Female Guests Research Articles

Accommodation preferences of the girlfriend getaway market in Malaysia

Purpose This paper aims to examine the relationship between self-image of women travelers, accommodation preferences and the post-consumption behaviors of satisfaction and loyalty. Design/methodology/approach Accommodation preferences were measured using multi-items adapted from the literature and multi-phases of qualitative research. Female guests recruited from a resort’s membership database in Malaysia resulted in 540 useable surveys. Data were analyzed using both exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Structural equation modeling was used to identify relationships between the various dimensions of accommodation preferences, self-image, satisfaction and loyalty. Findings A significant negative relationship was found between women actual self-image and the dimension of hotel activities. Several significant positive relationships were found between women ideal self-image and various room amenities factors. A significant relationship was also found between overall satisfaction and loyalty of guests. Practical implications The results provide hoteliers with significant insights into women’s accommodation preferences and identify opportunities for the packaging of accommodation attributes as well as promotion of hotel amenities that would appeal to the girlfriend getaway market. Originality/value This study is the first to evaluate significant relationships between self-image and accommodation preferences of women travelers from the girlfriend getaway market in Malaysia.

Kissing a Photograph: Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy

Kissing a Photograph:Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy Arielle Zibrak (bio) The late-nineteenth-century writer Kate Chopin was fond of shocking people. It was perhaps for this reason that she kept a copy of Thomas Hardy's 1895 novel Jude the Obscure on display in her home.1 Her review of Jude, published in the St. Louis Criterion in 1897, begins with an anecdote about a polite female guest shocked to find the volume left out on a visiting-room table: "'Oh! how can you!' she exclaimed, 'with so many young people about!'"2 While this reaction clearly delights Chopin (her liberal use of exclamation points in the transcription is good evidence alone), she proceeds to trash Hardy's novel, stating outright that "the book is detestably bad" (714). Yet, in her prose, Chopin also betrays certain admiration for, or perhaps merely an uncomfortable identification with, the novel she purports to hate.3 When "one or two youngsters" ask her about the book, Chopin responds that it is "unutterably tiresome … but you might like it" (714). Indeed, her primary objection to the novel, reformulated and repeated throughout the review, is that it's incredibly boring: "ponderous … formidable … nothing alluring … the outward appearance of a Congressional Record … colorless … unpardonably dull" etc., etc. (713–14). She laments that no one was interested in the book prior to the controversy it stirred in the press, a controversy into which she, as yet another reviewer of the novel, has now entered; but under what terms? It seems rather irrelevant and late in the day to say all this about Jude the Obscure. It is only sympathy for the young person which moves me to do so. I hate to know that deceptions are being practiced upon him. He has been led to believe that the work is quite dangerous and alluring … I feel very sorry to think that he should part with so many good silver quarters and receive nothing in return but disappointment and dissolution. (715) [End Page 355] This ridiculous assertion of concern for "the young person" wasting his money on a boring novel is Chopin's satirical response to the overzealous parade of reviewers that felt compelled to damn Jude in both the English and American presses out of fear for what it might do to impressionable youths. Margaret Oliphant's notorious review in Blackwood's is a good example of this mode of criticism.4 Oliphant writes, "[T]o make [sex] the supreme incident, always in the foreground, to be discussed by young men and women, and held up before boys and girls … seems to me an outrage for which there is no justification."5 Chopin enters the debate not to defend the portrayal of sexuality in Jude, but rather to lament that the young reader who goes to the book in search of it will find little to gratify his or her curiosity. The performance of her own "outrage" at the dullness of Hardy's novel is less a gesture aimed at Hardy or Jude than it is a perverse counterstrike against reviewers who object to the "immorality" of novels that portray sexual desire. Chopin responds to the sex panic of Hardy's reviewers with an art panic of her own: our concern, she suggests, should be protecting the sanctity of children's minds from bad literature. In Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011), Roger Lancaster outlines the social, cultural, and judicial power of sex panics from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Echoing Lee Edelman's 2004 polemic No Future, Lancaster asserts that "the constant element in successive waves of panic is the figure of the imperiled innocent child—a child whose innocence is defined in terms of his imagined sexlessness and whose protection from sex looms as an ever more urgent and exacting demand."6 This profoundly effective rhetoric is nowhere more present than in Oliphant's defamatory review. (And it is precisely this rhetoric that Chopin appropriates.) After repeatedly harping upon the dangers to young people that Jude and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) pose, Oliphant laments the extermination of Jude and Sue's children, who...

