Service Personnel,Technology, and Their Interaction in Influencing Customer Satisfaction*

Managing both the technologies and the personnel needed for providing high‐quality, multichannel customer support creates a complex and persistent operational challenge. Adding to this difficulty, it is still unclear how service personnel and these new communication technologies interact to influence the customer's perceptions of the service being provided. Motivated by both practical importance and inconsistent findings in the academic literature, this exploratory research examines the interaction of media richness, represented by three different technology contexts (telephone, e‐mail, and online chat), with six customer service representative (CSR) characteristics and their influences on customer satisfaction. Using a large‐sample customer survey data set, the article develops a multigroup structural equation model to analyze these interactions. Results suggest that CSR characteristics influence customer service satisfaction similarly across all three technology‐mediated contexts. Of the characteristics studied, service representatives contribute to customer satisfaction more when they exhibit the characteristics of thoroughness, knowledgeableness, and preparedness, regardless of the richness of the medium used. Surprisingly, while three other CSR characteristics studied (courtesy, professionalism, and attentiveness) are traditionally believed to be important in face‐to‐face encounters, they had no significant impact on customer satisfaction in the technology‐mediated contexts studied. Implications for both practitioners and researchers are drawn from the results and future research opportunities are discussed.     

A Factor Analysis Approach Toward Reconciling Community Vulnerability and Resilience Indices for Natural Hazards

The concepts of vulnerability and resilience help explain why natural hazards of similar type and magnitude can have disparate impacts on varying communities. Numerous frameworks have been developed to measure these concepts, but a clear and consistent method of comparing them is lacking. Here, we develop a data-driven approach for reconciling a popular class of frameworks known as vulnerability and resilience indices. In particular, we conduct an exploratory factor analysis on a comprehensive set of variables from established indices measuring community vulnerability and resilience at the U.S. county level. The resulting factor model suggests that 50 of the 130 analyzed variables effectively load onto five dimensions: wealth, poverty, agencies per capita, elderly populations, and non–English-speaking populations. Additionally, the factor structure establishes an objective and intuitive schema for relating the constituent elements of vulnerability and resilience indices, in turn affording researchers a flexible yet robust baseline for validating and expanding upon current approaches.     

Integrating skill acquisition and perspective taking capacity in the development of leaders

This essay integrates approaches from three literatures to develop a model of leader development. Kanfer and Ackerman's (1989) episodic model of skill acquisition is combined with Kegan's approach to adult development to encompass development of transactional and transformational leadership. Importantly, feedback mechanisms are added to explain changes in individuals'intellectual capacities, values, and beliefs over time. This framework provides a summary of what is known about the processes underlying developmental change in how leaders understand and act on their environment and provides specific directions for future research.     

What do teenagers want? What do teenagers need?

It is widely accepted that adolescence is a developmental phase fraught with challenges, yet in the 1990s, teenagers face unique demands and difficulties. Dilemmas such as increased violence, drug and alcohol use, sexual involvement and AIDS pose problems not only for the teens themselves, but also for their families, teachers, health care providers and other caregivers.This article reports on the qualitative findings extracted from a study of over 3,700 teenagers from urban, suburban, and small city settings, describing the array of difficulties teenagers face today. The themes which emerged from the students' comments offer a compelling portrait of life as a teenager in the 1990s and help shape an agenda for understanding and responding to these myriad needsThis research was supported by grants from the Ohio Department of Mental Health (#93,1058A), Treu-Mart Fund, Nord Family Foundation, and the University at Albany Faculty Research Awards Program.     

Energizing the ordinary: Biographical work and the future in stroke recovery narratives

Historically, the life course has been constructed as an organized and linear temporal progression. This holds true in various disciplines from education, to psychology, to counseling. The foundation of a life unfolding through temporal categorizations is documented in textbooks and theories that straddle these disciplines as well as many others, including the sociology of health and illness, which has often conceptualized the illness experience as embedded in a recovery trajectory.Here, we take this to task. Using Gubrium and Holstein's [Sociol. Inq. 65 (1995) 207; Gubrium, J., & Holstein, J., (1997). The new language of qualitative method. New York: Oxford University Press] analytic vocabulary of biographical work, we analyze narratives of stroke survivors by emphasizing the ordinary resources used as discursive foundations for the narrative production of the future in illness. Ordinary resources focused on include God and spirituality, comorbidities, and activity and leisure. The discussion is embedded in overarching concerns with “healthy aging” in gerontology and geriatrics.     

Comparison of the Cancer Risk of Methylene Chloride Predicted from Animal Bioassay Data with the Epidemiologic Evidence

Methylene chloride has been shown to be a lung and liver carcinogen in the mouse; yet, the current epidemiologic data show no adverse health effects associated with chronic exposure to this compound. Hearne et al. have compared the results of a large mortality study on occupational exposure to methylene chloride to the human risk predictions based on the rodent bioassay to point out the inconsistency between the animal toxicologic and human epidemiologic data. The maximum number of lung and liver cancers predicted due to methylene chloride exposure based on the rodent bioassay data was 24 compared to 14 deaths from these cancers actually observed in the Hearne et al. epidemiology study. We assess the minimum risk detectable by the human study in order to calculate the upperbound potency of methylene chloride and compare it to the potency derived from the bioassay data. Results from the epidemiology study imply an upperbound potency of 1.5 x 10(-2) per ppm, compared to 1.4 x 10(-2) per ppm calculated using the most conservative analysis of the animal data. We conclude that the negative epidemiology study of Hearne et al. is not sufficiently powerful to show that the risk is inconsistent with the human risk estimated by modeling the rodent bioassay data. Specifically, the doses to which the workers were exposed, the population studied, and the latency period were not adequate to determine that the risks are outside the bounds of the risk estimates predicted by low-dose modeling of the animal data.     

Racial Prejudice and Fear of Criminal Victimization by Strangers in Public Settings*

In this article we examine the extent to which racial (antiblack) prejudice conditions the effect of the race of strangers encountered in public settings on whites' fear of being crime victims in those settings. We hypothesize that encountering black strangers. as opposed to white strangers, evokes greater fear of being a crime victim in prejudiced whites than in whites who are not prejudiced. Data collected using the factorial survey method support this hypothesis. These results indicate that research dealing with whites' fear of being crime victims in public settings needs to consider both the race of potential criminals and the racial attitudes of potential victims.