Consequential service encounters
How consumers experience and respond to complex interactions with experts and institutions.
Marketing researcher · educator · former healthcare executive
Karen M. Blackwell
Examining consumer behavior in consequential service encounters across healthcare, expert guidance, and public policy.
Research platform
Consumer behavior in consequential service encounters
My work examines how people interpret expertise, navigate institutions, and make decisions when service interactions carry meaningful personal or societal consequences.
Healthcare and patient experience
How healthcare interactions shape information interpretation, decision-making, and later behavior.
Marketing and public policy
How consumer research can inform service quality, organizational practice, and public-interest conversations.
About Karen
Research shaped by healthcare leadership, education, and practice
Karen M. Blackwell is a marketing researcher, university educator, and former healthcare executive whose work examines consumer behavior in consequential service encounters. As a doctoral researcher in marketing at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business, she studies how people interpret expertise, navigate institutional interactions, and make decisions in settings with meaningful personal or societal consequences.
Her interdisciplinary research interests span healthcare and patient experience, expert guidance, information interpretation, measurement development, and marketing and public policy. Her scholarship is informed by executive leadership experience in healthcare marketing, strategy, market access, commercialization, and organizational growth.
Karen has also founded and led a research-informed marketing practice, translating consumer insight, data, and strategy into practical organizational decisions. Across multiple California State University campuses, she connects marketing theory with applied decision-making, inclusive course design, and students’ professional development.
Flagship research program
The problem
Broad patient-experience measures may not isolate specific encounters in which patients feel their concerns were not given appropriate consideration.
The research focus
Develop a clearly bounded, encounter-level approach to studying patient-perceived medical dismissal.
The potential contribution
Advance research in consumer behavior, healthcare quality, patient experience, and public policy.
Current stage: Construct and measurement development
Current flagship research
Medical dismissal
Developing a clearer way to study patient-perceived healthcare invalidation at the level of a specific encounter.
The project examines how these experiences may shape later health-information interpretation and responses to expert guidance. Public materials communicate the research problem, broad aims, and potential relevance while protecting unpublished items, models, hypotheses, and detailed study procedures.
- Encounter-level construct development
- Qualitative research and applied-measurement preparation
- Interdisciplinary relevance for healthcare and public policy
Partnership value
What I bring to collaborative work
Research partnerships benefit from more than a strong question. I bring academic preparation, healthcare fluency, executive experience, and a record of translating complex ideas for varied audiences.
Grant-ready thinking
A socially meaningful research platform, external recognition, and experience communicating across academic and applied audiences.
Healthcare and organizational fluency
Former executive leadership across healthcare marketing, market access, payer relationships, value-based care, and digital health.
Translation and engagement
Experience teaching, presenting, facilitating, and developing clear frameworks for scholarly, organizational, and public audiences.
Selected evidence
Research momentum and teaching impact
AMAFAmerican Marketing Association FoundationValuing Diversity PhD Scholarship
CDIPCalifornia State University Office of the ChancellorChancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program Fellow
4.94/5CSULA overall teaching effectiveness, Spring 2026
Recent updates
Selected milestones
July 2026
American Marketing Association Foundation Scholarship
Recognized through the Valuing Diversity PhD Scholarship for research examining medical dismissal, health-information interpretation, and responses to expert advice.
June 2026
CSU CDIP Fellowship
Selected for the 2026–27 cohort based on scholarly promise and potential as a future faculty member.
June 2026
Quality Matters Preparatory Review
MKT 3210: Personal Selling met expectations in a QM-Managed Preparatory Review after the amendment process.
Start a conversation
Research grows through the right connections.
I welcome conversations about grants, datasets, populations, healthcare settings, measurement expertise, coauthorship, invited presentations, and faculty opportunities.