A Study of Refusal Speech Act in Chinese Dating Programs ——Take "If You Are The One" As an Example

Looking at the development of China dating programs, If You Are The One in Jiang Su satellite TV is the heated program drawing much attention from the public. There are some papers focusing on the dialogue in the program from the perspective of linguistic features or pragmatic function, but there are few papers on the refusal speech act in such programs. Based on the classified oral language data in the program, this paper studies the refusal speech act when male or female guest was asked to build a love relationship with someone. Under the guidance of the face theory (Brown & Levinson), Politeness principle (Leech), we analysize the pragmatical difference of different refusal speech act. In addition, from the perspective of gender difference the study analyzes different refusal speech act patterns conducted by male and female guests in dating program and we find that men behave generally more direct while women are more euphemistic and polite in refusal speech act. Keywords: Refusal Speech Act, Direct and indirect, Politeness principle, Gender differences, If You Are The One

Gender-choice behavior linkages: an investigation in the hospitality industry

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate whether males and females differ on the emphases they place on core service and relational service in choosing a hotel. Design/Methodology – Data were gathered from the residents of a metro area in the United States. Three hundred and forty-one residents participated in the study. The Del statistic, an undertapped technique, was used. Findings – The results reveal that male and female guests are essentially the same in the importance they place on core and relational services in choosing a hotel. Originality of the research – Empirical research about the hotel choice behavior of female guests is scarce. Therefore, this study addresses this underresearched issue.

Are there gender differences in what drives customer delight?

Purpose– This paper aims to understand how male and female hotel guests become delighted customers. It aims to present the similarities and differences along with respective implications for theory and application.Design/methodology/approach– During a period of three months, tourists were interviewed at an upscale Florida hotel. A total of 208 semi-structured interviews were conducted. The script for the interviews was based on an interview protocol used by Crottset al.Adapted from a previous customer delight study (Torres and Kline), a codebook was developed to determine the salient themes that emerged during the interview process. Interviews were coded independently by three experienced reviewers using the process of content analysis.Findings– The results demonstrated that while men and women agreed on most aspects of the service experience that led them to feel delighted, there were other aspects of the delight experience that seemed to vary by gender. More specifically, female guests were more likely to be delighted by employee friendliness and professionalism. In contrast, male tourists appeared to be more likely to be delighted by having their needs met, by efficient and timely service and by the availability of complimentary amenities or upgrades.Research limitations/implications– The present study contributes to existing literature by demonstrating that men and women can potentially be delighted by different aspects of the service experience. Such information can potentially benefit hospitality industry practitioners to deliver service experiences desired by each gender.Originality/value– Ekinciet al.proposed that the ultimate evaluation of customer experiences can be highly individualized by elements such as personality. The present research argues that the process of delighting customers might be more complex than originally conceived. Accordingly, the results suggest: a universal set of criteria will tend to delight all guests, and a more specific set of criteria will potentially delight guests of a certain gender. Future research is encouraged to quantitatively validate the findings and explore other factors that impact customer delight such as personality, age, income and culture.

Reading Nostalgia

Reading Nostalgia

Insights Into the Lives of Indonesian Female Tablighi Jama’at

AbstractTablighi Jama’at is one of the most popular Islamic purist movements in the world. Although it has a growing presence in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, little research has thus far been done on its activities in that country. To gain access to Indonesian society, the Tablighi Jama’at has been particularly original in choosing a uniquely Indonesian institution as its entry point: thepesantren(Islamic boarding schools). The role ofpesantrenfor the Tablighis in Indonesia is not confined to spreading Islamic knowledge, they also serve as a hub of Tablighi activities. This paper focuses on examining the role of the Tablighipesantrenin shaping and transmitting religious knowledge to its Indonesian followers, and in particular to female followers, as there is to date no scholarship on this topic. It analyses the life experiences of female Tablighis inside and outside thepesantrenand their passion to belong to a global imagined Tablighi community. Transnational travel of female Tablighis from diverse neighbouring countries is a central part of thepesantrenexperience. For Indonesian Tablighi women, the presence of these female guests and foreign students who are enrolled in thepesantrenplay a significant role in strengthening their passionate desire to be part of the global Tablighi Jama’atumma.

