The measurement of guest satisfaction and delight is the focus of this article. An application of a quantitative methodology known as stance-shift analysis is proposed and demonstrated on data composed of Internet blog narratives. The authors argue that the method provides both an efficient and effective means to determine a firm’s competitive position in producing satisfied guests who will not only come back but also recommend the firm to others. Specifically, the method produces relatively detailed evaluations to determine the following: How satisfied are my guests? What are they telling others about their experiences? How is my property performing in creating satisfying guest experiences when compared with the competition? What are my property’s strengths and weaknesses in its competitive environment?

The Carolinas Conversations Collection is a password-protected digital collection of transcribed audio and video recordings of conversations about health, supported by the National Libraries of Medicine. It has two cohorts: 125 unimpaired multiethnic older speakers with any of 12 chronic conditions and a longitudinal set of 400 conversations with 125 persons having dementia. Information about health literacy, health status, and cognitive function requires high standards for privacy and confidentiality, and restricted data use agreements. Since contents are housed in an adaptation of the well-established ONZE Miner, users can search and perform online analysis of sound, word or syntax with increasing specificity.

This discussion examines how speaker pauses, both filled and silent, are keyed to functions within a conversation and to functions within narration. In Alzheimer's discourse, pause-fillers can be both placeholders and hesitation markers; they may be ohs and ums or longer formulaic phrases. Extracts from the speech of 4 older women from the United States and from New Zealand are reviewed for changes in syntactic complexity, for retention of story components, and for pauses. The extracts illustrate these functions for silent pauses: as word-finding; as planning at word, phrase, and narrative component levels; and as pragmatic compensation as other interactional and narrative skills decrease.

The stories told by people with dementia are often fragmented and repeated many times. This leads people to discount their value and ignore what they can reveal about the tellers. This paper focuses on five types of stories told by ‘Ms Tatter’ in 10 conversations with student volunteer partners. Many of the stories involve Ms Tatter as a child interacting with her mother. In them she reveals much about herself and her early life as well as the ways in which she positions both herself and her mother.