Questionnaire for Service Quality of Hospitals – Download

Following questionnaire was proposed by Asghar Zarei et al. in 2012 on their study “Service quality of private hospitals: The Iranian Patients’ perspective”. Authors derived the questionnaire from famous SERQUAL Questionnaire of Parasuraman et al.

The questionnaire composed of 2 parts:

The first part includes 8 questions relating to the socio-demographic data of the patient.

The second part includes three dimensions of the service quality as follows:
Reliability/Responsiveness
Empathy 
Tangibles

Download in Word format

Download in PDF format 

Questionnaire for Service Quality of Hospitals

Socio-demographic Variables

Gender:          Male               Female

Age:               ≤ 30                 31-40               41-50               51-60               ≥ 61

Education level:         Illiterate          Primary and secondary school             Academic Degree

Residence:      Urban                         Rural

Hospital ward:           Internal            Surgery            Obstetrics and Gynaecology               Other

Health condition:                   Excellent         Good               Average           Bad

Service Quality Dimensions and items

Service Quality Dimensions and items	Strongly Disagree (1)	Disagree (2)	Neither Agree Nor Disagree (3)	Agree (4)	Strongly Agree (5)
Reliability/Responsiveness
1. Sincere interest of personnel in solving patients’ problems
2. Carrying out of the services right at the first time
3. Providing services at appointed time
4. Error-free and fast retrieval of documents
5. Telling when services will be performed
6. Prompt performance of medical and non-medical services
7. Willingness of personnel to help patients
8. Attending of personnel whenever called
9. Instilling confidence in patients
10. Feeling safety and security in interaction with personnel
Empathy
11. Polite and friendly dealing of personnel with patients
12. Knowledgeable personnel to answer patients’ questions
13. Individual attention to patients
14. Availability of 24-hour services
15. Attention to the patient’s beliefs and emotions
16. Having patients’ best interest at heart
17. Understanding specific needs of patients
Tangibles
18. Neat and well-dressed personnel
19. Clean and comfortable environment of the hospital
20. Modern and up-to-date equipment
21. Visually appeal of physical facilities

Reference

Zarei, A., Arab, M., Froushani, A. R., Rashidian, A., & Tabatabaei, S. M. G. (2012). Service quality of private hospitals: The Iranian Patients’ perspective. BMC health services research, 12(1), 31.

Common symbols used in statistical tests

Each statistical tests or methods has its own terminology and symbols, but the following are commonly used by all statisticians / researchers

N – Size of population

n - number of observations (sample size)

K - number of samples (each having n elements)

α (Alpha) - level of significance

v (Nu)- degrees of freedom

σ (Sigma)- standard deviation (population)

s - standard deviation (sample)

σ² (Sigma)- Variance(population)

s² - Variance (sample)

μ (Mu)- population mean

- sample mean

ρ (Rho)- population correlation coefficient

r - sample correlation coefficient

β (beta)- regression coefficients (population)

b - regression coefficients (sample)

Z - standard normal deviate

To understand types of error - WHAT ARE TYPE I AND TYPE II ERRORS?

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List of free and premium websites for financial and economic data

Data is so much important for researchers, Investment analyst, Quants and in Academia. We are in information age. Data is everywhere in internet. The thing is it depend for where you look for the data. Here I bring you a list of best websites, free and paid platforms  where you can retrieve Financial and economic (macro and micro) data.

1. Yahoo Finance (free): If you are looking for stock market data like historical share price, ETF, and Mutual funds then Yahoo finance is perfect and free platform. Many Excel sheets and R scripts use Yahoo finance API to get data. To understand how to download read my post DOWNLOADING SHARE PRICES METHOD 1 YAHOO FINANCE TO EXCEL SHEET .
2. Economagic (free): Economagic provides over 400,000 data files, with charts and excel files for economic data related to most of the country around the world. The site was started in 1996 to help students in an Applied Forecasting class. Majority of the data is related to USA macro economic factors.
3. Econstats(free): Econstats holds large source of historical data on US and other economies, both economic and financial data presented in a spreadsheet.
4. Bankscope(Paid): Bankscope specially holds data of almost all banks around the globe. It may be commercial, private, public, central, Islamic, or of any kind. Still the database holds financial details of banks.
5. Worldbank(free): World bank database is named as DataBank that contains collections of time series data on a variety of economic and social data of countries. You can create your own queries; generate tables, charts, and maps; and easily save, embed, and share them.
6. IMF(free): Its a Superb resource for economic data contains 32,000 macro times series covering over 200 countries, and trade stats.
7. WTO(free): If you are looking for trade data then its perfect location that includes exports and imports by product group, trade in services and tariff related data.
8. International Labor Office(free): This website Collects huge amounts of labour related data that includes employment, wages, Child labour stat, labour productivity, income distribution and more.
9. Trading Economics(free): Provides economic data on over 230 countries along with historical data on some 300,000 economic indicatorsincluding bond yields, stock indices and commodity prices.
10. United nations database (free): United Nations has data covering, crime, education, energy, environment, gender, health, population, tourism and trade and much more.

