Conversation analysis of why women are not using their own profile picture in FacebookName:Date:Acknowledgment”In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious and the Most Merciful”All and every kind of praises upon Allah, the strength of universe, who guides us from darkness to light and help us in all difficulties. All and every kind of respect is to His Holy Prophet MOHAMMAD (P.B.U.H) for unique comprehensive and everlasting source of guidance and knowledge for humanity.It is my foremost duty to express my heartiest and sincerest gratitude to my respected supervisor—————– , for their kind guidance during my studies. My grateful thanks to my family who were always there for my support and encourage me. Their sacrifice and encourage always boots me up at every stage.
During writing of this to my faculty specially —————who supervised and gave me valuable opinion and taught me how to remove difficulties and help me in completion of my work. Last but not the least great deal appreciation and thanks to my friends who help me in my work, guide me at my mistakes, encouraged me at my work worried for me if I get stuck in between and advise me if I want any solution. I am thankful to all who help, support and encouraged me with my work including family, teachers and friends. Without their support this success is impossible. Thanks to all of them.I Dedicated this Humble EffortTo”MY LOVELY PARENTS”Whose Prayers and Constant Encourgment Enabled Me to Do this Task of LearningAndWithout Whom The present Project Would Have Been Mare A DreamCERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITYThis is to certify that I am responsible for the work submitted in this thesis, that the original work is my own except as specified in acknowledgments or in footnotes, and that neither the thesis nor the original work contained therein has been submitted to this or any other institution for a degree.…………………………………………….
- Thesis Statement
- Structure and Outline
- Voice and Grammar
- Conclusion
( Signed )……………………………………………. ( Date)IntroductionSocial media gives users the opportunity to build an online persona through posting of content such as text, images, and links or through interaction with others. The way by which customers present themselves is a sort of lead ordinarily controlled by contrasts in measurement or psychologic qualities. Using immense enlightening accumulations of customers and their online practices, late examinations have made sense of how to viably collect models to expect a broad assortment of customer characteristics, for instance, age (Rao et al. 2010), sex (Burger et al. 2011), occupation, personality (Schwartz et al. 2013), political presentation (Pennacchiotti and Popescu 2011) and location. These examinations used unmistakable sorts of information, running from social framework affiliations which use the hypothesis (Rout et al.
2013) to content from posts which are set up in hypotheses about lingo use. With the happening to PC mediated correspondence, there has been a tremendous increment in the popularity and usage of social networking goals (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Substance, photo, and video posts are the underlying presentations of social media. Social media customers have an online character that may be one of a kind in connection to their honest to goodness identity yet through which they suspect online activities (Zhao, Grasmuck, and Martin, 2008). One particular basic course of action that is used for reckoning the customer’s online character is their choice of profile picture (Wu, Chang, ;Yuan, 2015).
This is in light of the fact that the profile picture is the most unmistakable bit of a customer’s online profile as it is every now and again used to recognize the customer and is accessible in any of their online activities. A couple of uses, for instance, WeChat, even utilize a friend’s profile picture to check a customer’s record if there should be an occurrence of the mystery key being ignored. Facebook similarly requests account holders to perceive sidekicks’ profile pictures in order to affirm their own particular records. A champion among the most standard kinds of social networking districts is, clearly, Facebook, which was moved on February 4, 2004. Facebook boasts a customer base of in excess of one billion people beginning at 2012, and all school and school understudies are found to have a Facebook account (Lee, 2012).
According to are port by the Market Intelligence and Consulting Institute (2014), the utilization rate of Facebook is the most bewildering among different social media in Taiwan. It exhibits that the fundamental explanations behind the customers were to keep up social associations and, in addition, to fulfill singular interests and slants. The fundamental inspirations driving customers were entertainment and correspondence.
