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The article aims to identify the possibility of contextual shift in traditional notions of e‐government service environment. The authors propose the existence of a new institutional entity as core service providers in addition to the government (G) and citizens (C) in the existing G2C e‐government service environments. Considering the nature of actors involved, the authors position the new e‐government environment under “credence based” service setting that emphasizes user's perspective. The work expands the scope of e‐government to accommodate a much broader range of similar services.

Scenario study has been chosen to understand the proposed contextual shift in traditional e‐government service setting. Study of one of the e‐government practices – “e‐counseling in India” – has been illustrated to advocate the authors' viewpoint. The data is collected from authorized government websites in India that offer e‐counseling services. In addition, 15 in‐depth interviews were also performed with government officials and users to have a deeper understanding about the new service setting.

The study has revealed and defended the authors' proposition on “contextual shift” and validated the existence of “credence based” setting in e‐government service environments. Moreover, it provides preliminary insights about why and how information quality can be a critical element for the aforesaid setting.

Identification of “credence based” e‐government service environments may require a different design strategy for structures, policies, systems, and services to fulfil the user expectations.

Attention is given to developing credence based context for G2C e‐government environments. This “contextual shift” identified in this paper contributes to the existing stream of research that emphasizes user's perspective in e‐government services.

For the business community, the Internet is a new frontier, offering unparalleled opportunities for expansion and growth. Businesses can and do offer their services throughout the world, with the range of services multiplying daily. This paper discusses ethical issues related to the online provision of business and financial information and advice, reviews problems encountered and ethical issues raised, and proposes an ethical code to help address such problems. It begins by identifying differences occurring in an online advice‐giving environment and extending them to identify ethical issues. Specific problems that have occurred are reviewed and ethical issues are discussed. Finally, existing ethical codes addressing Internet practice are then utilized to identify elements in a proposed set of ethical standards for online business advisors and their professional organizations.

This study aims to determine depression, anxiety and stress levels of health-care students during coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic according to various socio-demographic variables.

This cross-sectional study was conducted with 933 students. Data were collected with an information form on COVID- 19 and an electronic self-report questionnaire based on depression, anxiety and stress scale.

Findings revealed that 58% of the students experienced moderate-to-extremely severe depression, 39.8% experienced moderate-to-extremely severe anxiety and 38% experienced moderate-to-extremely severe stress.

Educational administrators can help reduce long-term negative effects on students’ education and mental health by enabling online guidance, psychological counseling and webinars for students.

This paper is original and adds to existing knowledge that health-care students’ depression, anxiety and stress levels were affected because of many factors that are not yet fully understood. Therefore, psychological counseling is recommended to reduce the long-term negative effects on the mental health of university students.

Literature suggests young people (YP) from ethnic minority backgrounds face barriers in accessing mental health support due to discrimination and stigma and so this study aims to explore how YP from ethnic minority backgrounds interact with online counselling.

The study used secondary data provided by Kooth, a digital mental health service for YP, for users who accessed the service from September 2020 to 2021 (N = 118,556). The users measure of need (YP-CORE) was assessed upon sign up to the service, and they also chose the ethnicity and background they felt best represented by. The study hypothesised the following: H1. There would be a significant difference between ethnic group of YP and source of referral; H2. There would be a significant difference in ethnic group of YP and YP-CORE score.

The one-way ANOVA and chi-squared analyses demonstrated a significant difference for both hypotheses indicating a significant association between source of referral and ethnicity, and a significant difference in measure of need when comparing YP who self-identified as White to those who self-identified as Asian.

Findings reveal school-based services are the most popular source of referral for all YP; however, a higher number of YP from Asian and Black ethnicities reached out through informal sources such as Google as opposed to health professionals such as GPs. From the data, YP who identified as Indian, Chinese and African present to online counselling at a lower level of distress compared to their White British counterparts, contradictory to findings investigating measure of need in face-to-face settings.

This research study aimed to collect feedback from the learners on the usefulness and effectiveness of the online counselling sessions organised during COVID-19 lockdown through online platforms to provide academic support to the learners.

The link of a questionnaire designed in a Google Form sent to IGNOU learners of the January 2020 session enrolled under the jurisdiction of IGNOU Regional Centre (RC) Chandigarh through email as well as SMSs. Total responses received were 487, out of which 445 responses were complete, roughly 8% of the total registered learners during the January 2020 session. The questionnaire contained questions on a cross-section of online counselling issues, besides questions on the learners' profile.

Majority of the learners were satisfied with the input provided while organising online counselling sessions during COVID-19 lockdown in India. A significant proportion of learners (88%) used smartphones for attending counselling sessions. Facebook page of the RC rated as a relatively better option than other online platforms. However, more than 50% of learners faced Internet connection problems and found them a significant hurdle for smooth viewing of online counselling sessions. The proportion of learners who encountered difficulties in handling electronic devices was insignificant. The learner's feedback on many attributes such as usefulness and effectiveness of the online counselling sessions, interaction with the academic counsellors, e-content used in the counselling was significantly positive. A significant proportion of the learners have reported that face to face counselling could be replaced with online sessions in future, considering its flexibility in terms of place and schedule of learning and availability of recording of such sessions.

The research study was conducted under Chandigarh region of IGNOU which has a predominantly urban population. Thus the results of the study are limited to Chandigarh region and the region with similar socio-economic settings. This certainly limits the scope of the study.

The study certainly provides valuable feedback to the ODL policymakers to consider replacing face-to-face counselling with an online mode in a phased manner. Online counselling options will be highly cost-effective, easily manageable, and provide flexibility for learners and resource persons, resulting in addressing learners' non-attendance related issues in the face-to-face counselling sessions.

