Search results

This study aims to investigate the influence of different virtual fashion styles on attitude and satisfaction within virtual reality (VR) tourism experiences. The investigation considers the mediating effect of perceived attractiveness, popularity, novelty and weirdness, as well as the moderating role of self-congruence with avatar clothing and the desire for unique products.

This research uses a quantitative experimental approach. Initially, a three-step pilot study (N = 201) was conducted to select avatar fashion styles for the main investigation. In the primary study, participants (N = 326) engaged with one out of four fashion style conditions to select attire for their avatars and then completed a self-administered survey. Data analysis involved paired-sample t-tests, multivariate analysis of variance and Hayes’ PROCESS Models.

The results show that presenting fantasy avatar fashion styles leads to a decrease in perceived attractiveness and popularity, while concurrently increasing perceptions of novelty and weirdness which in turn exert a negative influence on attitude and satisfaction with the virtual fitting room (VFR). However, these relationships change when considering the moderating role of self-congruence with avatar clothing and the desire for unique products.

VR tourism experience providers and designers can use research findings to bolster positive attitude and enhance satisfaction with VFR; an important first step that strongly affects the rest of the VR tourist journey.

This study contributes to tourism research by exploring the intersection of immersive technologies and virtual fashion. It emphasizes the enhancement of critical touchpoints like the VFR, moving beyond a sole focus on VR adoption, to improve the overall virtual tourist experience.

This study aims to examine the relationship between key value propositions of luxury fashion smartwatches, consumer attitudes and their purchase intentions, and to explore Millennial consumers' overall perceptions of using these wearable technologies.

The research adopts a mixed methods approach. Quantitative enquiry consisting of 312 respondents was followed by two qualitative focus groups in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the issue.

The findings indicate that functional, individual and social factors influence Millennial consumers' adoption intention of luxury fashion smartwatches. Empirical results reveal that perceived hedonism and usefulness are the most important factors that motivate adoption intentions, followed by subjective norm and perceived conspicuousness, indicating that luxury smartwatches are perceived as both a technological device and luxury fashion accessory.

Given extant research on luxury fashion smartwatches is limited, this study contributes to this unique research stream by exploring Millennial's perceptions towards using these new generation smartwatches. This research develops a theoretical framework building on technology adoption model 2 (Venkatesh and Davis, 2000), theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1975) and luxury perception models (Wiedmann et al., 2007).

This paper aims to explore consumers’ voluntary disposition practices through swapping events organised by community-based enterprises. The paper investigates consumers’ decision-making strategies and factors affecting voluntary clothing disposition via public swapping events across the UK.

This paper investigates UK swapping events, through conducting 18 semi-structured consumer interviews. Data were transcribed and analysed using the seven-step guide proposed by Easterby-Smith et al. (2018).

Findings indicate that within community-based enterprises an implicit social contract emerges between the enterprises and swappers which has an influence on the clothing brought to swaps, thereby impacting the competence and meaning elements of practice. This is linked to peer-pressure susceptibility which affects consumers’ participation in swapping. The findings further reveal an emerging consumer strategy aiding decision-making process regarding items brought to swaps. The use of a particular strategy is found to be linked with the respective level of swapping expertise.

Though the interviews provide a rich narrative, this paper is limited by its sample size meaning data cannot be generalised. Although the data is limited by singular country perspective, research participants were recruited from across the UK, thus, offering a broad picture of the swapping practice.

This paper contributes to and advances an understanding of swapping events organised by community-based enterprises. The theory of social practice lens offers a unique viewpoint on the elements influencing the consumers’ decision-making process with reference to voluntary disposition.

The competitive luxury market raises higher requirements for luxury brands to effectively involve young generations in creating and endowing meanings to products, services and experiences. Several researchers suggest that art experiences create a fertile source of co-creation practices for cultural customers as they could engage in cognitive, emotional and imaginal activities to endowing meanings to products or services. Hence, bridging art and luxury is of significance for luxury brands to create value and engage their customers. This chapter delivers the essence of value for luxury brands and their customers and focusses on how luxury brands deploy art-based initiatives as a favourable technique in which value co-creation takes place.

This paper aims to analyse Barcelona City Council's tourism policy documents to detect how, through the influence of research, different pathways are produced to achieve social impact.

Using the case study approach, a qualitative content analysis is applied to review 31 tourism policy documents of Barcelona City Council.

The results show that the influence of tourism research on Barcelona City Council's policy documents occurs through the following pathways that drive potential social impact: the development of shared research programmes, joint projects, the creation of information exchange platforms, support for academia, the creation of debates, the founding of institutes, the referencing of scientific articles and studies commissioned directly by the City Council from higher education bodies for implementation in the city.

