Empirical Research on Key Factors of Social Presence: Comparison of Three Universities

This study investigates how cognitive presence and affective connectedness impact social presence. We employed Partial Least Square (PLS-SEM) to analyze the data (N=679). Respondents were gathered from an online survey questionnaire by Indonesian and Malaysia undergraduate students in three universities: Universitas Negeri Medan (n=405), Universitas Negeri Malang (n=215), and Universiti Putra Malaysia (n=59). The result of this study indicates that in terms of the overall sample, cognitive presence and affective connectedness were found to have a positive and significant effect on social presence. If we peel the sample based on three universities, the result is consistent in Universitas Negeri Medan and Universiti Putra Malaysia samples. However, not the case in Universitas Negeri Malang. In this sample, affective connectedness was found to not significantly impact social presence. The findings are discussed in detail related to the key factors of social presence that have unique characteristics from the three campuses. This study suggests that in establishing students’ social presence, the teacher needs to utilize learning that intensifies cognitive presence and affective connectedness in order to foster the social presence

Investigating the impact of facebook use on cancer survivors' psychological well-being

Rapid growth of Social Network Sites (SNSs) use by cancer survivors makes it important to examine whether there is a relationship between the use of these online communities and cancer survivors' psychological well-being. This article poses the question of how the Facebook use as the most popular SNS, may impact cancer survivors' psychological well-being. To answer this question a comprehensive literature review of studies conducted in information systems and health disciplines has been undertaken and a theoretical model is proposed. This study is expected to contribute to the existing knowledge base through the development of a new theoretical model which introduces and explains the ways that SNS use may impact cancer survivors' psychological well-being. It provides important information on the health-related SNSs use and is envisioned to assist health care organizations and cancer survivors to use SNS as an e-health application. © (2013) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office All rights reserved

Determinants of Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use in Individual Adoption of Social Network Sites

A large-scale online survey (n=1327) was utilized to investigate determinants of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use as well as other effects on the formation of a behavioral intention to use social network sites (SNS). Findings show that need-based motivations such as social deficit, communication need, and community need do positively impact perceived usefulness while hedonic need and contribution need do not. Additionally, perceived ease of use was affected by technologyoriented self-efficacy. Trust and privacy considerations impacted perceived usefulness as well, while external threats to security did not. Finally, age and gender effects on the underlying technology acceptance model constructs were also explored

Optimal Environment for Flamers: Information Overload and its Effect on Hostile Behaviors

Despite of abundant studies, little is known about controllable variables of flaming. In order to address this challenge, this study explores flaming mechanism in terms of three perception factors (perceived risk, anonymity and expected emotional reaction) and finds a controllable variable which moderates that mechanism. The findings of this study are referred that public self-awareness, perceived identifiability and affective social presence have significant effects on flaming in terms of perception factors, while information overload moderates the influence of public self-awareness on flaming. From those results, it is important to preventing information overload in order to control flaming. More implications and limitations are discussed on last section

The Influence Of Social Presence On Virtual Community Participation: The Relational View Based On Community-Trust Theory

Virtual communities constitute an online environment that offers not only a new form of communication through which community members share information and interact with each other, but also an arena in which members develop social relationships. Prior research on the conceptualization of social presence, the degree to which a person is perceived as real in a mediated communication, results in two lines of perspectives. The media richness view conceives social presence as a media attribute while the relational view considers social presence as a quality of relational systems, emphasizing the relational aspects of communication. Drawing upon the relational view of social presence, this research incorporates the commitment-trust theory to investigate the influence of social presence on virtual community members’ continual participation. Moreover, this research considers sense of virtual community (SOVC) as the mediator between social presence and virtual community participation. The contributions of this research are three-fold. First, this research contributes to social presence literature by focusing on the social relational aspects of communication that are dependent on the participants rather than on the medium. Second, this research examines the role and importance of social presence in SOVC and virtual community participation. Lastly, it helps clarify how social presence contributes to continual participation in virtual communities

