University Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)

Today my month long stay in Ciudad Real (Spain) as a guest of the University of Castilla - La Mancha (UCLM) comes to an end. Over the period I worked with Dr. Angel Millan and Ph.D. student Marta Retamosa Ferreiro from the marketing department, exchanging ideas and experiences about research in marketing. Our main focus was on University branding as they have a substantial database about the perceptions of their university’s brand. 

We worked on a paper about the satisfaction of students across different courses (engineering, business and nursing), using customer-based brand equity as the theoretical underpinning. This involved doing a factor analysis followed by a logistic regression and, as always, statistical analysis takes longer than you anticipate (even though we were already familiar with the tests!). In the end we got there and we are now continuing to write the paper.

UCLM has five campi spread across the region (Albacete, Ciudad Real, Toledo, Cuenca and Talavera). The Ciudad Real one is modern and the facilities are good.

Interestingly, I had not met Dr. Millan in person prior to my arrival in Ciudad Real. Five years ago I presented a paper in Portugal about emotions in events which Dr. Millan attended. He then started supervising a Ph.D. on business travel which featured a strong component of emotions (experienced by business travellers during their trip). When he and his Ph.D. student were writing a paper about it, Dr. Millan remembered my talk and they decided to invite me to collaborate with them. 

In October they sent me an email asking if I was interested in co-authoring a paper with them. We ended up collaborating and submitted the paper to a good journal (three star according to the U.K.’s ABS list). After we submitted the paper, he commented that UCLM had funding for guest researchers and asked whether I would be interested in spending some time working with him. Fortunately I had a pretty uneventful July and therefore we applied to the grant, which was awarded. 

By the way, the paper we submitted got quite positive reviews, but as always we were asked to do some changes which we also worked on during my stay. We are now awaiting feedback about the revised version (we are optimistic as the changes requested were all possible to address!).

The month in Spain was not only about work. In the next post I will talk about some of the leisure experiences during my stay.