Internal Stimulus Factors as Antecedents of Impulse Buying: Gap Identification and Future Direction

Impulse buying is an important area of consumer behaviour. The process of impulse buying is influenced by various external, situational, and internal stimulus factors. The extant literature review suggests that various external and situational factors are studied in great detail; however, studies on various internal stimulus factors are rare. Hence, this study explores relevant research gaps, and, in this process, it identifies three internal stimulus factors such as materialism, hedonism and perceived risk as potential antecedents to impulse buying. This article also suggests the use of moderator variables, individualism, and income, the impact of which is to be tested on the respective proposed relationships. This article reviews the contributions of all seminal as well as other important works from 1950 through 2018 conducted in the field of impulse buying. In this process, it includes relevant published academic and research papers through a comprehensive search from the database of Scopus, electronic sources such as Sage Journals, Science Direct, Emerald Insight and aggregators such as JSTOR and EBSCOhost. However, consequently, it excludes unpublished doctoral thesis, conference proceedings, working papers, and dissertations. The reviewed literature are all written and documented in the English language.

Clients’ Quality Expectations in Malaysian Conference Interpreting

As part of an unpublished doctoral thesis on “Conference Interpreting in Malaysia”, this paper reports clients’ expectations and highlights the necessity of taking what they anticipate as ideal into consideration. The study tailored on-site and off-site questionnaire-based survey study in Malaysian conference interpreting setting. The relative importance of various quality criteria attached by 42 clients as well as their responses to open-ended questions, adopted from the established questionnaires, revealed the interpreting clients’ perspectives and expectations from interpreting quality. The analysis of data by scale analysis and codification of the open-ended responses into matrices showed that different clients might have different expectations. Clients rated terminology as the most important quality criterion and native accent as the least important. The most interesting aspect of interpreting profession was international contacts, while they rated speed and time constraints as the most difficult aspect of conference interpreting. Interpreters’ lack of faithfulness to the original was indicated as the principal shortcoming, whereas incorrect terminology and unfinished sentences were the most irritating aspects of conference interpreting in clients’ point of view.Their suggestions to improve quality were mostly interpreter-related such as training interpreters and updating their knowledge, as well as organisationalrelated aspects like cooperation of the clients, interpreters, conference organisers, and users.

Users’ Quality Expectations in Conference Interpreting

This paper is part of an unpublished doctoral thesis on “Conference Interpreting in Malaysia”. Expectations of users were explored by an on-site questionnaire-based survey study in Malaysian conference interpreting setting. The relative importance of various linguistic and non-linguistic criteria for quality was obtained through quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. A reliable sample of 256 interpreting “users” (Cronbach alpha coefficient=0.81) were collected from five international conferences in Malaysia. Analysis of the results revealed that users attached high value to the linguistic criteria of sense-consistency with original message (94.1%), logical cohesion (91.1%), fluency of delivery (91%), correct terminology (89.8%), correct grammar (82.8%), completeness of interpretation (80.2%), synchronicity (73%), and style (70.5%) rating the criteria very important or important. The parameters of pleasant voice (60.9%), lively intonation (60.4%), and native accent (57.3%) were considered desirable, but not essential as they received the least importance by the users. Findings from the open-ended questions showed that users consider “wide range of topics” and “broadening one’s horizons” as the most interesting aspects of conference interpreting. Users indicated that they were willing to listen to the interpretation even if they understood it. These suggest that interpreters are seen as a professional source of knowledge from users’ perspectives. While stressing on the linguistic aspects and the importance of output-related quality criteria, the researcher calls for taking further notice of situational particularities and background variables, pragmatic communication issues, and contextual features with a more extensive view of the profession, in addition to the methodological issues that have always been argued in interpreting quality research.

Film4, Freeview and Public Service Broadcasting: Screening Films on British Television in the Multi-channel Era

This article analyses the shift in programming policy that took place when Channel 4's specialist subscription channel FilmFour was relaunched as Film4 on the Freeview digital terrestrial television platform in 2006. Adopting a similar survey approach to Hannah Andrews (2012), this article examines new data sources tracking patterns in programming and scheduling practices in order to interrogate the nationality, age and genre of films screened on both channels between 1998 and 2011. The changing character of film programming during this period is shown to relate, in part, to increased commercial pressures brought about by the rapidly evolving multi-channel landscape. But while commercial imperatives were indeed a key factor in this evolution, Film4's scheduling strategies are also shown to be a product of the broadcaster's desire to reassert its public service identity in the Freeview era. Bibliographical addition: Andrews, H. (2012), ‘Public Service Broadcasters and British Cinema, 1990–2010’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick.