Search results

This study aims to discover how domain familiarity and language affect the cognitive load and the strategies applied for the evaluation of search engine results pages (SERP).

This study used an experimental research design. The pattern of the experiment was based upon repeated measures design. Each student was given four SERPs varying in two dimensions: language and content. The criteria of students to decide on the three best links within the SERP, the reasoning behind their selection, and their perceived cognitive load of the given task were the repeated measures collected from each participant.

The evaluation criteria changed according to the language and task type. The cognitive load was reported higher when the content was presented in English or when the content was academic. Regarding the search strategies, a majority of students trusted familiar sources or relied on keywords they found in the short description of the links. A qualitative analysis showed that students can be grouped into different types according to the reasons they stated for their choices. Source seeker, keyword seeker and specific information seeker were the most common types observed.

This study has an international scope with regard to data collection. Moreover, the tasks and findings contribute to the literature on information literacy.

This study intended to identify and categorize the drivers of using online English learning resources (OELR) and to understand OELR's impacts.

The authors conducted an online survey, obtained complete responses from 157 OELR users and used structural equation modeling (SEM) for hypothesis testing.

Most utilitarian and hedonic drivers lead to positive perceptions of OELR, which in turn positively contribute to continuance intention (CI). Two counterintuitive findings were obtained. First, functionality was negatively related to the perception of ease of use. Second, perceived ease of use (PEOU) was not related to CI to use OELR.

This study has implications as follows: (1) complexity of the functions of OELR may deter rather than attract users, (2) ease of use of OELR is not directly positively related to CIs and (3) users may seek practical benefits (utilitarian) and experiential learning processes (hedonic) when using OELR.

The authors' study has theoretical significance by being the first to caution that excessive functionality or complexity in assisting learning tools would likely hinder further use of OELR. The practical significance of this finding is that the finding highlights two factors (perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived enjoyment) that could effectively increase OELR use.

Guided by the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS), this article identifies significant predictors that impact individuals seeking COVID-19 information. People with different political ideologies read contradictory information about the COVID-19 pandemic. However, how political ideology may affect COVID-19 information seeking remains unclear. This study explores the major information channels for individuals with different political ideologies to seek COVID-19 information. It further examines how political ideologies influence CMIS's effectiveness in predicting online health information-seeking.

This study collected 394 completed survey responses from adults living in the United States after the 2020 lockdown. ANOVA analyses revealed the differences in salience, beliefs, information carrier characteristics, utilities and information-seeking actions between Liberals and Conservatives. Regression analyses discovered variables that predict Liberals' and Conservatives' online health information seeking.

Results suggest that the internet is the top channel for COVID-19 information seeking. Compared to Conservatives, Liberals report more COVID-19 information-seeking actions. Liberals also express stronger salience, perceive higher trustworthiness of online COVID-19 information, are more likely to think of seeking online COVID-19 information as useful and helpful and report more substantial efficacy to mitigate the risk. Most CMIS variables predict Liberals' information seeking; however, only salience significantly predicts Conservatives' information seeking.

This article indicates that CMIS should include political ideology to refine its prediction of information seeking. These findings offer practical implications for designing health messages, enhancing information distribution and reducing the public's uncertainty.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2022-0436.

This article aims to elaborate the context-sensitive nature of credibility assessment by examining how such judgments are made in online discussion in times of uncertainty caused by Finland's intent to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in spring 2022.

The empirical findings draw on the qualitative content analysis of 3,324 posts submitted to a Finnish online discussion in February–March 2022. It was examined how the participants of online discussion assess the credibility of information sources referred to in debates on the NATO membership. It is assumed that the believability of the author of information is indicative of his or her expert power, for example based on the credentials of a scholar, while the credibility of information content, for example the provision of factual evidence is indicative of the source's informational power.

Political decision-makers, particularly the President of Finland were assessed as most credible information sources, due to their access to confidential knowledge and long-time experience in politics. The credibility assessments differed more strongly while judging the believability of researchers. On the one hand, their expertise was praised; on the other hand, doubts were presented about their partiality. Fellow participants of online discussion were assessed most negatively because information sources of these types are associated with low expert and informational power.

