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This study aims to develop an assessment scale for university service quality (university SQ) and examine University Service Quality assessment model (UNIQUAL) of higher education during the pandemic.

Two studies applied a mixed-method design to develop and validate the UNIQUAL scale. In-depth interviews and literature reviews were conducted to refine the initial dimensions and items of UNIQUAL in Study 1. Item analysis, EFA and CFA were then conducted to purify item refinement, scale refinement, purification and validation in Study 2. Finally, a confirmed UNIQUAL model was analyzed via partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) using Smart-PLS 4.0.

The research confirms the four-factor structure of UNIQUAL, with a total of 16 items, to be a valid and reliable scale for the assessment of the service quality (SQ) of universities. Having adopted the bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap approach to study 5,000 subsamples from 27 countries, the authors found “responsiveness” and “empathy” to be significantly associated and have positive relationships with students' satisfaction with university SQ. Furthermore, university SQ and satisfaction were mediated by “health and safety” concerns.

The newly developed UNIQUAL scale would be of value to educators and authorities of higher education to assess the SQ of their universities to enhance the effectiveness of student learning. The improvement in satisfaction with higher education's SQ ultimately helps in retaining both international and local students amidst concerns about traveling and studying during the pandemic.

COVID-19 has affected the private and public sectors worldwide. Millions of students have been affected by schools being shut down and substituted with distance-learning programs. Thus, the assessment of the quality of university services has become an important support mechanism for retaining the sustainability of higher education.

The UNIQUAL scale provides a conceptual model and validates an assessment tool. The research hypotheses confirm the relationship between university SQ and satisfaction from the perspective of international students.

The purpose of this study is to revisit the measures of internal consistency for multi-item scales in hospitality research and compare the performance of Cronbach’s α, omega total (ω_Total), omega hierarchical (ω_H), Revelle’s omega total (ω_RT), Minimum Rank Factor Analysis (GLB_fa) and GLB algebraic (GLB_a).

A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted to compare the performance of the six reliability estimators under different conditions common in hospitality research. Second, this study analyzed a data set to complement the simulation study.

Overall, ω_Total was the best-performing estimator across all conditions, whereas ω_H performed the poorest. α performed well when factor loadings were high with low variability (high/low) and large sample sizes. Similarly, ω_RT, GLB_fa and GLB_a performed consistently well when loadings were high and less variable as well as the sample size and the number of scale items increased. Of the two GLB estimators, GLB_a consistently outperformed GLB_fa.

This study provides hospitality managers with a better understanding of what reliability is and the various reliability estimators. Using reliable instruments ensures that organizations draw accurate conclusions that help them move closer to realizing their visions.

Though popular in other fields, reliability discussions have not yet received substantial attention in hospitality. This study raises these discussions in the context of hospitality research to promote better practices for assessing the reliability of scales used within the hospitality domain.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the mediating effect of friends and family as sources of perceived social support in the relationship between loneliness and depressive symptoms.

Survey data sample consisted of 733 university students from January to May 2023. Participants completed the UCLA loneliness scales, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MPSS) and Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21). The SPSS programme with PROCESS macro (Model 6) was used to test the hypothesis regarding the mediation effect.

The bootstrap analysis found that friends as a source of social support mediated the relationship between loneliness and depressive symptoms. Similarly, loneliness had a significant indirect effect on depressive symptoms through the mediation of family as a source of social support. Moreover, it was found that the relationships of friends and family as sources of social support mediated the association of the aforementioned variables.

This research advances our understanding of social support sources from friends and family amongst university students whilst providing suggestions for interventions tackling loneliness and depressive symptoms in a university setting.

This study determines the effects of high-involvement work practices (HIWPs) and servant leadership (SL) on job crafting (JC). It also investigates the effect of JC on innovative work behavior (IWB). It further examines the mediating role of JC in the relationship between HIWPs and IWB, as well as between SL and IWB based on self-determination theory and conservation of resources theory.

Data were collected in two waves with a one-week interval (Time 1 and Time 2) from 138 nurses from seven public hospitals in Baghdad through survey design. The data analysis was done through structural equation modeling using smart partial least squares.

This study reveals that HIWPs and SL have significant effects on JC, while JC has a significant relationship with IWB. It also shows that JC has a significant mediating role in the relationship between HIWPs and IWB. Finally, the relationship between SL and IWB is significantly mediated by JC.

This study contributes to the extant literature by revealing the direct effects of JC on IWB. It further unveils the mediating effect of JC on the nexus between HIWPs and IWB, as well as between SL and IWB. This mediating effect has been overlooked in the empirical literature.

This study aims to synthesize and integrate findings from diverse research on the antecedents and moderators of customer loyalty in the banking sector. Through a comprehensive meta-analysis, the research seeks to understand the primary drivers of bank loyalty and the potential cultural, economic and social indicators that might influence these relationships.

A rigorous meta-analysis was conducted, analyzing 275 studies with 1,365 effect sizes involving over 134,000 bank customers from more than 50 countries. The research evaluated the effect sizes of the main relationships between loyalty antecedents and consequences and assessed the influence of cultural, economic and social moderators.

The study identified key antecedents of bank loyalty, with responsiveness, privacy, commitment, trust and empathy being paramount. Cultural dimensions, such as individualism and masculinity, significantly moderate the relationships between trust and loyalty. The human development index (HDI) was also identified as a significant economic moderator, particularly influencing the relationship between satisfaction and bank loyalty.

This research offers a holistic view of bank loyalty, bridging gaps from conflicting findings in prior literature. Examining a vast array of studies across diverse cultural and economic contexts provides empirical generalizations about bank loyalty behavior, offering valuable insights for academia and the banking industry.

