This cross-cultural study explores the perceptions and preferences women have towards images of women in beauty product advertisements. Quantitative data were collected from two countries; UK and Egypt. These two countries were selected as being generally representative of two culturally-different communities; namely Western and Middle Eastern cultures. The study found that the perceptions and ...

BACKGROUND Despite increasing calls for shared decision making (SDM), the precise mechanisms for its attainment are unclear. Sharing decisions in mental health care may be especially complex. Fluctuations in service user capacity and significant power differences are particular barriers. OBJECTIVE AND DESIGN We trialled a form of facilitated SDM that aimed to generate patients' treatment pref...

A total of 206 wheat and 200 barley farmers were interviewed in northeastern Syria to understand farmer perceptions and practice relating to modern varieties, seed sources and seed quality. Wheat farmers had better awareness and grew modern varieties (87%), applied fertilizers (99.5%), herbicides (93%), seed treatment (90%) or insecticides (41%). In contrast barley growers had low awareness (36...

Our research analyzes users’ preferences for two-sided exchange networks that serve distinct but interdependent types of users (e.g. buyers and suppliers). To do this we look at multi-homing users’ participation on multiple independent and competing platforms. We use a unique dataset of 118 multihoming buyers’ participation in two online exchanges and examine how activity levels on both sides o...

We propose a new method for modelling users’ preferences on attributes that contain more than one trait. Starting with a data set the users have to enter a sort of order on the attributes in form of formulas corresponding to their preferences. Based on this order they only receive the relevant formal concepts, i.e., “object-attribute clusters”, where relevant corresponds to the users’ point of ...

We compare two gesture sets for interactive surfaces—a set of gestures created by an end-user elicitation method and a set of gestures authored by three HCI researchers. Twenty-two participants who were blind to the gestures’ authorship evaluated 81 gestures presented and performed on a Microsoft Surface. Our findings indicate that participants preferred gestures authored by larger groups of pe...

This paper analyzes subjective evaluations of the wage distribution and preferences for redistribution using Swiss data from the International Social Survey Program. Preferences for redistribution are conceptualized and measured as the discrepancy between the perceived and the just level of wage inequality. The results suggest that there is both considerable support for equalisation of wages an...

In group decision making, users’ behaviour are influenced by their long-term and group-induced preferences. However, how to leverage them is challenging due to their dynamic nature, which is also dependent on the specific group settings. In our work, we employ a group recommendation model that utilizes both types of preferences and we analyze alternative ways of combing them, under diverse grou...

Recommender systems have become important, as users are faced with an ever-increasing amount of information available on internet. Much of the research work on the topic has been focused on recommendation techniques, aiming at improving the accuracy of recommended items. Today, researchers use accuracy-metrics for evaluating goodness, when in fact these do not capture users’ expectations and cr...

The mobile communications‟ industry experiences moderate diffusion rates of innovative data services in many countries of the Western world. Mobile TV has been depicted as the “killer application” by both market analysts and mobile service providers. However, these optimistic forecasts have yet to come true. The present article presents the results of a quantitative study conducted in order to ...