Decretos internos de EPM Decreto 1348 de noviembre 5 de 2003

At the beginning of each interview, interviewees were provided a brief verbal introduction on the interview topic and were encouraged to freely talk about their personal experience. The same message was shared with all interviewees: “Thank you

very much for coming. Today, we are here to talk about your interaction experiences at association conferences. There will be no right or wrong answers. It is all about your personal experience: what you did and how you felt.” All interviewees were then asked to

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3.1.3.1 Interaction Incidents at CCEs

The main interview questions were grouped into three parts. In the first part, a brief statement was shared at the beginning to set the stage for the subsequent

conversation: “Based on your past experience, you know that when you go to a

conference, you meet a lot of people there: you go to a presentation session where there are other attendees, you meet another attendee at the elevator, in the hallway, or, you talk to people during lunch who are sitting at the same table with you.” Then, open-ended questions were asked to solicit information from the perspective of interviewees, as to how they define customer-customer encounters at conferences. One leading question was: “Now, according to your past association conference experiences, please recall those

common settings where you encountered other attendees. Please describe to me as many such encounters as you can.” According to the principles of the “laddering” technique in

marketing (Reynolds & Gutman, 1988), follow-up questions were asked for discovering richer information. Examples are “Where did you usually encounter other attendees?” and “What did you usually talk about?”

After conducting the first few interviews, the interviewer found that when

interviewees talked about their experience during common customer-customer encounters, two types of interaction partners were consistently referenced: strangers and

acquaintances. Following the constant comparison method suggested by Lincoln and Guba (1985), the researcher added several new questions in the rest of the interviews to yield a more thorough understanding of the phenomena of interest and to “stimulate

thought that leads to both descriptive and explanatory categories (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 341).” Example questions were: “Who do you find yourself usually interacting with,

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people who you knew already versus those you just met at the conference?” and “Did you

find the focus of your interactions with people who you already knew different from others who you just met at the conference?”

3.1.3.2 Motivations and Subjective Experiences at CCEs

The second part of the interview questions consisted of several open-ended questions soliciting interviewees’ motivations for engaging in customer-customer

encounters and their subjective experiences during customer-customer encounters when attending conferences. While the first part of the interview was targeted at generating a broad range of customer-customer encounters, the second part of the interview questions focused on experiences related to one’s most memorable or vivid customer-customer encounter. In detail, this dissertation adopts the Critical Incident Technique (CIT), which was widely used in previous research related to customer-customer encounters. For instance, when examining the impact of the interaction relationship among customers on their satisfaction and loyalty, Guenzi and Pelloni (2004) measured customers’ interaction

relationship with one particular customer. A more recent study on interaction experience during cruise travels (Huang & Hsu, 2010) also targeted one fellow passenger with whom the respondent had the most interactions, arguing that this person was most likely to have an impact on the respondent’s cruise experience, either positively or negatively.

Considering the significant impact of a critical incident on attendee’s memory and experience, in this dissertation, interviewees were instructed to recall their past

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conference experiences and describe the most vivid encounter involving another attendee(s).

In detail, interviewees were asked, “Among those common encounters you have just recalled when answering my earlier question, if I ask you to recall one encounter with other attendees, which one comes to your mind immediately, or let’s say, the one

that you are able to recall more easily than others? Please describe this encounter to me, just like telling a story.” Probes were used to facilitate interviewees’ responses

concerning their motivations for engaging in this particular encounter, which were open- ended or specific to the interviewees’ comments. Example questions were: “How did that encounter take place?” “Can you elaborate on what happened specifically at that

encounter?” “Who were you interacting with?” and “What made you stay in that encounter?”

Then, interviewees were instructed to talk about their evaluation of their

subjective experience at that recalled encounter with other attendees. Example questions were: “Overall, how would you describe this experience?” “If I give you a scale of 1 as

representing awful to 10 representing wonderful, what number are you willing to assign to your experience at this encounter?” “What made it an x (x is replaced by the number provided by the interviewee)?” and “How did you feel during the encounter? Were you

happy? Tense? Pleased? (Stel & Vonk, 2010) Why?” This procedure was to elicit verbal statements reflecting perceptions and feelings. Probing questions were used to encourage participants to think on a deeper level, including: “Can this face-to-face interaction

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“What does that encounter mean to you?” and “Why was this encounter more vivid to you than others?”

To identify potential factors that have influenced attendees’ experiences at

customer-customer encounters, interviewees were asked to recall anything that had positively or negatively influenced their encounter experience. Example questions included: “Did any factors influence the encounter experience you have just described?” and “Do you think your experience during the encounter which you have just described could be improved? How?”

Lastly, attendees’ negative experiences during customer-customer encounters were examined to generate a more holistic understanding of attendees’ experiences at

customer-customer encounters. In detail, interviewees were instructed to think back to their past conference experience and recall any encounters with other attendees that they would regard as negative. The question was worded as “According to your past

experiences at conferences, were there any encounters you had with other attendees that made you feel negative in some way? How?”

3.1.3.3 Conference and Demographic Variables

The last part of the interview questions gathered information about the conference where the recalled encounter took place, including the name, location, time, size, and scale of the conference. Interviewees’ basic demographic information was also collected

for debriefing purposes, including their gender, age, educational background, and occupation or study area.

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