The originality of this paper is to highlight the social relevance of research and to contribute to raising awareness among researchers. The social impact of research is an under-explored topic in the field of tourism. Moreover, there is little research that conducts this analysis through policy documents.

In this paper we describe the process of developing and implementing a knowledge management system for the Spanish judicial domain. Spanish judges, especially newly‐recruited ones, hold a solid background of theoretical legal knowledge, but are much less familiar with the judicial knowledge of the more senior judges acquired from everyday practice and case resolution. The aim of this development is to capture and model these two aspects of judicial knowledge – theoretical and practical – for knowledge browsing and retrieving.

Semantic web technologies are applied to feed a question‐answering system based on ontologies of professional legal knowledge (OPLK).

There is a kind of specific legal knowledge, which belongs properly to the expert domain, not being captured by current legal core ontologies, i.e. Judges require clues, hints or well‐grounded practical guidelines that refer to the problem they have before them when they put a question or start the query. A scalable and useful frequently‐asked questions system should have a simple, natural language interface, work in a real time environment, and the questions included in the system should be of high quality and reflect the current situation.

The final system will enable the users to ask queries in natural language and obtain answers, which are supported by legal documents stored in specialized legal databases. Special care is taken regarding usability issues, in order to ensure the highest user satisfaction.

This paper's aim is to examine the relationship between intimate partner violence, childhood abuse and psychiatric disorders among 118 female drug users in treatment in Barcelona, Spain.

Secondary analysis of a cross‐sectional study of the psychiatric, behavioural and social risk factors for HIV. DSM‐IV disorders were assessed using the Spanish Psychiatric Research Interview for Substance and Mental Disorders; the Composite Abuse Scale assessed intimate partner violence and the Child Maltreatment History Self‐Report assessed childhood physical and sexual abuse.

The odds of experiencing intimate partner violence were 2.42 times greater among those with any depressive disorder (95 per cent CI 1.13, 5.20), over three times greater for those who reported ever attempting suicide (OR 3.20; 95 per cent CI 1.29, 7.94), met criteria for borderline personality disorder (OR 3.05; 95 per cent CI 1.31, 7.11), had been abused in childhood (OR 3.38; 95 per cent CI 1.45, 7.85) or currently lived with a substance user (OR 3.74; 95 per cent CI 1.29, 10.84). In multiple logistic regression, only living with a substance user (OR 3.42; 95 per cent CI 1.08, 10.86) and a history of childhood abuse (OR 2.87; 95 per cent CI 1.05, 7.86) remained significant in the model examining intimate partner violence victimisation.

The small sample size, together with the fact that the study was not originally powered to examine differences in intimate partner violence may have increased the possibility of type II errors.

Histories of psychiatric disorders, intimate partner violence and childhood abuse are common in female substance users in treatment. Research suggests that such histories result in poorer treatment outcomes. Histories of intimate partner violence and childhood abuse should be identified and addressed in substance abuse treatment to enhance treatment outcomes.

The aim of this paper is to explore the affective and cognitive factors that condition banking relationships for economically vulnerable consumers and how these factors contribute to increasing financial difficulties and exclusion. This research, performed on a set of focus groups, bases its findings on a combination of experimental and discourse analysis methods.

Financial decisions are not rational and can be biased by affective and cognitive factors. Behavioural finance has focused very little on analysing how consumer biases influence relationships with banking institutions. Additionally, these relationships are affected by the digitalization and transformation of banking business. Thus, in the case of economically vulnerable consumers, who are not profitable for the increasingly competitive banking industry and lack financial abilities, their risk of financial exclusion is increasing.

The results show that distrust and shame lead to financial difficulties in economically vulnerable consumers. Distrust generates problems of access and self-exclusion, while shame generates difficulties of use. This lack of trust makes them more rational when dealing with machines than with people, showing greater banking difficulties for consumers with a “person-suspicious” profile.

This finding can help regulators establish limits on banking behaviour, require banks to incorporate affective and cognitive factors in their convenience tests and detect new variables that can help them improve their insolvency ratios and reputations.

The correlation between health care expenditure, gross domestic product (GDP) and population over 65 years (understood as share of the elderly) is a key question for health economics and demographic impact. The purpose of this paper is to study the role of ageing society to curb rising health care expenditures along the Spanish regions over the period 2002-2013, identifying their geographic differences and explain them based on GDP differences.

Cointegration technique is used in order to test if there is a statistically significant connection between variables.

They are similar to some obtained when using unit root test. In particular, the authors find how the elderly positively affects health care expenditure per capita.

The findings suggest that any cooperation policies should aim at improving the access of people to health care services based on public health care expenditures.

To the best of the knowledge this is one of the first studies which suggest different results by Spanish regions due to mature decentralized system in recent years.