Purchasing behavior of consumers for foreign medical services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – The present study aims to use the qualitative approach of soft laddering to gather insight into both risk perception and subsequent marketing strategies of medical tourism. Medical tourism has recently started to spark interest of marketing researchers and has been a frequently discussed topic by both journalists and physicians. Nevertheless, there are only few marketing studies offering in-depth research on the phenomenon of medical tourism. In the present article, we will concentrate on the central notion of risk inherent to any medical procedure and a fortiori to surgery in the so-called Third World countries. Because medical tourism is a product to be sold to costumers, the perceived risk needs to be dealt with on the marketing level. Design/methodology/approach – In the present study, the qualitative approach of soft laddering was used with 23 participants from France and 22 participants from Quebec to gather insight into both risk perception and subsequent marketing strategies of medical tourism. Findings – The results show significant differences in consumer behavior between the two nationalities involved. We will see how these differences are related to underlying values as well as different reasons and constraints to purchase. Practical implications – The results could help developed countries’ government to implement health policy. Originality/value – Qualitative research does not often use soft laddering, which was used in this paper. Moreover, this qualitative approach has some advantages as the number of chains, as well as the frequencies of selection and the diversity of elements quoted by consumers (kinds of risks, values and consequences of the choices made).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".