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The study described in this article aimed to gather insights into what people think when they search the Internet for information. The premise is that people relate to information services and systems metaphorically. In other words, they identify the system or service as analogous to something perhaps more mundane or commonplace. These are known as wild metaphors. They help to explain the unknown or unfamiliar and help us to learn new things. They arise from our individual beliefs and backgrounds but they are also inevitably influenced by our collective experience of contemporary media characterisations of the Internet. This study relates the analogies that academics in Australia report for the Internet with the satisfaction that they derive from information seeking on the network. It provides some insight into how academics in Australia perceive the Internet when they use it to search for information.

The increasing presence of the Internet in the medicine market is making it necessary to examine the ethics and privacy issues related to dispensing medical advice and information on the Web. In order to successfully regulate e‐medicine practices, a comprehensive set of regulations must be established to supplement existing corporate attempts at self‐regulation. This paper details some of major factors that must be present to achieve acceptable levels of e‐privacy/e‐security at the B2C (business‐to‐customer) level and manage the confidentially and trust afforded to e‐clinicians. One of the most important issues among Web‐enabled medicine providers is how to secure trust and loyalty among customers. This can be accomplished by providing reliable and accurate information, while safeguarding an individual's private information from third‐party collaboration and loss of integrity. Various examples and a conceptual model using basic concepts of reliability theory and the resource‐based view of the firm were used to identify the factors necessary to achieve privacy and ethics in an e‐medicine environment.

This chapter presents findings from a qualitative study focused on the strategies that two marginalized seventh graders used as they completed an Internet inquiry project about survival.

The participants spent time over a four-week period in three phases – selecting a topic, locating information, and presenting information. Participants completed journals and participated in interviews. The participants’ online searches and how they organized their presentations were recorded. The researcher took field notes. These four data sources were used to determine subcategories in each phase to document the strategies they employed as they completed the project.

Participants used phrases and questions as they decided on key words to locate information. The majority of the sites they visited ended in the .com domain. They used different web browsers and spent varied amounts of time reading websites once they decided on key words and selected sites. Each participant approached the project uniquely and met the requirements to complete it.

This study suggests that students in self-contained resource classes engage with online content in sophisticated ways but that they still need support from teachers to optimize their learning.

Studies like this add to a body of research offering thick descriptions of teachers and students work together. In addition, this chapter derives value from the fact that it was conducted by a classroom teacher and therefore offers a unique perspective on the classroom as a learning environment as well as a site of inquiry.

To contribute to the development of a theoretically grounded measure of organizational internet use (OIU) by conceptualizing and operationalizing it as a theoretical construct, and by empirically assessing its reliability and validity

The focal construct OIU was conceptualized as an abstract collective object with three components, forming an index with formative, causal indicators. A multi‐method research design – including a cross‐sectional drop‐and‐collect survey among small technology‐based firms (STBFs) in Germany and an observational study of web sites – was applied to assess empirically the theoretically developed construct OIU. This was achieved by using the component‐based partial least squares (PLS) structural modeling technique using PLS‐Graph.

The empirical assessment of the scale, applied to the international business domain, proved to be reliable and valid in the structural model and across assessment methods.

The focal construct was assessed among a very specific population. This limits the claims that can be made with regard to applying it in other industries, countries, and firms. Future research should address this by applying OIU in maximally different research contexts.

The developed construct has important implications for both managers and researchers. It should help in assessing levels of organizational internet use in a consistent fashion across populations and studies. It can be used for benchmarking purposes – of specific interest to managers – and it can be used to explore antecedents and consequences of organizational internet use – of specific interest to researchers.

Internet research is moving from anecdotal and exuberant internet euphoria to internet pessimism to internet realism. Only theoretically grounded, reliable and valid measures can support such a required transition. With this paper we have made an initial contribution for such a development to occur.

One of the most significant aspects of Internet, in comparison with other sources of information, such as libraries, books, journals, television, radio etcetera, is that it makes expert knowledge much more accessible to non‐experts than the other traditional sources. This phenomenon has often been applauded for its democratizing effects. Unfortunately, there is also a disadvantage. Expert information that was originally intended for a specific group of people ‐ and not in any way processed or adapted to make it fit for a broader audience ‐ can easily be misunderstood and misinterpreted by non‐experts and, when used as a basis for decisions, lead to unhappy consequences. Can these risks be diminished without limiting the informational freedoms of the information providers and without imposing paternalistic measures regarding the receivers of the information?

The exponential growth in corporate reporting on the internet has created numerous opportunities and challenges for the accounting and auditing profession, and regulators. This study aims to examine internet reporting practices of companies in Malaysia for the purpose of exploring their auditing implications.

An examination of the 100 Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange Composite Indexed (KLSE CI) companies in Malaysia in 2003 and 2004.

Although there has been an increase in both the number of companies and the types of information provided on the internet, the quality of internet reporting information to users has little improved. This problem is compounded because auditors have little control over web contents and the changes that can be made to audited information. Further guidance to standardise the types of internet reporting information may help protect the interest of users, provide more certainty to what information needs to be audited and reduce audit risks.

