge providers' videos, we find that TikTok has significant business potential in the knowledge payment industry. By using the ATLAS. ti software to code the data collected from these interviews, this study finds that demander characteristics (personal needs), product characteristics (product quality), provider characteristics (the key opinion leader effect), and platform characteristics (platform management) are the four core categories that influence users' payment decisions regarding knowledge products on TikTok. A theoretical model consisting of the ten variables of emotional needs, professional needs, quality, price, helpfulness, value, charisma, user trust, service guarantee, and scarcity is proposed based on the grounded theory. The theoretical and practical implications of the study findings are also discussed.

• The Korean Journal of Woman Psychology
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.303-329
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• 2011

In Korea, recent women's educational standard is more higher than any other period but rate of using human resources is the lowest level among the OECD nations. As the reason of this phenomenon, the career choice attract attention. Traditionally, job is classified female-dominated job from male-dominated job, and most women still avoid male-dominated job. If this unequal concentrated phenomenon is relieved, diversity using of human resource will be available. For the purpose, this study try to determine the experience structure and the career decision-making process of the female undergraduate who want the male-dominated job through the qualitative study method, and to determine factors that work negative or positive on the process to use for the career consult. Grounded theory based data analyses resulted in 61 concepts, 27 sub-categories, and 12 categories from the recorded data of 8 female undergraduates who want the male-dominated job. The core category was "For the special life, keeping challenging with the will". A paradigm model consist of the casual condition, central phenomenon, contextual condition, intervening condition, actions/reactions and the result was proposed. And the participants went through five stages with time in their career decision-making process: the stage of awareness about the trait and aspiration, the stage of internal determination, the stage of support and accept, the stage of challenge and overcome, and the stage of affirmation and confidence. Implications of the findings and suggestions for the future research are discussed.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.39-69
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• 2008

The present study examined the overall receptivity of community members to migrant wives in Korea. A total of 23 community members from two regions, Ansan, an urban area and Youngam, a rural area, were selected for the interview based on their prior experience with migrant wives. Data were collected via a semi-structured interview method. The participants provided their personal feelings and thoughts on a variety of issues involving migrant wives, such as how they perceive migrant wives' original culture and lifestyles, the nature of their interaction experience with migrant wives, their overall evaluation of migrant wives, their opinions about migrant wives' cultural adaptation, and their opinions about the on-going transformation of the Korean society into a multi-racial, multi-cultural society. Interview results indicated that, although the participants' attitude toward migrant wives was positive, the overall receptivity to migrant wives was largely based on the traditional sex-role stereotypes typically found in the Korean society. Moreover, the vast majority of the participants endorsed a narrow-minded, uni-directional perspective on cultural adaptation which puts far greater emphasis on migrant wives' assimilation into the host culture than reciprocal influence process between the two cultures. Implications of the study and directions for future research were discussed.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.311-329
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• 2010

It is necessarily for a counselor's role to vary according to the cultures. While an autonomy is stressed in Western horizontal society, sociability is emphasized in Korea which is a vertical authoritarian society. What is more, a lot of people look to a counselor for elder's role as a teacher or a fosterer as well as a therapist. The two basic framework of Reality Dynamic Counseling which has been developed as a counseling approach for Korean are 'presentization for problem' and 'elder's role of a counselor'. An elder's role of counselor showed in real counseling case is illustrated by 'narrative methods' in this study. The 'story making methods' as one of qualitative research methods is more useful than a protocol method which has been used in studying counseling case, because it has conciseness for original text of dialogs and commentary for counseling process. The seven characteristics of Reality Dynamic Counseling such as grasping the real cause, understanding mind,, emphasizing interpersonal factor, emphasis on role, utilizing confrontation, emphasizing the relationship of parent-child, and facilitating sociability are reflected in such an elder's role of counselor.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.592-608
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• 2007

This study explored the types of conceptual change of 'force' within middle school students' conceptual ecologies. This qualitative study was implemented with the use of classroom observations and two interviews with the participants. 11 middle school students (7 females and 4 males) joined in this study. The interviews with the participants were conducted individually before and after the 'force' unit. The collected data were all transcribed and analyzed interpretively. The results of this study consisted of two parts. First, the participants' conceptual ecologies of 'force' were categorized into 4: epistemological commitments (fixed or interactional explanatory consistency), analogy (attribute, working), metaphysical beliefs (people-oriented ontology, animism, causationism, mixed), and past experiences. Second, two representative cases including 'stable' and 'transitional' states were explained based on the interactions within their own conceptual ecologies. We can see students' conceptions with the integrated perspective in the sense that this results tried to get contextual and interactional understandings of the status of the conception and the possibilities of conceptual change. In addition, it implied that conceptual change research should have the perspective of conceptual ecology evolution in the future.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.107-120
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• 2014