This paper investigates the current psychological state of Chinese tourism practitioners and their career resilience during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It empirically examines the effects of COVID-19 on Chinese tourism practitioners' professional attitudes and their career belief in the future. The study is intended to guide enterprises and governments to design effective strategies/policies to deal with the effect of this unfavorable environment.

The sample consists of 442 tourism practitioners in 313 tourism enterprises in China. The data were collected via a targeted online survey based on a well-structured questionnaire. The data were analyzed using statistical procedures including multilevel regression analysis.

The study results show that Chinese tourism practitioners have strong career resilience in the face of current turbulent time. After testing, the model shows that career beliefs and social support have a significant positive impact on the professional attitudes of tourism practitioners, and that career resilience has a partial mediating effect on their career beliefs, social support and professional attitude.

This study enriches the existing literature on career belief, social support and career resilience. It provides a new interpretation on how career belief and social support impact career resilience and thus shape tourism practitioners' professional attitudes during pandemics.

Social media rumor combating is a global concern in academia and industry. Existing studies lack a clear definition and overall conceptual framework of users' rumor-combating behaviors. Therefore, this study attempts to empirically derive a typology of rumor-combating behaviors of social media users.

A three-phase typology development approach is adopted, including content analysis, multidimensional scaling (MDS), interpreting and labeling. Qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods are employed.

The elicited 40 rumor-combating behaviors vary along two dimensions: high versus low difficulty of realization, and low versus high cognitive load. Based on the two dimensions, the 40 behaviors are further divided into four categories: rumor-questioning behavior, rumor-debunking behavior, proactive-appealing behavior, and literacy enhancement behavior.

This typology will serve as reference for social media platforms and governments to further explore the interventions to encourage social media users to counter rumor spreading based on various situations and different characteristics of rumor-combating behaviors.

This study provides a typology of rumor-combating behaviors from a novel perspective of user participation. The typology delves into the conceptual connotations and basic forms of rumor combating, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of the complete spectrum of users' rumor-combating behaviors. Furthermore, the typology identifies the similarities and the differences between various rumor-combating behaviors, thus providing implications and directions for future research on rumor-combating behaviors.

This study aims to explore families that travel with children, as focuses on vulnerabilities, resource constraints and service exclusion through the lens of transformative service research (TSR). This paper investigates: how the experienced vulnerability of these families is shaped by structural, interpersonal and intrapersonal constraints, and how the constraints influence the family tourist-resource interaction in the air travel service encounter.

In total, 2,855 reviews of the family tourists with children were analyzed with text mining, t-test and multidimensional scaling using the interpretive language R to answer the research questions with analyses on unstructured (e.g. text) and structured (e.g. consumer rating) data.

The findings of the empirical investigation answered how experienced vulnerability is shaped by structural, interpersonal and intrapersonal resource constraints and the types of family tourist-resource interaction in the travel service encounter to understand the resource constraints. The findings of this paper help examine family tourism experiences from a value formation perspective to unfold how stakeholders interact to form value while increasing and decreasing their well-being by the value of co-creation and co-destruction.

This research helps advance the TSR’s service inclusion framework by enabling opportunities, offering choice, relieving suffering and fostering happiness with empirical findings in travel service encounters. These findings are particularly insightful to family tourists with children struggling with unfair access and treatment in aeromobility service encounters, which may help enhance the well-being of individuals and communities.

This study aims to help uncover corporate culture and values to attract and retain talent by understanding job reviews written by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople.

Over 40,000 job reviews on Glassdoor.com are analyzed by a dictionary-based content analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015), to explore the links between corporate culture and linguistics characteristics of reviews as articulated by B2B salespeople. This study adopted a multidimensional scaling approach based on the nine cultural value scores to create a map of corporate profiles. A projection of the LIWC2015 scores on this map uncovers differences in language patterns and emotions expressed across the profiles.

Findings reveal a map of corporate profiles with two dimensions, namely, product-centricity and customer-centricity, that divide salesforce subculture into a 2 × 2 matrix of four types: Empathic Innovators, Product Pioneers, Customer Champions and Commodity Traders.

This study combined two data sets, scores on CultureX’s nine cultural values (agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance and respect) and job reviews on Glassdoor.com. This research seeks to develop profiles of the organizational culture and to use a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods. This study adds to the literature on salesforce subculture and showcases a solution to the methodological difficulty in categorizing and measuring culture.

The purpose of this research is to extend the results of previous studies regarding corporate reputation scales and identify new and specific items relevant for studying global corporate reputation from a customer’s point of view.

This research was based on the qualitative projective “Album on Line” (AOL) technique. The authors used a sample of 12 French consumers distributed equally between affective and cognitive scenarios. An individual-difference multidimensional scaling approach (INDSCAL) was applied to display the overall semantic space among generated items.

The exploratory AOL approach generated 62 items related to both cognitive and affective orientations characterizing online and offline corporate reputation. The results uncovered six semantic clusters for each scenario. All in all, seven new items could be added in the process of building a new global corporate reputation measurement scale by adding: avant-garde, singularity, exclusivity, savings, return policy, freeness and speed.

This research makes it possible to propose a new global corporate reputation measurement scale with sound psychometric properties. This scale will be adapted for click and mortars and pure players. This paper unlocks future perspectives by suggesting a causal model that integrates online corporate reputation and its main antecedents and consequences.

From a managerial perspective, this research offers insights to managers with the main orientations surrounding the components of global corporate reputation. Moreover, the AOL mappings delineate which quadrants the managers would like to be fitted into or avoid, and hence define more precisely which key elements should be stressed or discarded.

This research outlines AOL, an original qualitative projective technique that can be used to understand customers’ thoughts, which are stocked and collected as images. Moreover, this research intends to analyze the gathered data using both INDSCAL and fuzzy k-means cluster analysis to reduce conventional biases related to subjectivity.