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This paper aims to represent a response to issues raised in the continuing quantitative-qualitative debate by Valtakoski (2020). Which appeared in a Journal of Services Marketing (JSM) special issue on qualitative research in service-oriented research.

The authors performed a content analysis of 1,268 papers that were published in JSM (1987-2019). In addition, the authors had data that is held in JSM’s manuscript central submission portal.

The analysis shows that while there is a dominance of quantitative methods in the journal, the proportion of qualitative papers is growing. During 2014-2019, 83.4 per cent of submitted papers to JSM represented quantitative research and 14 per cent represented qualitative research; however, 75 per cent of accepted papers were quantitative and 25 per cent were qualitative/mixed methods. Thus, the proportion of published qualitative studies are increasing and have a higher chance of receiving an acceptance decision compared to quantitative studies. Additionally, the largest percentage of qualitative papers published in JSM derive from corresponding authors outside of North America.

Service researchers who opt to use inductive research methods, which tend to use qualitative research, will not confront discrimination based solely upon the use of a research methodology among editors or reviewers at JSM.

JSM welcomes qualitative research that has rich practical implications.

This study is one of the first to provide authors with a detailed analysis and responses to the qualitative-quantitative debate in marketing.

Marketers have begun to investigate the potential of gamification for influencing consumer behavior by using game design elements in realms varying from branding, retail, sales and health services. Marketers have also begun to explore consumer behavior in sustainability. This paper aims to provide contributions to build on both literatures.

This research tests gamification principles in a large field study on real consumers that includes data from pre-post surveys, gamified app analytics and household energy meters. The data are analyzed using ANOVA’s and structural equation modeling.

The findings demonstrate: gamification significantly enhanced consumers’ knowledge, attitudes, behavioral intentions and realized bill savings compared to a control group; reward-based game design elements including points, badges and other rewards contribute to enhancing sustainable behavior outcomes.

Future research in settings outside of sustainability may extend upon the findings of the current research to further understanding the impact of reward-based game design elements in marketing.

The findings have important practical implications for how organizations might use serious games to promote sustainable and other desirable behavior. In particular, how reward-based game design elements, points, trophies and badges, can be used to create a chain of relationships that leads to reduced electricity consumption.

This paper fulfills the need to understand if the impact of gamification extends outside of controlled environments and into the field. Further, it demonstrates how reward-based game design elements contribute to consumers changing their behavior, a relationship that is not yet thoroughly understood in the marketing literature.

A transformative service aims to improve wellbeing; however, current approaches have an implicit assumption that all wellbeing dimensions are equal and more dimensions led to higher wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to present evidence for a new framework that identifies the paradox of competing wellbeing dimensions for both the individual and others in society – the transformative service paradox (TSP).

Data is drawn from a mixed-method approach using qualitative (interviews) and quantitative data (lab experiment) in an electricity service context. The first study involves 45 household interviews (n = 118) and deals with the nature of trade-offs at the individual level to establish the concept of the TSP. The second study uses a behavioral economics laboratory experiment (n = 110) to test the self vs. other nature of the trade-off in day-to-day use of electricity.

The interviews and experiment identified that temporal (now vs. future) and beneficiary-level factors explain why individuals make wellbeing trade-offs for the transformative service of electricity. The laboratory experiment showed that when the future implication of the trade-off is made salient, consumers are more willing to forego physical wellbeing for environmental wellbeing, whereas when the “now” implication is more salient consumers forego financial wellbeing for physical wellbeing.

This research introduces the term “Transformative Service Paradox” and identifies two factors that explain why consumers make wellbeing trade-offs at the individual level and at the societal level; temporal (now vs. future) and wellbeing beneficiary.

Collective motives for alcohol consumption represent a nascent field, with individual-level attributes, peer pressure and broad-level environmental elements being at the forefront of research. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of friendships in the context of alcohol consumption and determine what group-level motives exist for alcohol consumption.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 participants aged 18–30, these discussed the role the participant’s friendship group played in alcohol consumption and helped to elucidate what collective and group-level motives existed.

Group-level motives can steer a collective’s alcohol consumption by either endorsing it or degrading it, the findings revealed four group-level motives: these were, competition, conformity, hedonism, with opportunity cost receptiveness acting as a buffer.

The small sample and qualitative nature of the study means external validity still needs to be established to generalize the research to other audiences.

By unpacking group-level motives researchers can develop group-level strategies and match specialized interventions with the right priority group.

This paper is the first to address group-level motives for alcohol consumption and makes an important contribution to understanding how group-level factors can impact individuals.

Practitioners need to understand how households will engage with connected-home technologies or risk the failure of these innovations. Current theory does not offer sufficient explanation for how households will engage; hence, this paper aims to address an important gap by examining how households set “rules of engagement” for connected-home technologies in the context of electricity use and monitoring.