In the analysis of our finding it is clearly stated that the Internet connectivity and availability of electronic devices is an important issue to provide online counselling support to socially and economically disadvantaged groups. Therefore, the research study also identifies such social issues as a major challenge for providing online counselling support to the learners.

This is an original empirical research study and data collected is used in the analysis for the first time. This analysis is based on the feedback gathered from the learners registered at IGNOU RC Chandigarh during the January 2020 session. The data and derived results not used in any other study.

In this edition of digital innovations I will briefly discuss online therapy/counselling.

The online environment can offer a safe space for many individuals to seek support. The virtual world affords many features the offline world does not.

In this and the next digital innovations feature I want to look at this online support and how people provide, as well as, seek support virtually.

In this edition I will briefly look at online counselling with a focus on young people, who are a client group, research has found, often prefer to access mental health services online.

Millennials are considered the best group to intervene in terms of homeownership education as they are of working age and can earn monthly income. However, there is a concern about the affordability of millennials to purchase a house that will influence their decision in terms of purchasing a house. Further understanding of the home-buying process allows millennials to avoid dishonest and irresponsible sellers, as purchasing a house involves a large sum of money. The purpose of this study is to suggest a suitable delivery mechanism to increase awareness of the home-buying process among millennials in Kuala Lumpur.

This study adopts a quantitative method to analyse sets of questionnaire survey that were distributed at purposive random sampling in Kuala Lumpur. This study approached respondents with pre-set criteria, which include the respondents to be between 18 and 38 years old, interested to purchase a house and to have at least an initiatory understanding of the home-buying process.

The findings suggested that there is considerably low awareness of the home-buying process among millennials. However, it is important to note that among the home-buying process, millennials are most aware in the preliminary phase, which is information gathering. Based on these findings, the best delivery mechanism to increase awareness is through online games and training courses, followed by home counselling at a local housing agency.

This study contributes to government agencies and policymakers to interact with society, as education is one of the best methods. It will further enhance their efforts to ensure that the society is well equipped with useful knowledge to avoid the rueful decision of purchasing their first house.

This paper highlights homeownership education by tackling the issue of extensive knowledge of the home-buying process. This is crucial to the foundation of homeownership education, as it reflects the efforts of government agencies and policymakers to ensure homebuyers’ rights are protected in the housing market. This paper will benefit not only policymakers and decision-makers but also first time homebuyers.

The authors investigate how employee social support impacts children’s perceptions of service quality of a child helpline chat service and the chatters’ immediate well-being. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to examine how action-facilitating support, nurturant support and emotional reflections influence the children and to test whether this impact varies depending upon the controllability of the issues discussed.

The authors develop hypotheses about the influence of social support and controllability on children’s perceived service quality and well-being. Chat conversations are coded on the social support given by the employee and the controllability of the issue. Questionnaires are collected to measure children’s service quality and well-being. Using structural equation modeling, hypotheses are tested with a sample of 662 children and chat conversations of a child helpline.

The study reveals that for children chatting about controllable issues, nurturant support and negative emotional reflections negatively influence the immediate well-being of these children. Positive emotional reflections positively influence immediate well-being. For children chatting about uncontrollable issues, nurturant support and negative emotional responses positively influence the perceived service quality.

This study contributes to the services marketing literature by broadening the current understanding of the impact of social support on children’s service quality perceptions and well-being, and by showing how this impact is moderated by the level of controllability of the issue discussed.

This study aims to investigate the external and internal stimuli, which affect the organismic experiences of the users and thereby influence their response in terms of behavioral intention toward the use of online doctor consultation platforms.

The study operationalized the stimulus–organism–response framework for the research model and surveyed 357 users in India who had experienced online doctor consultation platforms. The analysis has been done using the structural equation modeling approach.

The authors’ main results indicate the following key points. One, perceived usefulness, social influence, health anxiety, offline consultation habit and perceived technology usage risk are significant predictors of perceived value. In contrast, perceived ubiquity is identified to be an insignificant predictor of perceived value. Second, social influence and perceived technology usage risk have significant influence on trust. However, perceived usefulness is not a significant predictor of trust.

This study contributes to the theory by integrating technology-oriented factors with behavioral attributes for determining the behavioral intention of users toward the online doctor consultation platforms.

The managerial contributions of this study involve highlighting those technology-oriented and behavioral elements, which can be targeted to attract more users toward these platforms.

This is an original study that has looked beyond the role of technology-oriented factors in influencing the perceived value and trust elements while investigating the behavioral intention among the users toward the online doctor consultation platforms.

The reviews of online tourism have not been taken advantage of effectively because the text data of such reviews is enormous and its current, in-depth research is still in infancy. Therefore, it is expected that the text data could be processed by the method of text mining to better understand the implicit information. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to tourism practitioners and tourists to conveniently use the texts through appropriate visualization processing techniques. In particular, time-changing reviews can be used to reflect the changes in tourists’ feedback and concerns.

Latent semantic analysis is a new branch of semantics. Every term in the document can be regarded as a single point in multi-dimensional space. When a document with semantics comes into such space, the distribution of the document is not random, but will obey some type of semantic structure.

First, overall grasping for the big data is applicable. Second, propose a direct method is proposed that allows more non-language processing researchers or proprietors to use the data. Lastly, the results of changes in different spans of times are investigated.

This paper proposes an approach to disclose a significant number of travel comments from different years that may generate new ideas for tourism. The authors put forward a processing approach to deal with large amounts of texts of comments. Using the case study of Mt. Lushan, the various changes of travel reviews over the years are successfully visualized and displayed.