The temporal dimension in the understanding of maternal sensitivity in caregiver-infant interactions: The ‘Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System’

Caregiver-child interaction is known to play a central role in children’s socioemotional development, yet the diversity of measures commonly used to evaluate it call into question the nature of the construct being assessed. Contingency within caregiver-child interactions has been identified as a key dyadic process that requires taking a temporal perspective to evaluating interactions. The Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System is a psychometrically sound measure that sequentially code the flow of interactive and non-interactive behaviours within a caregiver-infant system. Its use of the framework of nonlinear dynamical systems (NDS) expands our understanding of contingent caregiver-infant dyadic behaviour.     

Airport Servicescape,Approach Intentions,and the Mediating Role of Perceived Merchandise Value and Shopping Value1

Despite the large body of work on approach intentions in airport servicescapes, literature considering cognitive evaluations as a possible mediator is lacking. The aim of this study is to address this gap in literature by investigating the effect of an airport servicescape environment on approach intentions through cognitive evaluations on the foundation of the stimulus–organism–response framework. Data of 484 passengers at Chinese international airports were collected. Overall, perceived merchandise value significantly mediated the relationship between airport servicescapes and approach intentions; perceived merchandise value and shopping value acted as chain mediators between airport servicescapes and approach intentions. The theoretical implications are discussed, and the results could be used by airport stores to achieve higher approach intentions.     

Multi‐Criteria Ratios: What is the Unit?

When Analytic Hierarchy Process ratios are normalized to sum to unity, the unit of measure becomes obscure. This paper investigates this obscurity and whether ratio measurement is possible when there is no prior knowledge of the measurement unit. Initially, we look at ratio scales of tangible attributes of objects with well‐known measures. Then, ratio scales of unknown intangible attributes of objects are analysed. We discover that natural zero and a specific unit of measure are not necessarily used explicitly in deriving ratio scale measures. Nevertheless, the derived scale does have a derived unit of measurement. We conclude that although composite multi‐criteria answers are possible in ratio form, it is important to know that a unit of measure exists if ambiguities are to be avoided. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.