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In the era of big data, people are more likely to pay attention to privacy protection with facing the risk of personal information leakage while enjoying the convenience brought by big data technology. Furthermore, people’s views on personal information leakage and privacy protection are varied, playing an important role in the legal process of personal information protection. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a semi-qualitative method based framework to reveal the subjective patterns about information leakage and privacy protection and further provide  practical implications for interested party.

Q method is a semi-qualitative methodology which is designed for identifying typologies of perspectives. In order to have a comprehensive understanding of users’ viewpoints, this study incorporates LDA & TextRank method and other information extraction technologies to capture the statements from large-scale literature, app reviews, typical cases and survey interviews, which could be regarded as the resource of the viewpoints.

By adopting the Q method that aims for studying subjective thought patterns to identify users’ potential views, the authors have identified three categories of stakeholders’ subjectivities: macro-policy sensitive, trade-offs and personal information sensitive, each of which perceives different risk and affordance of information leakage and importance and urgency of privacy protection. All of the subjectivities of the respondents reflect the awareness of the issue of information leakage, that is, the interested parties like social network sites are unable to protect their full personal information, while reflecting varied resistance and susceptibility of disclosing personal information for big data technology applications.

The findings of this study provide an overview of the subjective patterns on the information leakage issue. Being the first to incorporate the Q method to study the views of personal information leakage and privacy protection, the research not only broadens the application field of the Q method but also enriches the research methods for personal information protection. Besides, the proposed LDA & TextRank method in this paper alleviates the limitation of statements resource in the Q method.

Decision-makers, practitioners and community members have a need to assess the disaster resilience of their communities and to understand their own capacities in disaster situations. There is a lack of consensus among researchers as to what resilience means and how it can be measured. This paper proposes a novel technique to achieve consensus among stakeholders on definitions, objectives and indicators for measuring a key dimension of community disaster resilience (CDR), physical infrastructure (PI).

This study uses a five-step approach utilizing Q-methods to contextualize a resilience index for PI. Interviews, focus groups and Q-sorting workshops were conducted to develop a tool that ranked measures according to stakeholder preference. A total of 84 participants took part in the workshops across four countries (United Kingdom, Malaysia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka).

The initial set of 317 measures was reduced to 128 and divided into the three community capacities of anticipatory, absorptive and restorative. The physical infrastructure capacity assessment tool (PI-CAT) was then finalized to have 38 indicators that were also ranked in order of importance by the participants.

The PI-CAT can be useful for local governments and communities to measure their own resilience. The tool allows stakeholders to be confident that the metrics being used are ones that are relevant, important and meet their requirements.

The Q-method approach helps stakeholders to develop and use a community capacity assessment tool that is appropriate for their context. The PI-CAT can be used to identify effective investments that will enhance CDR.

Engaging with stakeholders in “a personal, intimate way” (Men and Tsai, 2016, p. 932) or “includ[ing] the ‘personal touch’” (Kent and Taylor, 1998, p. 323) is often seen as desirable in internal communication management. While the importance of personal communication is undisputed from the perspectives of internal communication, its communicators, and from internal stakeholders, this is not true when it comes to the dimensions and characteristics that constitute an experience of communication as feeling personal. The present study aims to explore what makes communication personal from the employees' perspective.

The study used the Q methodology and Q method, thus focusing on an individual's subjective perspective. The Q methodology was implemented in the form of a Q-sort survey exploring the perceptions of 32 German employees (selected from a representative cross-section of 400 employees in Germany, using a balanced-block design to maximize heterogeneity).

The results show that while direct and dyadic communication is often perceived as personal, many other dimensions and characteristics are also considered “personal” in both the literature and based on stakeholder perceptions. The Q-sort survey revealed four perception types whose perceptions of communication as “personal” vary widely, with all these types rejecting non-human communicators.

This study contributes to the limited understanding of employees' perceptions of internal communication as “personal.” It shows how the Q methodology and Q method—a rarely used perspective—can complement existing theoretical and empirical research on internal communication. For internal communication management, the findings show that a “one-size-fits-all” approach must be questioned and that a communication team's involvement in personal communication can have negative consequences.

Researchers are expected to find ways to make citizens participate in research to support responsible and open conceptions of science. New methods for engagement need to be found in order to facilitate engagement. The public needs to build its knowledge and be presented with time for reflexion so as to give an informed opinion on a given topic. Traditional consensus conferences are costly, and surveys are not building citizens’ understanding of science. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The author presents a case where engagement was realized based on Q-method and technique. A research protocol and the results of the engagement are presented.

This case shows that an adapted version of Q can lead to meaningful engagement for citizens and relevant data for researchers. Participants enjoy the process and can become advocates for a topic. The data collected allow to map out points of views which can be used to inform policy and research.

From a practical point of view, this paper suggests a new way to proceed to citizen engagement with science. It also opens research questions related to the use of the method itself.

This study identifies and interprets the experiences and relationships of a host community to a marine national park in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, as it transformed from a local recreation site into an international tourist destination. This chapter elaborates on an original and innovative amalgamation of qualitative methods used to collect data consisting of verbal and pictorial techniques, including focus group interviews, visitor employed photography, and an adapted Q-methodology incorporating photo-elicitation. The research design for data collection is provided as a guideline to illustrate how the study progressed through two essential parts. This study contributes to a gap in method on how to extract pictorial measures on a collective basis to systematically to produce group place meanings. Recommendations are suggested based on the challenges faced in this study. This innovative qualitative method was successful in deriving sense of place for a marine park.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of a sustainability course that was designed to evoke measurable transformational changes in students’ preferences and in their roles as consumers, employees and citizens, via consciously addressing sustainability issues and involving a community partner.