The woman in the 360 Mirror: What Not To Wear and the feminist construction of reality

Abstract In the last decade, ‘makeover’ reality television has become popular. Feminist scholars in particular have focused on this genre, analysing the ways in which makeover programmes reinforce specific definitions of femininity, class, and sexuality. Academics have been especially critical of the show What Not To Wear, arguing that female guests are demoralized by hosts who prescribe a rigid set of rules for dressing. Many feminist writers perceive the subjects of each week’s episode as unwilling, insecure women who yield their individuality to the dictates of the programme’s stylists. We contend these articles ignore one of the basic tenets of feminist research: the subject must be given agency and allowed to define her experience in her own words. We argue feminists should start from the presumption that these women know how they feel and mean what they say, and even allow them to participate in exploring the meaning of the makeover. To this end, we closely examined several episodes of What Not To Wear that focus on making over highly educated women (several of whom exhibit high levels of gender consciousness) in order to explore how these women understand and interpret their experiences. Also, we interviewed an actual participant in the programme and discussed these issues with her. What results is a more nuanced analysis of what women experience when they are told ‘what not to wear’, in which the subjects smoothly integrate the aspects of the makeover that resonate positively with their sense of self, and leave the rest behind.

A Food Handler-Associated, Foodborne Norovirus GII.4 Sydney 2012-Outbreak Following a Wedding Dinner, Austria, October 2012.

On October 12, 2012, the provincial public health directorate of Salzburg reported a suspected norovirus (NV) outbreak among guests of a wedding–reception. The investigation aimed to confirm the causative agent, to identify the mode of transmission and to implement appropriate preventive measures. A probable outbreak case was defined as a wedding guest with diarrhoea or vomiting with disease onset from 7 to 10 October 2012 and who consumed food at the wedding dinner prepared by a hotel in the province Salzburg on 6 October 2012. A confirmed outbreak case fulfilled the criteria of a probable outbreak case and had a laboratory-confirmed NV infection. We conducted a cohort-investigation among the wedding guests. The case definitions were fulfilled in 26 wedding guests (25 %) including 2 confirmed cases. Females were 3.2 times more likely to develop disease (95 % CI 1.4–7.2) as compared to males. A mushroom dish was found to be associated with disease risk among females (risk ratio 2.3, 95 % CI 1.2–4.3). Two of 2 tested case-patients and 6 of 14 kitchen workers tested were positive for NV GII.4 Sydney. One kitchen staff-member worked during the wedding dinner despite diarrhoea. No food safety training was documented for the employees and the kitchen staff’s restroom was lacking operational facilities for hand hygiene. We report the first investigated outbreak due to GII.4 Sydney, which was likely due to a symptomatic kitchen worker. Gender-specific eating behaviour may have posed female guests at higher risk of NV infection.

"The Text Must Remain the Same": History, Collective Memory, and Sung Poetry in Morocco

It was about 3:00 a.m. when the performance of “ Kharbusha” began. As the vocalists took turns singing verses imbued with traditional lore, they recounted images of proud cavaliers and beautiful horses, battles, saints, voyages, historical fi gures, nature, passion, desire, and the agony of love. Alternating between close calland-response, unison cries, and solo singing over a fast galloping rhythm, the verses followed one another in a whirling motion accompanied by the riff s of the viola. “Araw l-khayl a t t a ba ya ba ihsan a rasi mahadru l- lamat l-yum” (Bring the horses! Come to me, father! Oh God have mercy on me! Th e bannerbearers did not come today). 1 As the verses turned to the images of horses and cavaliers, the male guests began dancing among themselves while crowding around the female performers; unlike the female guests, who danced sensually in small groups among themselves, the men mimicked galloping and horse riding. Th e performance of “ Kharbusha” had taken on a mesmerizing quality. “Shti ‘Kharbusha?’”(did you see “ Kharbusha?”) the lead vocalist asked me as we sat down at a table. Th e performance had been halted by the hostess of the wedding party who, concerned by the excessive excitement “Kharbusha” had created, had asked another group to go on to cool off the temperature of the celebration. While they performed an Egyptian pop song for the guests, now composedly seated at their tables, I asked the musicians: “is it always like this?” Hafi da stared at me with her piercing and knowing eyes as she nodded her head up and down. “Kharbusha”—the name of the female character who personifi es a legendary Moroccan heroine—is the title of one of the most celebrated poems of the ta (lit. cry or call). Th is genre of sung poetry, practiced along the Moroccan Atlantic Plains and in their adjacent regions, has traditionally been a favorite

