Wendy W. N. Wan

Customers' adoption of banking channels in Hong Kong

Purpose – The study sought to investigate factors that influenced Hong Kong bank customers’ adoption of four major banking channels, i.e. branch banking, ATM, telephone banking, and internet banking. Specifically, it aimed to focus on the influences of demographic variables and psychological beliefs about the positive attributes possessed by the channels.Design/methodology/approach – Based on extant literature on bank marketing and interviews with ten bank managers in Hong Kong, a questionnaire was designed. Then, in a large‐scale survey by means of mall‐intercept and telephone interviews, we successfully obtained data from 314 bank customers.Findings – Overall, ATM was the most frequently adopted channel, followed by internet banking and branch banking, and telephone banking was the least frequently adopted channel. Psychological beliefs about the extent to which a channel possessed certain positive attributes were more predictive of adoptions of ATM and internet banking than adoptions of branch banking ...

Dispositional Optimism and Coping with Academic Examinations

Correlations between scores on dispositional optimism and four categories of coping strategies for academic examinations for a group of 248 Hong Kong undergraduates were .25 for Self-encouragement and -.20 for Cognitive Avoidance. These results lend partial support to the association of adaptive coping and optimism, measured by the Life Orientation Test.

Personality correlates of loving styles among Chinese students in Hong Kong

Abstract The present study explored how the six loving styles of ludus, mania, eros, agape, storge, and pragma were correlated with the Big Five personality traits among Chinese university students. Two hundred and eleven university students in Hong Kong filled out a Chinese version of Hendrick and Hendrick’s revised Love Attitudes Questionnaire and the Chinese version of the NEO Personality Inventory — Short Form. Personality correlates of the six loving styles were markedly different from those found in the West. These differences are discussed in light of Chinese cultural characteristics.

CONSISTENCY IN CHOICE OF SOCIAL REFERENT

Similarity has been an important but ill-defined concept in social comparison theory. For social comparisons of competence, similarity should be defined within the same evaluative social context, for example, the same school for students or the same workplace for workers. 104 postsecondary school students, 96 full-time university students, and 81 part-time mature university students were recruited to participate in this study. They filled out a questionnaire to indicate whether they compared themselves with each of 11 categories of social referent in each of 10 domains of competence. Comparers preferred to choose those in the same evaluative social context as referents for social comparisons in domains of competence, and their comparisons with dissimilar others were rare. This preference was consistent across the three different samples.

An institutional perspective on modernization and sex-appeal advertising

Purpose Building on institutional theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for analyzing how consumer attitudes toward nudity in ads change as a result of modernization. Modernization is driven by the currents of pluralism and rationalism. The authors highlight the inherent contradiction of these two pillars and how this contradiction results in an inverted-U pattern in the relationship between level of modernization and consumer attitudes toward sex appeals. Consumers’ sexual permissiveness and their perceived insufficiency of regulatory control over sexual content in the mass media are the individual-level mediators of the two pillars. Design/methodology/approach The data were collected from three Chinese cities at different levels of modernization. A total of 811 college students from the three cities participated in the study. Findings The relationship between level of modernization and attitude favorability followed an inverted-U pattern. Female participants in the most modernized city possessed significantly less favorable attitudes to the ads than their male counterparts. Female and male participants were similar in their attitudes in the less modern cities. Sexual permissiveness mediated the relationship between modernization and male participants’ attitudes, but not with female participants’ attitudes. Perceived sufficiency of regulatory control over sexual content mediated the relationship between modernization and their attitudes among both male and female participants. Originality/value The paper makes an empirical contribution by testing the hypotheses regarding consumers responses to sex-appeal advertising with data collected from three Chinese cities at different levels of modernization. Additionally, it offers an institutional perspective on social attitude changes. Social attitude change is of great interest to researchers, but a systematic theoretical analysis is currently lacking.

School Children's Attributions of Intentions for Parental Behaviors Development of a Measure

The present study developed a new scale to measure childrens attributions of intentions for parental behaviors. The scale has 180 items (18 intentions that children may use to explain why parents perform each of 10 parental behaviors), and was administered to 1973 Chinese students (age range = 9–16 years; M = 12.5, SD = 1.70; 1024 boys and 949 girls). Using half of the sample, 10 exploratory factor analyses were conducted (variance accounted for ranged from 64.24% to 73.32%, M = 69.9%), each on the 18 items associated with one of the 10 parental behaviors. Four factors with eigenvalues over one emerged. The items associated with two of the 10 stimulus behaviors were selected to form a short version. Using the other half of the sample, confirmatory factor analyses on the short version were conducted and provided further support for the four-factor structure. Concurrent validity was assessed by correlations with parental psychological and behavioral control, and gender, age, and grade of the respondents. Test–retest reliability was assessed among 159 of the respondents over a one-month separation.

Measures of Cross-Cultural Values, Personality and Beliefs

Culture plays an important role in solving complex social coordination problems. To avoid cutthroat competitions among individuals striving to maximize their personal fitness, members of the society negotiate and agree on the way to make sense of the reality and on the human qualities or behaviors that are socially desirable and allowed. These consensual views are integral parts of a culture. Given the social significance of culture, many measures have been constructed to capture cultural differences along major psychological dimensions. The present review covers the psychometric properties of the measures that were developed to study cultural variations in personality, social beliefs, values, and perceived norms in the society and its residents. Although many measures have been used in cross-cultural studies (e.g., measures of self-esteem, locus of control, the Big 5 personality trait constructs), these measures were not developed to capture cultural differences in human psychology and are therefore not included in the present review. The measures reviewed here are the Value System Module, the Schwartz Value Survey, the World Values Survey, the GLOBE Cultural Values, Measure of the Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions of Individualism and Collectivism, the Cultural Orientation Scale, the Cross-cultural Personality Assessment Inventory, the Social Axioms Survey, and the Tightness and Looseness Scale. Instead of providing a comprehensive survey of all cross-cultural measures, the present review aims at illustrating representative measures that are recently developed to capture different aspects of cultural differences.