Interdisciplinary research

The last one, interdisciplinary research. For the big interdisciplinary, we are in the tourism area, or we’re in the hospitality area. For the small interdisciplinary, in the hospitality or tourism area, maybe you have smaller discipline. For example, I’m in the marketing field, I’m in the organizational behavior field, I’m in the finance, I’m in the counting, I’m in information technology, whatever. Each one has their area of discipline study. But it’s getting very popular right now that discipline and discipline emerge together. The case I showed you before, for example, the video manipulation study is interdisciplinary, because the performing arts students were hired to perform the video.

When you have a chance to look at the video, there are four different videos for the four conditions. Actually she hired students to perform the condition in our campus hotel. They are performing arts students, and they also have scripts, they write their scripts, they have some directors to direct their performance. From the neuroscience perspective, you will clearly see that they have neural scientists with the researchers, who are in the tourism hospitality area and virtual reality area. What I say is not only a scientific way, which means we want the neural scientists.

Because we don’t know the signal, we don’t know how to interpret the brain signal, we don’t know how to use the device and we don’t know how to code the color. But in this one, the interdisciplinary is between two or more discipline areas, for example, marketing with human resource, marketing with finance, human resource with finance. There are quite many examples here, I just give you two or three examples, and give you a feeling. For example, marketing-finance interface, they have two discipline areas, one is market discipline, one is the finance discipline. This is the study indicating why finance and market are studied together.

When you study marketing area, for example, at the very beginning you wanna see how satisfied people are, right? Satisfaction is your destination, I say the destination, which means you find a goal. Now it’s not enough, you want to see how satisfied people are, you also want to see if these people are satisfied with some kind of attitude or behavior. Which means they say something good, word of mouth or maybe some people will visit again. It’s not enough. We want to see if they continually do that kind activities, will they become loyal customers, brand loyal customers? For these loyal customers, how can they generate the benefits to the company in terms of money, in terms of value.

The value could be equity value, asset value, return on investment. Gradually, the measurement of marketing performance is based on the financial performance. The high performance of company finance indicates they do a good job, because why? Because the customer loyalty, customer’s level of satisfaction, customer loyal behavior will generate financial benefits to the company, for example, increased occupancy rates, increased return on investment, increased daily rate achievement. This is one example, I will give you another example, which was published in 2013 at the International Journal of Hospital Management by two scholars, Sun and Kim.

The topic is “Does customer satisfaction increase firm performance: an application of American Customer Satisfaction Index”. The result they find is that customer satisfaction is reflected by the profit margin, return on assets, return on equity, and the market value added of hotels, restaurants and airlines. This is the model, it’s not a complicated model, but they collect the data based on Customer Satisfaction Index, and they will have impact on firms’ profitability, firm’s value. That’s one of examples of how marketing and finance interface together. We called it interdisciplinary study, two disciplines interface together. Of course, in human resource area, employee’s satisfaction, employee’s performances definitely will generate company’s financial results. So human resource and finance can be together.

As we studied marketing, marketing and human resource can be together. Because why? Because Internal marketing concept is mainly applied for human resource area. So what you need to think about is not only your discipline area, but how your discipline area can interface with other discipline areas. That’s what we call interdisciplinary study, at least two or more interface with different disciplines. It is basically what I just share with you.

There are six areas: from univariate to multivariate, from self-report to experiment, and the area of interdisciplinary studies, and scenario studies，mixed methods and longitudinal. Those are different areas which just give you introduction. If you want to have details of each of them, probably you will take one semester or even more. This is only for introduction, and which may give you an idea if you wanna do something. When you study for your degrees or for your projects, you may think about the possibility of methods right now. Thank you very much.