The research was undertaken using mixed methods. Q-methodology helped create student groups with similar preferences for sustainable attitudes and behaviours before and after the course; the most important features of attitude changes and identify the phases of transformation were explored. In-depth interviews with each participant contributed to understanding and explaining the motivation for changing preferences and generated individual-level reflections about the perceived process of transformation.

Q-method highlighted how stakeholder roles were transformed from the three pre-factors to the three post-factors and for the whole group. Seven phases of transformational change are identified based on the reflective in-depth interviews from “no transformation” to “change agent behavior”.

Findings provide new perspectives for evaluating and embracing the transformational potential of sustainability courses.

Assessing the impacts of sustainability courses on students’ transformation via measuring their mindsets and behaviour preferences prior to and after a course is still an under-researched area, especially in relation to the Q-method. A further unique feature is how the influence of engaged community partner on students’ preferences is captured. The explored scope of individual responsibility goes beyond environmental awareness and addresses participants in various stakeholder roles simultaneously, by examining their priorities as consumers, employees and citizens.

Innovation and technology development policy-making naturally encounters numerous uncertainties and complexities, especially in developing countries, for the sake of the prevailing prospect of decision makers focusing on hard evidences, and neglecting key and effective social ones; in this research, a context-based method by means of Q-methodology was designed to facilitate policy-making for complex systems by bridging between policy and practices (latent in viewpoints) through providing context-based evidences.

Due to the nature of knowledge-based systems, the performance of Innovation and Technology Development (ITD) systems is highly dependent on the standpoints of key players/stakeholders of the system. In consideration of Iran’s economy characteristics, Upstream Oil and Gas (UOG) Industry, which is one of the complex Large Technical Systems (LTS), was selected as a case study. Regarding the features of LTSs, the designed model was completed by adding hierarchical clustering method, as well as using the framework of innovation and technology learning transition model to analyze the results.

The results showed the capability of the model in providing credible evidences to inform policy-making processes.

This study is one of the first real experiences which used Q-method for providing evidence-based policy-making model in a complex Large Technical System, namely, Upstream Oil and Gas (UOG) Industry.

This paper shows that the current quality literature does not consider all factors that affect quality program implementations. Employee perceptions of quality differ across organizational levels. It is clear that these differing perceptions of quality affect the success of a quality program implementation. Therefore, we propose the use of Q methodology as an effective method for understanding the perceptions of those individuals who will be taking part in a quality program implementation as well as for identifying supplemental training needs. In addition, we give an actual example of how this method can be used in a quality program implementation. This research is important because it shows the need for pre‐implementation assessment within the company and a generalizable tool that readily accomplishes this task.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the attractiveness or unattractiveness of cyberloafing in the workplace using Q methodology and the Kano model.

The perception of employees towards cyberloafing was investigated based on Q methodology, and then they were prioritized using Kano model. Ten IT companies were selected for the case study. In this study, a mixed method was used. First, 30 participants were interviewed. Next, after extracting the comments, Q-matrix was presented to 30 participants and they completed the matrix cells. Finally, Kano questionnaire was designed using the items obtained from Q methodology and distributed among 30 participants.

Q methodology led to nine perceptions, and the priorities of Kano model were proponents of increasing employees' dependence on the internet, economic thinkers, the indifferent, dissatisfied, proponents of receiving information, self-control proponents, the profit-minded, mind destroyer and satisfaction-oriented. Cyberloafing is considered unattractiveness with adverse effects. The combination of Q methodology and Kano model can improve the analysis of the results.

This study is one of the few studies in which Q methodology is improved by Kano model. In the past, Q methodology alone examined people’s perception, but by combining these two methods, it is determined which perception is more satisfying and which one is more important, and then a general result can be reached.

The development of information technology has made it possible for companies to get access to information about their customers ' future demand. This paper outlines various approaches to utilize this kind of visibility when managing inventories of end products on an operative level. The purpose is to explain the consequences, for capital tied up in inventory, of sharing four different types of planning information (point-of-sales data, customer forecasts, stock-on-hand data, planned orders) when using re-order point (R,Q) inventory control methods in a distribution network.

A simulation study based on randomly generated demand data with a compound Poisson type of distribution is conducted.

The results show that the value of information sharing in operative inventory control varies widely depending on the type of information shared, and depending on whether the demand is stationary or not. Significantly higher value is achieved if the most appropriate types of information sharing are used, while other types of information sharing rather contribute to decreased value. Sharing stock-on-hand information is valuable with stationary demand. Customer forecast and planned order information are valuable with non-stationary demand. The value of information sharing increases when having fewer customers, and when the order quantities are large. Sharing point-of-sales data is not valuable, regardless of the demand type.

The use of simulation methodology is a limitation, because the study has to be limited to a specific model design, and because it is not based on primary empirical data. The study is especially limited to dyadic relationships in supply chains, and to distribution networks with a rather limited number of customers.

Guidance is given about what type of information should be appropriate to share when different types of demand patterns and distribution networks, and how order batch sizes and lead times affect the value of information sharing when using re-order point (R,Q) methods.

Very limited research providing specific assessments of potential inventory control consequences when sharing planning information in various contexts has been found in the literature. The findings and conclusions also question some previous research on information sharing.