Hotel safety and security systems: Bridging the gap between managers and guests

Safety and security are important factors in guests’ selection of a hotel. Hoteliers normally follow local regulations when designing a hotel's safety and security systems, but which system features hotel guests perceive to be the most important and which they expect to find in place remain open questions. The main aim of this research is thus to investigate the gap between hotel safety and security managers’ and hotel guests’ perceptions of the relative importance of safety and security facilities. Two sets of questionnaires – designed for managers and guests, respectively – containing 32 attributes were used to gauge respondents’ perceptions of different hotel safety and security system installations. Independent t-tests and one-way ANOVA were employed to examine significant differences in the way managers and guests rate the importance of hotel in-house safety and security systems.The findings reveal that guests perceive “well-equipped fire prevention systems in accordance with local regulations”, “an emergency plan”, “an emergency lighting system”, “a 24-h uniformed security guard” and “the regular testing of hotel safety and security systems” to be the top five in-house safety and security systems, whereas hotel managers perceive “closed-circuit television systems for hotel public areas”, “emergency lighting systems” and “application of a guest key to activate the lifts to guest floors” to be the third through fifth most important. The results also indicate two good matches, six under-perceptions and four over-perceptions, indicating that managers may require a better understanding of guest expectations.In addition to gap analysis, this study discusses the importance of staff safety and security training, the acceptance of high-tech safety and security systems and the need for female guest floors, and provides a number of insights to help hotel managers better understand the needs of their customers, thereby allowing them to employ measures that are likely to keep customers’ satisfied.

Psychometrics Of Hotel Service Quality: Comparative Factor Structures Of Alternative Market Segments

When different market segments are encountered, can the same instrument be used to understand and predict the determinants of customer perceptions of service quality, satisfaction and retention? This paper analyzes a national sample of over 18,000 U.S. customer surveys regarding hotel experiences in a range of properties from budget to near-luxury accommodations. Its purpose is to examine the dimensionality of customer satisfaction for business vs. pleasure travelers, and male vs. female guests, in order to determine the appropriateness of conceptualizing and measuring service quality with the same instrument for these potentially divergent segments. Our findings provide good evidence of factor stability across these segments, using the multi-item scales that are employed by one of the largest privately held hotel chains in the United States. Within the common factor structure, modest but intuitively reasonable differences in the importance of service attributes in determining customer loyalty for different segments do emerge.

Low Immunity to Measles and Rubella among Female Guest Workers, Northern Mariana Islands

Low Immunity to Measles and Rubella among Female Guest Workers, Northern Mariana Islands

Communicative stances in Japanese interviews: Gender differences in formal interactions

This study explores the communicative strategies used by Japanese males and females in gender-mixed formal interactions. It incorporates quantitative and qualitative analyses of television interviews. Quantitative results show that female and male hosts use polite strategies, but female guests are more assertive than male guests. However, the qualitative results show a much more complex picture; domineering and cooperative strategies are used by both, male and female, participants. Most importantly, the quantitative analysis demonstrates that communicative strategies are multi-functional and therefore linguistic, pragmatic or turn-sequential manifestations do not necessarily correspond to a particular stance.

Gender Effects on Relational and Core Service Dimensions of Hotel Choice Decisions

The study proposes and tests a model of hotel choice behavior based on the economics of information theory which incorporates relational and core service experiences as well as search attributes. The model expands the domain of inquiry beyond the initial level attributes to the higher order latent construct and composite levels. Results suggest that hotel choice behavior of male and female guests can be represented as a global construct with three viable components. Implications of the results are discussed.

"And Now for the Main (Dis)course..."

"And Now for the Main (Dis)course..."

Female guests in a manly world: A picture with numerous shades

These studies on female engineers in several countries since the last century show similar processes of integration and marginalization if one considers the major lines of development. But primary and secondary education, the predominance of school culture or of shop culture, the opening of technical schools, the intervention of the state and other factors acted differently at times and across the countries, producing specific patterns concerning the choice of technical fields, as well as affecting the extent and the kind of occupational work. If we cannot discern any uniformity in respect of these dimensions, the results of the historical investigations converge nevertheless on one point: the persistence of the gendered hierarchical order at the workplace.

Daytime television talk shows: Guests, content and interactions

Strident controversy over the often‐bizarre subject matter of daytime television talk shows motivated this content analysis of 11 shows with the highest Nielsen ratings in 1994–95. A sample of 10 episodes of each of the shows was videotaped and subjected to a systematic analysis of the shows’ guests, topics of discussion and interactions. Results indicate that this genre of program indulges in overrepresentation of female, youthful and African American guests. The most prevalent major topic of discussion was parenting on nearly half the episodes. In general, these talk shows center around family issues, sexual activity and dating.