As the study concentrated on credibility assessments made in a Finnish online discussion group, the findings cannot be extended to concern the credibility judgments occurring information in other contexts.

The study is among the first to characterize the role of expert and informational power in credibility assessment in times of uncertainty.

The current study aims to investigate the factors that impact the feedback received on answers to questions in social Q&A communities and whether the expertise-required question influences the role of these factors on the feedback.

To understand the antecedents and consequences that influence the feedback received on answers to online community questions, the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) is applied in this study. The authors use web data crawling methods and a combination of quantitative analyses. The data for this study came from Zhihu; in total, 353,775 responses were obtained to 1,531 questions, ranging from 49 to 23,681 responses per question. Each answer received 0 to 113,892 likes and 0 to 6,250 comments.

The answers' cognitive and emotional components and the answerer's influence positively affect user feedback behavior. In addition, the expertise-required question moderates the effects of the answer's cognitive component and emotional component on the user feedback, moderating the effects of the answerer's influence on the user approval feedback.

This study builds upon a limited yet growing body of literature on a theme of great relevance to scholars, practitioners and social media users concerning the effects of the connotation of answers (i.e. their cognitive and emotional components) and the answerer's influence on user feedback (i.e. approval and collaborative feedback) in social Q&A communities. The authors further consider the moderating role of the domain expertise required by the question (expertise-required question). The ELM model is applied to explore the relationships between questions, answers and feedback. The findings of this study add a new perspective to the research on user feedback and have implications for the management of social Q&A communities.

The discontinuous usage behavior of short video social media presents an ongoing challenge to platform development. The purpose of this study is to investigate the antecedents of intentions to short media discontinuous usage.

This study adopts a Cognition–Affection–Conation (CAC) framework to analyze short video social media discontinuous intention on the basis of cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) and self-efficacy theory. The empirical evaluation of the research model was conducted using SmartPLS 2.0 and was based on questionnaire data obtained from participants in China.

The results show information overload and user addiction have a significant positive association with cognitive dissonance, which is, in turn, found to significantly impact discontinuous usage intention. Self-efficacy moderates the relationships between information overload, user addiction, cognitive dissonance and discontinuous usage.

This study contributes to the understanding of the factors that influence short video discontinuous usage intention and it achieves this by engaging from a CDT perspective and by applying Self-Efficacy Theory. Theoretical implications for future short video platform research, as well as practical suggestions for short video platform operators and users, are also discussed.

This study aims to investigate how message sidedness affects the impact of fake news posted on social media on consumers' emotional responses.

The study involves a face-tracking experiment in which 198 participants were exposed to different fake news messages concerning the COVID-19 vaccine. Specifically, participants were exposed to fake news using (1) a one-sided negative fake news message in which the message was entirely unfavorable and (2) a two-sided fake news message in which the negative message was mixed with favorable information. Noldus FaceReader 7, an automatic facial expression recognition system, was used to recognize participants' emotions as they read fake news. The authors sampled 17,450 observations of participants' emotional responses.

The results provide evidence of the significant influence of message sidedness on consumers' emotional valence and arousal. Specifically, two-sided fake news positively influences emotional valence, while one-sided fake news positively influences emotional arousal.

The current study demonstrates that research on fake news posted on social media may particularly benefit from insights regarding the potential but often overlooked importance of strategic design choices in fake news messages and their impact on consumers' emotional responses.

This study aims to analyse how first-year undergraduate audiovisual communication students assess the credibility and reliability of information on Wikipedia in Basque and analyse whether the experience of being a Wikipedia editor helps to improve students’ perceptions of Wikipedia’s trustworthiness. The purpose of this project was to help students to better understand the credibility mechanisms of Wikipedia in Basque regarding the work of editing and creating entries. Do students’ perceptions about how reliable Wikipedia is change if they receive training as Wikipedia content editors and understand Wikipedia’s credibility mechanisms? What are their perceptions about the credibility of Wikipedia?

The authors observed and analysed students’ behaviour and perceptions when creating Wikipedia articles and learning about the process of evaluating Wikipedia. This research was carried out at [masked for review] over four consecutive years, where 188 students in the Degree Programme in Audiovisual Communication participated through a questionnaire and in-depth interviews.

