Browsing by Subject "quality"
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Item Assessing Millennial Brand Equity for the Minnesota Historical Society(University of Minnesota Tourism Center, 2015-06-30) Linnemanstons, Katherine; Schneider, Ingrid; Gartner, WilliamThe University of Minnesota Tourism Center worked with the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) to investigate its brand equity with millennials (defined as those born between 1980 and 1993). Specifically, the Tourism Center assessed customer-based brand equity with regards to four dimensions: Awareness, Image, Quality and Loyalty. Results from this research will allow promotions and marketing staff to align perceived brand identity with intended brand identity among millennials. Similarly, development professionals can use the information to better understand how to connect with millennials.Item Assessing the State of Customer-Based Brand Equity Among Select Minnesota Historical Society Stakeholders(University of Minnesota Tourism Center, 2013) Gartner, William C.; Schneider, Ingrid E.; Templin, Elizabeth; Schlueter, Alexander; Meyer, Chelsea; Bengston, PaulItem Essays on Improving Quality and Safety in Highly Regulated Industries(2019-08) Kang, SehwonManaging quality and safety is critical in highly regulated industries because failing to do so can lead to serious negative consequences. One way to improve quality and safety is enhancing organizational focus, emphasis on a specific set of actions. To study various contexts of focus, I select three settings in highly regulated industries: acute-care hospitals, nursing homes, and oil pipeline operators. First, I study internally driven focus as disproportionate emphasis on a medical specialty in acute-care hospitals. I examine the effect of focus strategy and its combined effects with patient experience practices, on quality performance measured as readmission rates and patient satisfaction. Using secondary data from 3,027 hospitals, I find that focus has undesirable effects on both measures. However, patient experience mitigates the negative influence of focus on readmission rates. I also find that an imbalance between focus and patient experience results in poor performance. There is no single magic bullet to improve the two performance measures. Second, I study externally driven change in attentional focus where recurring visits are unannounced while initial visits are announced in advance at nursing homes. Drawing on the attention-based view, I examine the effects of announced and unannounced inspections on the immediate and sustained quality performance. Using a dataset from accredited nursing homes, I show that unannounced inspection visits lead to a more sustained increase in quality performance than announced visits. Thus, announcing the inspection in advance results in short-term gains but long-term disadvantages. Finally, I study externally driven focus on a safety management program in oil transportation. The program requires pipeline operators to prioritize their resources to reduce incidents in high consequence areas (HCAs). I examine the effects of pipeline system complexity and the learning experience with the program, on safety performance measured as future incident cost. Using a panel dataset of 642 pipeline operators, I find that complexity increases the cost but organizational learning reduces it. Interestingly, complexity heightens the negative relationship between the experience and future incident cost. The program is fruitful for incidents in high consequence areas (HCAs), but not in non-HCAs, which substantiates the intent of the program.Item Teaching Practices and Quality In Graduate Education In the Philippines(2020-06) Allison, ChristineWhile the Philippines’ higher education sector has a long history distinguished by early adoption of quality assurance practices, the Philippines Development Plan 2017-2022 concluded that Philippine higher education institutions are ill-positioned to compete in the global higher education arena. The Government of the Philippines therefore mandated a shift to outcomes-based education (OBE) in all higher education programs starting in 2018, to improve the quality of education and the skills and knowledge of graduates and to improve alignment of Philippine higher education with ASEAN regional standards. This shift to OBE created an opportunity for critical scholarly inquiry into teaching practices, particularly in graduate education, given its role in producing researchers, innovators, and the next generation of scholars. Using a socioecological conceptual framework and a mixed methods approach, this study examines teaching practices in graduate education at two Philippine universities. It specifically focuses on how conceptions of quality, individual-level factors, discipline-specific practices, and institutional climate, as well as the national higher education environment, affect teaching practice in graduate education. The study concludes that conceptions of quality are currently driven by external validation (accreditation, licensure rates, etc.) rather than internal benchmarks of quality enhancement. Respondents in the study associated ‘evidence-based’ approaches to teaching with high quality, but were not at all critical of the cultural assumptions that may have underpinned the evidence to which they referred. The findings support the arguments in the literature on social practice theory that teaching is a socially situated practice, but not just within disciplinary networks as reflected in social network theory or specific work groups as reflected in community of practice theory, but also within specific institutional and cultural normative practices that are very effective in influencing teaching behaviors. Teaching practice is also situated within national political and policy frameworks that may influence teaching directly, for example, through professional development schemes, and indirectly through regulation of the higher education sector. While current reform efforts target a number of the key shortfalls identified in Philippines Development Plan 2017-2022, critical gaps remain that may undermine the intended impacts of the adoption of OBE.Item Translational Cancer Research Data Quality – The Context Factor(2017-08) Orreggio, GiordiCronbach’s alpha indicates that as the count of items in a set increases, so does the level of relationship between them. Translational cancer research (TCR) data is an example of increasing items within a set. As a national priority, TRC is well-funded contributing to continued increase in data organizations produce, the number of organizations producing data, and the amount of sharing in which each organization participates. However, rather than leveraging the data relationships – a contextual approach – intrinsic measures such as accuracy and completeness remain referenced most often in data quality (DQ) articles and conceptual frameworks. The purpose of this set of studies is to expand our knowledge of TCR data quality (DQ) by examining context-sensitive DQ methods. The knowledge gained could be incorporated into future TCR DQ efforts, leading to more informative and actionable data, and quicker development of better clinical treatments.