The Role of the Group in Peer Group Entry

AbstractThis study explored psychological conditions affecting children's receptiveness to a newcomer (the guest) in a peer group entry task. Subjects were 93 host dyads (48 male) of 7‐ to 9‐year‐old children. Hosts played a word‐naming game for 5 min before being joined by a male or female guest. The hosts' pre‐entry interaction was coded to reflect an orientation toward the game (agentic) or toward each other and toward experimental setting demands (communal). Hosts' psychological orientation predicted entry outcomes. Specifically, hosts of excluded children verbally competed with each other (an aspect of agency) more than hosts of children who entered. Male hosts competed more than female hosts and female hosts helped and encouraged each other (aspects of the communal orientation) more than male hosts. These findings suggest that the strategies and effort required by children to achieve group entry may depend on prior psychological conditions attending the interaction of the peer group.

The male presence

Male domination of the news media begins, very simply, with numerical superiority. The male presence in the news industry is immense and far‐reaching. Ninety‐four percent of top management positions in U.S. news media are occupied by men. The top five executives at Capital Cities, ABC, Times Mirror, CBS, Knight‐Ridder, the New York Times, and Turner Broadcasting System are all men. The boards of directors of these same corporate media outlets are also virtually all male. More than three‐quarters of all network reports are filed by men. And only 27 percent of front‐page bylines in ten major newspapers were women's. A study of the New York Times op‐ed page found that 87 percent of the 309 opinion pieces by outside contributors during the first half of 1989 (excluding Sundays) were written by men. Male numerical domination of the industry is accompanied by similar domination in the roles of both sources and subjects. We can illustrate this through our study of ABC's “Nightline.” We paid particular attention to who appeared as guests on the program. These guests play the mixed role of source and commentator, telling viewers both what the news is and how to understand it. An analysis of who appears in the news can tell us a great deal about the news product viewers ultimately receive. We analyzed the transcripts from forty months of “Nightline” (January 1985 through June 1988), which included 865 programs and 2,498 guests. We coded each program by topic and each guest on a variety of dimensions, including gender. We were interested in the context in which male and female guests appear, the kinds of men who appear regularly, and the effect this has on the journalistic enterprise. Our study shows that the news is interpreted almost entirely by men. All 19 of the guests who appeared more than five times in the forty‐month period were men. And 68 of the 74 guests who appeared alone on “Nightline” were men. Of the 2,498 guests in this period, 2,239, or 90 percent, were men. Nine out of ten guests who discussed international affairs, domestic politics, or the economy were men. The only time this figure dropped substantially was on programs about social issues (e.g., health, education, religion, or family). Still, on these programs 80 percent of the guests were men. On the other hand, 41 percent of all women who appeared on the program did so on programs about social issues, and only 22 percent appeared on programs about international issues. The figures for men were roughly the opposite. The analysis of international affairs is almost the exclusive property of men, whereas women are relegated to discussions of traditionally “female” social issues. Men also appear earlier in the program and are given more opportunity to speak. In the rare instances when women did appear on “Nightline,” they were likely to be responding to agendas that had been framed by the male guests who appeared earlier. The “Nightline” guest list is not stratified simply by gender. On the contrary, only certain types of men have regular access to the major news media. By excluding some men, the news media help signal “appropriate” or “sanctioned” gender and political roles for men. The news, by taking some perspectives seriously and largely ignoring others, can help constitute an “ideal” male identity. First, the ideal man is an elite, white man. More than 92 percent of the guests from the United States were white, and 80 percent of the guests were government officials, professionals, or corporate representatives. People of color and nonelites appeared only rarely on the program. Those representatives of labor and public‐interest organizations who did appear on “Nightline” were twice as likely as government officials, professionals, or corporate representatives to be women. This suggests that access to “Nightline” and other media is structured by the intersection of gender, race, and class. Women and people of color are rarely seen, and the voices of white working‐class or poor men, or their representatives, are also rarely heard. Second, this ideal male displays a high degree of respect for government policymakers. “Nightline” only rarely featured appearances by potential dissenters. Only 6 percent of the guests represented labor, public‐interest organizations, or racial/ethnic organizations. Even those white men with elite credentials who hold strongly critical positions may have little access to programs such as “Nightline.” While white male, former government officials make for prime “Nightline” guests, critics who fit this profile—such as former attorney general Ramsey Clark, former CIA station chief John Stockwell, former ambassador Robert White, and former Pentagon planner Daniel Ellsberg—were absent from the guest list. Ultimately, programs such as “Nightline” bring viewers interpretations of the world largely from elite, white men who do not challenge the status quo.