title: Chinese students' complaining behavior: Hearing the silence

authors: FitzPatrick, Mary

subjects: China

abstract: Purpose – Despite the competitive internationalization of higher education, international students' responses to dissatisfaction (consumer complaining behavior or CCB) are not well understood in New Zealand. While studies show that many factors, including culture, influence CCB, the None-Action mode in particular has been largely overlooked by researchers. The purpose of this paper is to examine Chinese student's CCB.
Design/methodology/approach – The study employed a qualitative exploratory focus group design examining Chinese students' CCB. Data were analyzed in two stages. First, data were coded into various CCB modes. Next, data relating to the specific mode of None-Action were thematically analyzed. Five key themes for None-Action were revealed: Futility, Inadequate Information, Fear of Consequences, Complexity, and Internalization.
Findings – This exploratory research found a high level of None-Action responses. It was apparent that culture was highly influential in participants' CCB responses and that these None-Action responses had an affective dimension.
Research limitations/implications – Understanding None-Action responses to dissatisfaction among international students in higher education is critical if universities are to avoid adverse funding consequences. There are cultural and personal implications for students and strategic implications for higher education institutions in understanding Chinese students' Non-Action. The exploratory nature of the research means that it is designed to stimulate thought and debate on how to expand the body of knowledge on this mode of CCB.
Originality/value – The research highlights the importance to higher education institutions of understanding the cultural and service-specific explanations for Non-Action as a response to student-consumer dissatisfaction.

text: Chinese students' complaining behavior: Hearing the silence Purpose – Despite the competitive internationalization of higher education, international students' responses to dissatisfaction (consumer complaining behavior or CCB) are not well understood in New Zealand. While studies show that many factors, including culture, influence CCB, the None-Action mode in particular has been largely overlooked by researchers. The purpose of this paper is to examine Chinese student's CCB.
Design/methodology/approach – The study employed a qualitative exploratory focus group design examining Chinese students' CCB. Data were analyzed in two stages. First, data were coded into various CCB modes. Next, data relating to the specific mode of None-Action were thematically analyzed. Five key themes for None-Action were revealed: Futility, Inadequate Information, Fear of Consequences, Complexity, and Internalization.
Findings – This exploratory research found a high level of None-Action responses. It was apparent that culture was highly influential in participants' CCB responses and that these None-Action responses had an affective dimension.
Research limitations/implications – Understanding None-Action responses to dissatisfaction among international students in higher education is critical if universities are to avoid adverse funding consequences. There are cultural and personal implications for students and strategic implications for higher education institutions in understanding Chinese students' Non-Action. The exploratory nature of the research means that it is designed to stimulate thought and debate on how to expand the body of knowledge on this mode of CCB.
Originality/value – The research highlights the importance to higher education institutions of understanding the cultural and service-specific explanations for Non-Action as a response to student-consumer dissatisfaction.

year: 2012

title: Speeding up and boosting diverse density learning

authors: Foulds, James Richard

subjects: computer science

abstract: In multi-instance learning, each example is described by a bag of instances instead of a single feature vector. In this paper, we revisit the idea of performing multi-instance classification based on a point-and-scaling concept by searching for the point in instance space with the highest diverse density. This is a computationally expensive process, and we describe several heuristics designed to improve runtime. Our results show that simple variants of existing algorithms can be used to find diverse density maxima more efficiently. We also show how significant increases in accuracy can be obtained by applying a boosting algorithm with a modified version of the diverse density algorithm as the weak learner.

text: Speeding up and boosting diverse density learning In multi-instance learning, each example is described by a bag of instances instead of a single feature vector. In this paper, we revisit the idea of performing multi-instance classification based on a point-and-scaling concept by searching for the point in instance space with the highest diverse density. This is a computationally expensive process, and we describe several heuristics designed to improve runtime. Our results show that simple variants of existing algorithms can be used to find diverse density maxima more efficiently. We also show how significant increases in accuracy can be obtained by applying a boosting algorithm with a modified version of the diverse density algorithm as the weak learner.

year: 2010

title: Poster Abstracts

authors: Lapsley, Hilary

subjects: Maori

abstract: These are the poster abstracts from the Proceedings of the National Māori Graduates of Psychology Symposium 2002.

text: Poster Abstracts These are the poster abstracts from the Proceedings of the National Māori Graduates of Psychology Symposium 2002.

year: 2003