Browsing by Author "Radford, Scott K."

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    An Investigation of Cryptocurrency Owners: Examining the Role of Fallacious Gambling Beliefs and Conspiratorial Thinking
    (2024-08-13) Tuico, Kyle Andrew; McGrath, Daniel S.; Sears, Christopher R.; Lee, Kibeom; Radford, Scott K.
    Introduction: Cryptocurrencies have become widely popular speculative assets in recent years, attracting traders and investors to the gambling-like cryptocurrency market. Previous literature indicates that cryptocurrencies may appeal to those who distrust authorities or perceive potential financial gains despite the notable risks. Therefore, the present study investigated whether fallacious gambling beliefs and conspiratorial thinking, along with gambling and behavioural factors, predict cryptocurrency ownership and identification as a trader. Methods: Participants (N = 574; n = 278 cryptocurrency owners; n = 278 non-owners) were recruited to participate in a cross-sectional online survey through Connect, an online crowdsourcing platform. Respondents completed measures assessing cryptocurrency engagement, gambling involvement, problem gambling severity, trait impulsivity, gambling fallacies, and conspiratorial thinking. Results: Hierarchical logistic regressions identified several predictors of cryptocurrency ownership, including male gender, younger age, higher household income, more severe problem gambling, higher sensation seeking, and lower negative urgency. Among cryptocurrency owners, predictors of trading versus investing included younger age, lower susceptibility to gambling fallacies, and higher engagement frequency. Conclusion: Although the observed predictors suggest some overlap between cryptocurrency engagement and gambling, the absence of other associations indicates distinct differences that warrant further exploration. Developing a greater understanding of cryptocurrency owners’ characteristics provides stakeholders with valuable insight, helping inform programs that prevent risky cryptocurrency engagement.
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    The Ideologies of ‘I Do’: Commodification, Consumption, and Identity in the Wedding Industry
    (2020-08-21) Hanslip, Lisa Marie; Smith, Tania Sona; Radford, Scott K.; Stowe, Lisa
    This dissertation investigated the relationship between identity, commodification, and conspicuous consumption in the wedding industry; as well as how these ideologies are promulgated through the media. The broad aim was to contribute to the analysis of the wedding industry within the larger context of how bridal media both informs and reflects its cultural context. Weddingbells was used as a proxy for the wedding industry in Canada; to examine how it engaged cultural ideologies as it advised, and how it exemplified a commodified amalgamation of performance and identity. Wedding magazines function as curators of wedding trends and therefore serve as an example of the voice of the wedding industry. At its core, this project is a historical look at how magazines portrayed the performance and communication elements of a wedding and how that was indicative of a broader societal context, as well as the sheer tenacity of the commodified white wedding. It also offers a historical background of the modern conception of the wedding and outlines the establishment of the wedding industrial complex to allow a good understanding of the power encompassed by the wedding industry in manufacturing, retail, and publishing to better understand the analysis. The development of the editorial curation over a 10-year period (2003-2012) in Weddingbells was analyzed using a critical textual analysis — primarily a content analysis with a look at the rhetorical appeals presented in some of the data — industry-centric rather than the psychology of the reader. The theoretical framework used the theory of conspicuous consumption, spectacle, and theory of identity. The findings offer a unique perspective from a researcher that spent more than a decade in the industry, as well as a theoretical construct in the elevation of the term “white wedding” to encapsulate many of the most important concepts in this dissertation. This research offers valuable insight into the wedding industry at large, as well as indicators of its impact on Canadian culture. As a result, this study generates a new perspective on weddings as communication, what it means to commodify our identity, and weddings as an enactment of identity.
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    Understanding Human Behaviours in Engineering Design to Aid its Teaching and Research
    (2020-09-11) Gress, Gary Robert; Li, Simon; Radford, Scott K.; Wood, David H.; Onen, Denis; Marsden, Catharine C.
    The objective of this thesis is to better understand the process of engineering conceptual design in terms of human abilities and behaviours so as to provide insights and improvements in its practice, education and research. The thesis aims to help educators better guide novice designers towards proficiency by allowing for their natural predispositions, if any, and to contribute towards a common theoretical foundation upon which future design research can be conducted. To do this the thesis seeks to identify and understand those predispositions, and to determine their underlying causes where possible. This necessarily involves an outside-of-design multi-disciplinary approach, and includes several facets. Literature in the fields of child development and neuro-psychology are reviewed for their similarities or possible causative links to designer behaviours already elucidated in an initial design-research literature review. This is followed by a self-observation study of the researcher while undertaking an actual design project, to provide any insights or context and to illuminate any aspects that may require further investigation. That study uncovered the extreme importance of lengthy observation of the physical artifact – and of discussing the artifact with others – to successful outcomes for this designer. It lead to a subsequent extended review of the literature in the fields of memory, visualization and spoken language, which provided key information for the completion of near-identical object-learning and design problem-solving models. These models are shown to explain several design behaviours usually disparaged upon by design educators and researchers; they also provide guidelines for dealing with these behaviours and for design learning and instruction generally. These explanations and guidelines form the key contributions of this research. The research is completed by a series of interviews with practicing designers to discern their design approaches, which are found to align with the published literature, this researcher’s own design approach, and the aforementioned models. Finally, it is also found that the models’ paired tenet of observing and conjecturing, aligning with Simon and Schön’s paradigms of recognition and reflection respectively, is likely an essential or core process of design.
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    Working Together toward a Better Brand: Customer-Based Brand Equity and Co-Creation of Value with Consumers
    (2020-03-30) Farrokhi, Mohammad; Radford, Scott K.; Mourali, Mehdi; Andrus, Deborah; Calvert, Ann; DiBenedetto, Anthony
    Customer-based brand equity (CBBE) is an important marketing asset. Despite numerous previous studies on CBBE, there is still the need for a comprehensive conceptual framework to be used as a guideline for both academics and practitioners. This thesis is an effort to integrate the relationship between CBBE and many important marketing constructs into a comprehensive framework that help both scholars and practitioners in building and improving CBBE. Then, considering the increasing interaction opportunities between customers and brands, due to the constant advances in technology, the current dissertation explores the relationship between co-creation of value with customers, as a relatively new construct, and CBBE. Chapter 2 explains why CBBE is a fundamental construct in brand building and explains the important constructs of interaction, value, and co-creation of value with customers. Chapter 3 uses these constructs to form a theoretical framework for CBBE that explains how important marketing concepts stand in relation with CBBE. After forming the theoretical foundation of CBBE, this thesis uses multiple quantitative methods to test those theories. First, in chapter 4, numerous previous quantitative studies on CBBE are used in a meta-analysis to test the strength of relationship between proposed constructs and CBBE. Meta-analysis is complemented by Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to test the fitness of the proposed framework. In chapters 5, 6, and 7, multiple experiments are used to test the CBBE and co-creation of value with customers relationship, using both online and lab settings, student and general population samples, in a product as well as a service context. This research shows co-creation of value with customers has a direct positive effect on CBBE. Finally, the role of process enjoyment and self-efficacy as moderators of co-creation and CBBE relationship are tested. The experiments’ outcome does not support the moderating role of process enjoyment or self-efficacy in terms of statistical significance, but data depicts promising patterns of effect size that asks for more studies to better understand the moderating role of self-efficacy and process enjoyment. Findings of this manuscript cast new light on the significance of how important marketing constructs can help build CBBE, which can be used as a guideline for both academics and practitioners.