This study proposes a novel recommender system using the structural hole analysis to reflect qualitative and emotional information in recommendation process. Although collaborative filtering (CF) is known as the most popular recommendation algorithm, it has some limitations including scalability and sparsity problems. The scalability problem arises when the volume of users and items become quite large. It means that CF cannot scale up due to large computation time for finding neighbors from the user-item matrix as the number of users and items increases in real-world e-commerce sites. Sparsity is a common problem of most recommender systems due to the fact that users generally evaluate only a small portion of the whole items. In addition, the cold-start problem is the special case of the sparsity problem when users or items newly added to the system with no ratings at all. When the user's preference evaluation data is sparse, two users or items are unlikely to have common ratings, and finally, CF will predict ratings using a very limited number of similar users. Moreover, it may produces biased recommendations because similarity weights may be estimated using only a small portion of rating data. In this study, we suggest a novel limitation of the conventional CF. The limitation is that CF does not consider qualitative and emotional information about users in the recommendation process because it only utilizes user's preference scores of the user-item matrix. To address this novel limitation, this study proposes cluster-indexing CF model with the structural hole analysis for recommendations. In general, the structural hole means a location which connects two separate actors without any redundant connections in the network. The actor who occupies the structural hole can easily access to non-redundant, various and fresh information. Therefore, the actor who occupies the structural hole may be a important person in the focal network and he or she may be the representative person in the focal subgroup in the network. Thus, his or her characteristics may represent the general characteristics of the users in the focal subgroup. In this sense, we can distinguish friends and strangers of the focal user utilizing the structural hole analysis. This study uses the structural hole analysis to select structural holes in subgroups as an initial seeds for a cluster analysis. First, we gather data about users' preference ratings for items and their social network information. For gathering research data, we develop a data collection system. Then, we perform structural hole analysis and find structural holes of social network. Next, we use these structural holes as cluster centroids for the clustering algorithm. Finally, this study makes recommendations using CF within user's cluster, and compare the recommendation performances of comparative models. For implementing experiments of the proposed model, we composite the experimental results from two experiments. The first experiment is the structural hole analysis. For the first one, this study employs a software package for the analysis of social network data - UCINET version 6. The second one is for performing modified clustering, and CF using the result of the cluster analysis. We develop an experimental system using VBA (Visual Basic for Application) of Microsoft Excel 2007 for the second one. This study designs to analyzing clustering based on a novel similarity measure - Pearson correlation between user preference rating vectors for the modified clustering experiment. In addition, this study uses 'all-but-one' approach for the CF experiment. In order to validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we apply three comparative types of CF models to the same dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the other comparative models. In especial, the proposed model significantly performs better than two comparative modes with the cluster analysis from the statistical significance test. However, the difference between the proposed model and the naive model does not have statistical significance.

• Korean Journal of Comparative Education
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.187-209
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• 2017

The purpose of this study was to highlight the necessity of a conceptual reestablishment of world university evaluations. The hitherto most well-known and validated world university evaluation systems such as Times Higher Education (THE), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) or Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) primarily assess big universities with quantitative evaluation indicators and performance results in the rankings. Those Systems have instigated a kind of elitism in higher education and neglect numerous small or local institutions of higher education, instead of providing stakeholders with comprehensive information about the real possibilities of tertiary education so that they can choose an institution that is individually tailored to their needs. Also, the management boards of universities and policymakers in higher education have partly been manipulated by and partly taken advantage of the elitist ranking systems with an economic emphasis, as indicated by research-centered evaluations and industry-university cooperation. To supplement such educational defects and to redress the lack of world university evaluation systems, a new system called 'U-Multirank' has been implemented with the financial support of the European Commission since 2012. U-Multirank was designed and is enforced by an international team of project experts led by CHE(Centre for Higher Education/Germany), CHEPS(Center for Higher Education Policy Studies/Netherlands) and CWTS(Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University/Netherlands). The significant features of U-Multirank, compared with e.g., THE and ARWU, are its qualitative, multidimensional, user-oriented and individualized assessment methods. Above all, its website and its assessment results, based on a mobile operating system and designed simply for international users, present a self-organized and evolutionary model of world university evaluation systems in the digital and global era. To estimate the universal validity of the redefinition of the world university evaluation system using U-Multirank, an epistemological approach will be used that relies on Edgar Morin's Complexity Theory and Karl Popper's Philosophy of Science.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.99-124
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• 2009