The above mentioned are some of the commonly used database where you can find and retrieve data for your research. Share your list of database in comment section. Subscribe Sulthan Academy for weekly updates. Share with your friends.

Elsevier Publishing Campus - Much needed platform for researchers

I am a research scholar and gradually it took me 3 years to understand the research world and still learning. It took me so much time to understand the framework of research and publishing. To  be honest,I have just understand how things are working in research world and I have so much to do. To be a good researcher you should first be able to explain what's your research is about. There is no use of research if you cant present your ideas through a paper which is read and understood by others. For this you need to understand how to write a journal article or submitting a book proposal, learning how to conduct peer review for a high impact journal, understanding research and publishing ethics or writing a successful grant application. This is where Elsevier Publishing campus comes in to help the researchers with their resources to help you achieve your goals. The Elsevier Publishing Campus offers free lectures, interactive training and professional advice.

"Researchers today need to secure funding, collaborate, share data, publish results, commercialize research and demonstrate impact. Early career researchers in particular are under significant pressures and Elsevier is committed to supporting you on your way to publishing a world class journal article or book and developing your career as a successful professional researcher." - Hannah Foreman, Head of Researcher Relations,  Elsevier.

Elsevier Publishing Campus users are also entitled to a 30% discount on ALL Elsevier books and a 10% discount on Elsevier Webshop services and products.

What you get inside campus:

• Interactive training courses guide you carefully through a topic and test your knowledge along the way. Average completion time is 15-30 minutes.
• Online lectures present a topic by leading experts and engage in Q&A towards the end to boost the discussion. Average completion time is 15 minutes.
• LIVE online lectures present a topic by leading experts and are followed by a live Q&A which you can join in! Average completion time is 50 minutes.
• Attending and completing any of the above will result in your being awarded a Certificate of Completion. They will be available at the end of each course of lecture to download and they are automatically stored in your profile.

Taking these courses will help a researcher to develop and get perfect with their skills. I thank Elsevier for creating such useful platform for people like me. Wish other researchers do get benefited by this. Visit: https://www.publishingcampus.elsevier.com for more details. 

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What is an Academic database? What is review of literature?

A review of literature is a process of evaluating the information found in the literature(past studies) related to your selected area of study. All works included in the review must be read, evaluated and analysed, but relationships between the literature must also be identified and articulated, in relation to your field of research. As a process of review of literature, a literature review report is written with the purpose to convey the reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. The literature review should provide a context for the research, justify the research, ensure the research hasn't been done before, show where the research fits into the existing body of knowledge, enable the researcher to learn from previous theory on the subject, illustrate how the subject has been studied previously, highlight flaws in previous research, outline gaps in previous research, show that the work is adding to the understanding and knowledge of the field and help refine, refocus or even change the topic. To do this process we need to go through the published articles. Finding and searching the past studies in each journal is almost a impossible task and this where academic databases play a vital role.

An Academic databases (sometimes referred to as abstracting and indexing databases) will find articles from thousands of journals. Search by your keyword to generate a list of results. Using them will save you time and effort compared to searching individual journals and will give you a comprehensive set of journal articles. I recommend you to use these academic databases rather than Search engines (Google)  or Encyclopedia (Wikipedia) because the information included in the databases is of high academic quality.

List of frequently used Multidisciplinary Academic database:

• Ebsco Host
• Google scholar
• Scopus
• ProQuest Central
• Microsoft Academic Search

Apart from the above mentioned multidisciplinary databases there are several specific database for specific disciplines and its branches.

If you need any help or clarifications feel free to drop your queries at comments. 

Why you should use Adjusted closing prices for Analysis

Beginners in analysis often do a basic mistake by considering the closing prices of stocks for analysis instead of Adjusted closing price. In this post I will explain, why you should use Adjusted closing price for any data analysis?

When you download data from internet you will often have a column Adjusted closing price in the file. You can read my post which explains how to download stock prices Method-1 and Method-2.

                                              

Closing price: It is the final price at which a security is traded on a selected trading day.

Adjusted closing price: It is a stock's closing price on any selected day of trading that has been amended to include any distributions (dividend) and corporate actions (Split/bonus shares) that occurred at any time prior to the next day's open.

From the above definition you can understand it could be a bias to use closing price for analysis which doesn’t discount the corporate actions or distributions. So it is always recommended to use Adj. Closing price during analysis.

A short guide to use Bibliography in LaTeX

Download the full file here: PDF

Bibliography in  LATEX
Sulthan

Contents

1	What is Bibliography?																												2
2	Citation																												2
	2.1   Content of Citation   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .				.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	2
	2.2   Unique identifiers of citation  .  .  .				.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	3
3	Different Biblography methods																												3
	3.1   Manually creating  bibliography    .				.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	3
	3.1.1    Output of manual  method				.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	4
	3.1.2    Citation   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .				.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	4
3.2   Bibliography Automatically Using BibTe									X	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.       4
3.2.1    Why should you use BibTeX?   .  .									.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.       4
3.2.2		Bibliography Database	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	5
3.2.3		Bibliography Style   .  .	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	5
3.2.4		Example  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	5