The hosting of audited information on an auditor's web site may provide auditors with better control, reduce audit risks and further improve the credibility and reliability of information to users.

Provides information on the financial reporting and auditing challenges posed by internet reporting.

This study aims to increase the understanding of the pregnancy-related information behavior (IB) of pregnant women in Estonia.

The research involved a quantitative research methodology consisting of a semi-structured questionnaire. Data was collected from pregnant Estonian women through a self-administered Web-based questionnaire using a convenience sampling during the period from January to February 2019. A total of 300 pregnant women answered the questionnaire. The data were analysed using statistical analysis and the results of the study were compared with the results of previous studies.

The three topics on which information was most frequently sought were: fetal development, use of medicines during pregnancy and symptoms of pregnancy. The main sources of information were the internet and the midwife. The most reliable and valuable source of information was a midwife. Health-related information was sought mainly because it helped women make decisions related to pregnancy and childbirth. A number of factors facilitate the information seeking process. In addition, widespread access to the internet and technological skills facilitated IB. The following factors hindered the search for information: the controversy and/or ambiguity of information published on the internet and the time spent searching for information. Most women used wearable technologies during pregnancy.

This study has several limitations. First, the weakness of online surveys is the potential lack of representativeness, as it excludes from the survey those who do not have access to or ability to use the internet for various reasons (Evans and Mathur, 2005; Limbu et al., 2021). Second, as most recruitment for the study took place online, there was a risk that those who did not use the internet could be excluded from the survey. Third, as the questionnaire was also shared in the Facebook news feed by the Women’s Clinic and Maternity Hospital of the East Tallinn Central Hospital, it may be that the respondents recruited through it more often used the support provided by medical professionals. Fourth, due to the volume limits of the study, it is not possible to present all the results of the study on the basis of socio-demographic characteristics and stage of pregnancy. Therefore, the findings cannot be generalized to the broader population and future studies should explore a larger and more representative populations.

This study will give some useful information to help to improve the services offered for pregnant women in Estonia.

The findings of this study may inform how to better support this target group.

There is a lack of research in Estonia that focuses on the IB of pregnant women and this research fills this gap.

By selectively reviewing theory‐driven survey studies on internet health information seeking, the paper aims to provide an informal assessment of the theoretical foundations and research methods that have been used to study this information behavior.

After a review of the literature, four theory‐driven quantitative survey studies are analyzed in detail. Each study is examined in terms of: theoretical framework; research variables that form the focus of the study; research design (sampling, data collection and analysis); and findings and results of hypothesis testing and model testing. The authors then discuss the theoretical models and analytical methods adopted, and identify suggestions that could be helpful to future researchers.

Taken as a whole, the studies reviewed point strongly to the need for multidisciplinary frameworks that can capture the complexity of online health information behavior. The studies developed theoretical frameworks by drawing from many sources – theory of planned behavior, technology acceptance model, uses and gratifications, health belief model, and information seeking models – demonstrating that an integration of theoretical perspectives from the health sciences, social psychology, communication research, and information science, is required to fully understand this behavior. The results of these studies suggest that the conceptual models and analytical methods they adopted are viable and promising. Many relationships tested showed large effect sizes, and the models evaluated were able to account for between 23 and 50 percent of the variance in the dependent variables.

The paper represents a first attempt to compare, evaluate, and to a degree synthesize the work that has been done to develop and test theoretical models of health information seeking on the web.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of auditors in Egypt toward the role that continuous auditing (CA) can play in offsetting the challenges facing the quality of Internet-reported financial information. The paper also examines the impact of audit firm type and years of experience on these perceptions.

Ninety-six auditors working in the Big 4 and large local audit firms are surveyed to attain their perceptions on the issues examined. Chi-square, Mann–Whitney and t-test are used to test the research hypotheses.

The overall results indicate that the majority of auditors in Egypt agree that implementing CA can offset the challenges associated with the Internet financial reporting (IFR) environment. The results also reveal that there are significant differences between auditors working in Big 4 audit firms and those working in local firms regarding the perceptions of the effect of CA on some aspects of the timeliness of information.

The paper extends the stream of research on both CA and IFR that confirms that the widespread use of the Internet in disclosing financial information continues to be a worrisome problem for auditing firms.

The paper provides insights into the challenges facing auditing in the IFR environment and how implementing CA can help offset these challenges.

To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to examine issues related to CA in the IFR environment in the Middle East and, in particular, Egypt.

The use of print catalogs for direct marketing has a long history of success. Today, telecommunication networks, such as the Internet, offer the potential to reach a larger market through the use of online catalogs that could be dynamic, flexible, and consumer‐responsive. This paper reports the results of an empirical study that compared individuals’ attitudes and intentions to shop using print and Internet catalogs. The findings suggest that individuals perceived differences between the two catalog media on the shopping factors of reliability, tangibility, and consumer risk. Further, product value, pre‐order information, post‐selection information, shopping experience, and consumer risk emerged as the factors that influenced attitudes and intentions to shop using print and Internet catalogs.