Many firms in Korea have adopted and used advanced information technology in an effort to boost efficiency. The process of adapting to the new technology, at the same time, can vary from one firm to another. As such, this research focuses on several relevant factors, especially the roles of social interaction as a key variable that influences the technology adaptation process and the outcomes. Thus far, how a firm goes through the adaptation process to the new technology has not been yet fully explored. Previous studies on changes undergone by a firm or an organization due to information technology have been pursued from various theoretical points of views, evolved from technological and institutional views to an integrated social technology views. The technology adaptation process has been understood to be something that evolves over time and has been regarded as cycles between misalignments and alignments, gradually approaching the stable aligned state. The adaptation process of the new technology was defined as "appropriation" process according to Poole and DeSanctis (1994). They suggested that this process is not automatically determined by the technology design itself. Rather, people actively select how technology structures should be used; accordingly, adoption practices vary. But concepts of the appropriation process in these studies are not accurate while suggested propositions are not clear enough to apply in practice. Furthermore, these studies do not substantially suggest which factors are changed during the appropriation process and what should be done to bring about effective outcomes. Therefore, research objectives of this study lie in finding causes for the difference in ways in which advanced information technology has been used and adopted among organizations. The study also aims to explore how a firm's interaction with social as well as technological factors affects differently in resulting organizational changes. Detail objectives of this study are as follows. First, this paper primarily focuses on the appropriation process of advanced information technology in the long run, and we look into reasons for the diverse types of the usage. Second, this study is to categorize each phases in the appropriation process and make clear what changes occur and how they are evolved during each phase. Third, this study is to suggest the guidelines to determine which strategies are needed in an individual, group and organizational level. For this, a substantially grounded theory that can be applied to organizational practice has been developed from a longitudinal comparative case study. For these objectives, the technology appropriation process was explored based on Structuration Theory by Giddens (1984), Orlikoski and Robey (1991) and Adaptive Structuration Theory by Poole and DeSanctis (1994), which are examples of social technology views on organizational change by technology. Data have been obtained from interviews, observations of medical treatment task, and questionnaires administered to group members who use the technology. Data coding was executed in three steps following the grounded theory approach. First of all, concepts and categories were developed from interviews and observation data in open coding. Next, in axial coding, we related categories to subcategorize along the lines of their properties and dimensions through the paradigm model. Finally, the grounded theory about the appropriation process was developed through the conditional/consequential matrix in selective coding. In this study eight hypotheses about the adaptation process have been clearly articulated. Also, we found that the appropriation process involves through three phases, namely, "direct appropriation," "cooperate with related structures," and "interpret and make judgments." The higher phases of appropriation move, the more users represent various types of instrumental use and attitude. Moreover, the previous structures like "knowledge and experience," "belief that other members know and accept the use of technology," "horizontal communication," and "embodiment of opinion collection process" are evolved to higher degrees in their dimensions of property. Furthermore, users continuously create new spirits and structures, while removing some of the previous ones at the same time. Thus, from longitudinal view, faithful and unfaithful appropriation methods appear recursively, but gradually faithful appropriation takes over the other. In other words, the concept of spirits and structures has been changed in the adaptation process over time for the purpose of alignment between the task and other structures. These findings call for a revised or extended model of structural adaptation in IS (Information Systems) literature now that the vague adaptation process in previous studies has been clarified through the in-depth qualitative study, identifying each phrase with accuracy. In addition, based on these results some guidelines can be set up to help determine which strategies are needed in an individual, group, and organizational level for the purpose of effective technology appropriation. In practice, managers can focus on the changes of spirits and elevation of the structural dimension to achieve effective technology use.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.235-248
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• 2022