An Investigation into Consumers’ Continued Social Shopping Intentions

Social shopping (s-shopping), a novel online shopping model which connects consumers and leverages collaborative efforts, has achieved initial success. However, the continued usage remains a serious issue. To explore the consumers’ intentions to continually participate in s-shopping activities, we reviewed literature on sustaining IS usage and s-shopping technical designs and built a research model. To test the hypotheses, an online survey of s-shopping users was conducted in a leading Chinese social network site, Sina Weibo. The results confirmed that consumers’ perceptions of the usefulness and enjoyment of using the s-shopping system are critical predictors of their persistent usage. Moreover, informational social support from the virtual group also encourages ongoing participation in the collaborative shopping activities. In addition, personalization, social interaction and social presence support of the s-shopping system are discovered as remarkable antecedents of consumers’ usefulness, enjoyment and social support perceptions of the system. This paper fills in the research gap of s-shopping continuance and enriches s-shopping literature

Online Instructional Consultation (OICON) Model for Higher Education Institution

The purpose of this research is to solve the problems of the existing telementoring program which are (a) the miscommunication due to lack of nonverbal cues, (b) the need or competency in written communication and technical skills, and (c) the issue regarding recording, retrieving, and playback of consultation recorded document. The main objective of this research is to develop an appropriate online consultation model for higher education institution. The specific objectives of this research are to identify suitable multimedia components to be implemented in the online instructional consultation (OICon) model, to develop a prototype, and to test and evaluate the acceptance of online instructional consultation (OICon) prototype by students and lecturers in higher education institution. OICon model was established based on the identification of multimedia communications components and features that were adapted and adopted from the existing online financial consultation, tele-medicine consultation model as well as major e-consultation components for public policy consultation. In addition, recommendations from the IT and Educationist experts were also taken into consideration. This model was then transformed into a prototype and tested on 40 students and 8 lecturers. Eleven hypotheses are derived from 7 factors of TAM with actual system variable excluded. The hypotheses relationships among these 4 factors (Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU), Attitude, Behavioural Intention (BI) are supported except that PEOU does not have positive relationship with attitude as predicted. Perceived Importance of Communication Components and Features have positive relationship with PEOU. Users are relatively positive towards the implementation of multimedia communication tools for consultation in higher education institution. Users perceived the communication components as important if the components are easy to use. They agreed that they will use the OICon prototype in the future in term of PU and Attitude

AI-Enabled Smartphone-Based Intervention Mental Health Application for University Students

The novel COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in lockdowns and university campus closure which affected the mental health of university students negatively. This was reflected in mental disorders, with emotional, physical fitness, exercise, and studying are the most affected aspects during the pandemic. The design and development of a smartphone application is the objective of this paper. The app\u27s goal is to assist university students in improving their mental health and overall quality of life by answering a structured questionnaire at first then the app uses artificial intelligence for sentiment analysis of a user’s social interaction. Then the app connects the user with random peers who share similar mental sentiments to chat with and if there is no peer available, a chatbot is used. In case of significant loneliness, the app connects the user with caregivers, community volunteers, and health professionals

Predicting User Response and Support Activities in Virtual Health Support Communities

Despite growing emphasis on the factors affecting different types of supports users receive from virtual health support communities (VHSC), theoretical knowledge on how social awareness capabilities determine the extent of the support received is yet to be investigated. Adopting social awareness theory and using data collected from the COVID-19 support community on a large VHSC platform, we apply linguistic analysis to measure the impacts of three social awareness variables — social sensitivity, social insight, and social communication — on users’ response and support behaviors. The ordinary least square regression results show that social insight significantly influenced the number of replies to a post. In addition, results from the negative binomial regression also indicate that social sensitivity and social communication significantly predicted the number of support votes and thanks votes a user’s post received. The findings reveal some important research and practical implications on the need to facilitate social awareness in VHSC forums

Quality Is more Important than Quantity: Social Presence and Workplace Ergonomics Control Predict Perceived Remote Work Performance

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a widespread disruption to the way that we work. One of its lasting consequences will be the ubiquity of remote work. The effective use of collaboration tools is therefore a critical factor for information systems (IS) research when design the workplaces of the future. We theorize that social presence and workplace ergonomics control are important predictors of perceived performance. Moreover, we investigate how different factors (i.e., collaboration tool efficacy, mode of work, and number of meetings) influence social presence. Using survey data (N = 389), we provide evidence that workplace ergonomics control and social presence are indeed important for perceived performance. Surprisingly, we observe that only collaborative platform efficacy has a significant impact on social presence, and that neither the number of meetings nor the modality were significant factors. Based upon these results, we derive implications for theory and practice