After the experience of creating content on Wikipedia and learning about Wikipedia’s credibility mechanisms experientially, the majority of students reported that their perception of Wikipedia’s credibility had increased, and 70% of students believed Wikipedia to be reliable or more reliable than expected. A smaller number of students stated that understanding Wikipedia’s editing processes decreased their perception of Wikipedia’s credibility.

This project will lead to a better understanding of the performance of students in editing content on Wikipedia and of the impact that this editing experience has on students’ perceptions of credibility with respect to Wikipedia. It will make it possible to better incorporate Wikipedia content editing into the learning processes of students and citizens. This study provides interesting keys to improving the reliability and credibility of Wikipedia among students.

As the study examined Basque Wikipedia, it has important social implications since Basque is a minority language and Wikipedia is the main sources of information for students who study in Basque.

The authors have been analysing the credibility of information in general and that of information on Wikipedia in particular since 2010. Based on this experience, the authors decided to design this study so that it was carried out while the students were creating and editing Wikipedia content as part of a project in their educational curriculum. Furthermore, the study expands the body of research carried out to date by incorporating the perspectives of media studies students.

Misinformation on social media has become a great threat across the globe. Therefore, the authors aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of social media users' misinformation combating behavior, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the authors merged the uses and gratifications theory, social cognitive theory and theory of prosocial behavior into one theoretical framework (e.g. information seeking, status seeking, entertainment and norms of reciprocity) to understand their effect on users' prosocial media sharing experience and misinformation self-efficacy to combat misinformation.

The authors collected data from 356 social media users through “Google Forms” during the third wave of coronavirus in Pakistan. Further, the authors applied structural equation modeling for hypotheses testing.

The authors noted that entertainment and perceived norms of reciprocity positively affect social media users' prior experience and misinformation self-efficacy to enhance their misinformation combating intention. However, information seeking positively affects social media users' prior experience and insignificantly affects their misinformation self-efficacy. Similarly, status seeking was noted to be insignificantly associated with social media users' prior experience and misinformation self-efficacy.

The authors tested this model of misinformation combating intention in a developing country during the COVID-19 pandemic and noted that entertainment and status seeking motives are context-specific. Therefore, this study may likely benefit researchers, academicians and policymakers to understand the causal relationship between motivations and the behavior of combating misinformation on social media within a developing country.

In this study the authors merged three theories (e.g. uses and gratifications theory, social cognitive theory and theory of prosocial behavior) to understand information seeking, status seeking, entertainment and norms of reciprocity as the main motives for social media users' misinformation combating intention.

The rapid adoption of social media has resulted in a fundamental shift in the way communication and collaboration take place. While social media is recognized as an important marketing communication tool, it has become overlooked how social media marketing activities (user-generated and firm-generated content) influence brand equity creation in the higher education sector. Drawing from social identity theory, this study identifies how higher education institutions develop customer-based brand equity using social media marketing and social brand engagement, taking cross-comparison between high and low subjective norms.

A survey was used to collect data from a sample of 936 undergraduates of private higher education institutions in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. These data were gathered using purposive sampling, and in testing the hypothesis and structure among the variables, structural equation modeling was used to determine the relationship between the study variables.

For the conceptual framework, the authors found that the structural equation model complies with the empirical data. The structural equation model shows that social brand engagement mediates the relationship between user-generated content, firm-generated content and brand equity. Further, the subjective norms were found to moderate the relationship between user-generated content, firm-generated content and social brand engagement, highlighting that the lower the subjective norms the higher the influence on social brand engagement as students receive low pressure and influence from external parties.

The study was conducted at private higher education institutes in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Future research could benefit from the perceptions of undergraduates in public higher education institutes. Future researchers could widen the diversity of service settings in the sample and replicate this investigation to discover if the results are consistent across the whole services sector.

The current research contributes to the services marketing and branding literature in the higher education context. The paper presents the crucial elements in building brand equity for higher education institutes to fill the existing gaps in higher education branding literature. The findings of the current study provide strategies to improve the higher education sector.