With the changes in the future educational environment, such as the rapid decline of the school-age population and the expansion of students' choice of curriculum, changes are also required in PCK, the expertise of science teachers. In other words, the categories constituting the existing 'consensus-PCK' and the characteristics of 'science PCK' are not fixed, so more categories and characteristics can be added. The purpose of this study is to explore the potential area of science PCK required to cope with changes in the future educational environment in the form of 'Family Resemblance Science PCK (Family Resemblance-PCK, hereafter)' through Wittgenstein's family resemblance approach. For this purpose, in-depth interviews were conducted with three focus groups. In the focus group in-depth interview, participants discussed how the science PCK required for science teachers in future schools in 2030-2045 will change due to changes in the future society and educational environment. Qualitative analysis was performed based on the in-depth interview, and semantic network analysis was performed on the in-depth interview text to analyze the characteristics of 'Family Resemblance-PCK' differentiated from the existing 'consensus-PCK'. In results, the characteristics of Family Resemblance-PCK, which are newly requested along with changes in role expectations of science teachers, were examined by PCK area. As a result of semantic network analysis of Family Resemblance-PCK, it was found that Family Resemblance-PCK expands its boundaries from the existing consensus-PCK, which is the starting point, and new PCK elements were added. Looking at the aspects of Family Resemblance-PCK, [AI-Convergence Knowledge-Contents-Digital], [Community-Network-Human Resources-Relationships], [Technology-Exploration-Virtual Reality-Research], [Self-Directed Learning-Collaboration-Community], etc., form a distinct network cluster, and it is expected that future science teacher expertise will be formed and strengthened around these PCK areas. Based on the research results, changes in the professionalism of science teachers in future schools and countermeasures were proposed as a conclusion.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.85-111
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• 2012

Introduction : The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between perceptual characteristics of consumers and intent of relational continuance for PB(Private Brand) products in discount stores. This study was conducted as an empirical study based on survey. For the empirical study, factors of PB products as characteristics perceived by consumers such as perceived quality, store image, brand image and perceived value were deduced from preceding studies. The effect of such factors on intent of relational continuance mediated by brand trust and brand equity of PB products was structurally examined. Research Model : Based on theory analysis and hypotheses, constructed a Structural Equation Model(SEM). The research model is shown in Figure 1. Research Method : This paper is based on s qualitative study of selected literature and empirical data. The survey for empirical study was carried out on consumers in Gyeonggi and Busan between January 2012 and May 2012. 300 surveys were distributed and 253 (84.3%) of them were returned. After excluding omissions and insincere responses, 245 surveys (81.6%) were used for final analysis as effective samples. Result : First of all, the Reliability was carried out for instrument used. The lower limit of 0.7 for Cronbach's Alpha as suggested by Hair et al. (1998). And Construct validity was established by carrying out exploratory factor analysis by Varimax rotation for all. Four factor result for the consumer's perceptual characteristics of PB Products, two mediating factors and one dependent factor. All constructs included in research framework have acceptable validity and reliability. Table 1 shows the factor loading, eigen value, explained variance and Cronbach's alpha for each factor. In order to assure validity of constructs, I implemented Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), using AMOS 20.0. In confirmatory factor analysis, researcher can take control over the specification of indicators for each factor by hypothesizing that a specific factor is loaded with the relevant indicators. Moreover, CFA is particularly useful in the validation of scale for the measurement of specific construct. CFA result summarized Table 2 shows that the fit measures of all constructs fulfill the recommended level and loadings are significant. To test causal relationship between constructs in the research model, used AMOS 20.0 that provides a graphic module as method for analysing Structural Equation Modeling. The result of hypothesis test is shown in Table 3. As a result of empirical study, perceived quality, brand image and perceived value as selected attributes for PB products showed significantly positive (+) effect on brand trust and brand equity. Furthermore, brand trust and brand equity showed significantly positive (+) effect on intent of relational continuance. However, store image of discount stores selling the PB products was analyzed to have positive (+) effect on brand trust and no significant effect on brand equity. Discussion : Based on the results of this study, the relationship between overall quality, store image, brand image and value perceived by consumers about PB products and intent of relational continuance was structurally verified as being mediated by brand trust and brand equity. Looking at the results, a strategic approach that maximizes brand trust and equity value for PB products by large discount stores is required on top of basic efforts to improve quality, brand image and value of PB products in order to maximize consumer's intent of relational continuance and to continuously attract repeated purchase of products.