• International Journal of Contents
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.31-40
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• 2015

This paper primarily intends to explore whether smartphones accelerate the customer education paradox. Smartphone usage is becoming a mainstream habit, and it is changing people's shopping experience and conventional practices, hence presenting new challenges to the market. A smartphone affects customers strongly when they are trying to choose a product/service among a variety of options, and making purchase decisions. With smartphones bringing such changes and challenges to the market, especially to the companies and stores, it is important to understand market trends in order to retain the loyalty of existing customers as well as to attract new buyers. Therefore, companies and stores should offer enhanced and better technical service quality, along with the use of tools such as QR codes. Further, mobile based websites would offer a suitable approach in assisting customers using smartphones to obtain better information of greater value. The results of this study imply that there is an opportunity for organizations to design various methods of imparting customer education by using smartphones, such as loading applications on a smartphone that lead to more information with good quality and present real benefits regarding the products/services.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.217-245
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• 2010

This study attempts, using qualitative research methods, to identify a series of complex processes and mechanisms that turn the differences in the parents' education levels and occupational statuses into the gaps between their children's academic achievements. The highly educated parents with high occupational status are obsessed with top universities while the less educated parents with low occupational status tend to be less interested in educational capital. The highly educated middle-class parents themselves have strong educational aspirations. They also try to inspire educational aspirations and academic enthusiasm in their children by the early and deep involvement in a long-term educational strategy. They repeatedly teach their children to have aspirations toward higher professional status as well as a competitive attitude in academic performance. In contrast, the less educated working class parents do not emphasize the importance of high education and 'a good educational background' to their children. The differences in the educational aspirations and parenting practices between the two social classes primarily derive from their varying life experiences in the social structure. The middle class interviewees said that their obsession with 'a good education background' was closely related to their sense of fear that their children could fall from the middle class. In contrast to the middle class interviewees, the working class parents had no memories of painful experiences related to their lack of higher education. They claimed that they rarely ever felt inferior and that they rarely regretted their lack of high education. In addition, they did not believe that their lives were more difficult due to their 'low education'.