A review of the extant psychology, technology and engagement literature is conducted and yields two research questions for exploration. The research questions are addressed via 43 in-depth household interviews. Analysis includes thematic analysis and computerized text analysis.

The results include a typology of technology engagement (the “PIP typology”) and discuss three main roles for technology in assisting households: intern, assistant and manager. Key contributions are as follows: consumers in household settings may experience “compromised engagement” where the perceived middle option is selected even if no-one selected that option originally; households open to using connected-home technologies are often taking advantage of their ability to “delegate” engagement to technology, and because consumers humanize technology, they also expect technology to follow social roles and boundaries.

Future research may examine the PIP typology quantitatively and/or in different contexts and would benefit from a longitudinal study to examine how household technology engagement evolves. Four research propositions are provided, which may form the basis for future research.

Recommendations for practitioners are presented regarding the benefits of keeping consumers at the heart of connected-home technology goods and services. Specific design principles are provided.

This paper fulfills the need to understand how households will engage with connected-home technologies and the roles this technology may fulfill in the complex household service system.

Purpose – The chapter provides the reader with an overview of how teacher preparation programs can utilize a school-based reading/literacy clinic model within university coursework. Information on how to successfully scaffold teacher candidates into becoming more reflective educators through the use of a reading clinic model is provided. Details for partnering with community organizations to provide tutoring support for struggling readers is illustrated.

Methodology/approach – The research support for utilizing tutoring programs is shared. Implications for teacher preparation programs seeking to develop literacy experiences for preservice and practicing educators are depicted. This book chapter describes a framework for establishing and maintaining tutoring partnerships within communities.

Practical implications – The author provides examples of effective community partnerships with suggestions and techniques for developing new programs and/or partnerships. Practical tips for establishing and maintaining tutoring programs which are composed of innovative practices are included.

Social implications – The key element of effective tutoring programs is to improve student achievement in literacy. Educators must build meaningful and thought-provoking literacy practices into the tutoring setting. A model for using a tutoring approach supportive of struggling readers is described. The components for effectively designing and preserving a reading clinics program are shared.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the attitudes of employers in a de‐regulated institutional industrial relations framework, and whether they are still willing to engage in collective bargaining (CB).

A cross‐sectional survey design using a self‐administered postal questionnaire, seeks information on employers' attitudes to a range of issues. Included are employers within all 17 standard industry classifications used by previous New Zealand researchers.

The paper quite convincingly shows that unless employers are prepared to engage in dialogue with employees or third parties and unless the benefits to be gained from such a dialogue are more widely accepted it is unlikely they will engage in CB. Therefore, involvement would appear to be limited to those areas that do not hinder managerial freedom.

This is one of the first studies in New Zealand of employers' attitudes to CB since the 1990s. The paper provides valuable data for policy makers, unions, employers and employment relations researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine early sociological research on the experience of non-impaired siblings in families of children with disabilities for evidence of an approach consistent with aspects of the social model of disability.

Due to the historical nature of this special issue, this work examines research published over a 30-year period beginning with the 1960s and ending with the late 1980s. After an extensive literature search, a mixture of 51 quantitative and qualitative studies on the sibling experience was included in the sample.

Findings indicate that while the focus of much of the early research on the non-impaired sibling experience was on the negative impact of having a sibling with impairments, there were some exceptions in early sociological studies that highlighted the impact of structural barriers and cultural attitudes on sibling adjustment. In particular, results of early studies showed that the transmission of inclusionary attitudes within the family unit can improve the lives of siblings.

Self-promotion on social networking sites (SNSs) is a controversial issue as it has been attributed to various positive and negative consequences. To better understand the reasons for the mixed consequences and the nature of self-promotion on SNSs, the purpose of this paper is to theorize and empirically investigate the duality of SNS self-promotion and its underlying socio-psychological mechanisms.

By drawing on the motivational affordance lens and self-determination theory, this study develops a theoretical account of the duality of self-promotion on SNSs. The author places subjective vitality and SNS addiction as the positive and negative consequences of self-promotion. The model was tested using partial least squares technique with data collected from 289 Finnish Facebook users using a survey.

The results show that self-promotion contributes to both subjective vitality and to SNS addiction. Importantly, exhibitionism attenuates the effect of self-promotion on subjective vitality and amplifies the effect of self-promotion on SNS addiction. The feature-level analysis shows that status updates, adding photos, commenting in others’ posts and profile completeness are the main determinants of self-promotion. Status updates, adding photos and check-ins, in turn, have high exhibitionistic appeal.

To date, the empirical attempts to investigate the duality of SNS use have been rare. In particular, prior research is largely silent in explaining what tilt the outcomes of self-promotion either toward positive or negative direction. The paper fills this theoretical and empirical gap and thus contributes to literature on dualities of SNS use.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.