CIICPD 2023

authors have found a significant and strong positive relationship between a negative critical incident and brand-switching and suggest that service providers should create positive critical incidents on purpose to increase customers’ loyalty. 5. The Outcome of the Analysis The methodology adopted to conduct the interviews combined qualitative and quantitative methods using a mixed-methods approach. This approach combined qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis techniques. The two questionnaires (one for students and one for financial intermediaries) contained both open-ended questions (to collect qualitative data) and rating scales or Likert-type questions (to collect quantitative data). Both questionnaires (see the Annex) were distributed online. The sample interviewed (students and financial intermediaries) was quite balanced in terms of gender (same number of males and females) and nationality (same number of Italian and non-Italian respondents). In terms of the age of the interviewee, the research group did not have any specific requirements. The respondents were contacted by e-mail by the research project team, inviting them to participate in the e-survey. The following part provides a brief comment on the answers by also introducing the individual questions, to clarify how significant the outcome is expected to be given the low number of respondents and the peculiarities of the context. 5.1 Banking Students Twenty students from the Structured Finance and Financial Institutions Management courses participated in the survey. These courses are addressed to both bachelor’s and master’s students at the School of Economics and Management of the University of Siena. This is a small to medium size university, albeit most active in terms of inter nationalisation. Therefore, it provided an ideal multinational and intercultural context. As Figure 1 shows, the survey participants are mainly students between the ages of 23 and 26 (50% of the respondents). The second largest group are those aged between 19 and 23 (40% of respondents), while only 10% of those who took part in the survey are older than 27.

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