Cellphones were the fundamental device for achieving this size of development. The amount of customers of WeChat created from 4 million to 6.5 million in the region of 2014 and 2016, a development rate situated as the most raised among all the social media on the planet. Its number of dynamic customers is required to outperform that of Qzone this year and waits simply behind that of QQ. WeChat, a social medium for correspondence in light of convenient hosts, was moved on January 21, 2011. WeChat positions first in versatile messaging in the Asia-Pacific region (We Are Soical, 2014). Like Facebook, WeChat empowers customers to make a profile to post their own specific information, for instance, a profile picture, place of home, and a tweaked signature.
Limits, for instance, substance and picture sharing, messaging, gaming, and cash related organizations are in like manner given. Clients may share feelings, photos, and recordings in their circles and also connect with companions.Personality detection from appearance by humans has long been a topic of interest in the domain of psychology (Haxby, Hoffman, and Gobbini 2000), as it has deep implications in studying personal interaction and first impressions. Most of the studies in psychology have focused on facial expressions as people frequently use facial characteristics as a basis for personality attributions (Penton-Voak et al.
2006), while other studies additionally considered the pose of the person (Naumann et al. 2009). Human raters were able to correctly evaluate certain personality traits as assessed through questionnaires, for example extraversion (Penton-Voak et al. 2006).
While human perception is important, psychologists also raise the possibility that computer vision algorithms would be able to predict personality automatically as a way to avoid collecting costly questionnaire data (Kamenskaya and Kukharev 2008).With recent advances in computer science and a wider availability of inexpensive user generated data, automatic personality detection has become an important research topic. Personality influences a wide range of behaviors, many of which can be directly observed through social media usage. Therefore, methods using a range of modalities have been successfully developed: video (Subramanian et al. 2013), audio (Alam and Riccardi 2014), text (Schwartz et al. 2013) or social data (Van Der Heide, D’Angelo, and Schumaker 2012; Hall, Pennington, and Lueders 2014).In this study, we focus on static images, and in particular on self-selected profile pictures from social media. Although users can post other photos, studying profile pictures is particularly interesting as these reflect the impressions that the users want to convey to others.
Although social media allows a user to shape his or her own personality and idealized view (the ‘idealized virtual identity hypotheses), evidence shows that social media behavior usually represents an extension of one’s self (the ‘extended real life hypothesis’), thus allowing others to observe the users’ true personality (Back et al. 2010).While most of the work in computer vision recognition has focused on object recognition, for personality prediction the subject of interest is usually a person or face. The typical computer vision framework for object recognition relies on thousands of low level features either pre-determined or, more recently, automatically extracted by deep neural networks. However, if using these for personality prediction, they would hardly offer any interpretability and insight into the image characteristics that reveal personality traits.
A sub-category of work focuses on facial expression recognition (Pantic 2009), emotion recognition (Kim, Lee, and Provost 2013) and sentiment analysis (Borth et al. 2013; You et al. 2015) from images, all of which can disclose personality traits. Further, the separate area of computational aesthetics (Datta et al. 2006), aims to utilize features derived from photography theory to determine the factors that make a picture appealing.Previous work on predicting personality from images has mainly focused on predictive performance.
Recently, Celli, Bruni, and Lepri (2014) worked with profile pictures of 100 Facebook users with their self-assessed personalities and interaction styles. They used bag-of-visual-words features defined on local SIFT (Lowe 2004) features and combined different machine learning algorithms to test the effectiveness of classifying users as being high or low in each personality trait. They were able to classify personality traits with nearly 65% accuracy. In an attempt to interpret the results, they performed clustering on correctly classified images from each personality trait to find the most important characteristics of each personality trait and observed that extroverted and emotionally stable people tend to have pictures in which they are smiling or appear with other people. Al Moubayed, Noura and Vazquez-Alvarez, Yolanda and McKay, Alex and Vinciarelli, Alessandro (2014) used the FERET corpus consisting of 829 individuals whose personality was assessed by 11 independent judges.
Theoretical backgroundThere are wide range of people who use facebook on daily basis. But if we analyze the data we find that most of the women do not use their own photo. The reason is the environment of Pakistan and mentality of people.
The profile picture is an important component of social media. However, the profile picture does not always correspond to the real self. This can be explained by the fact that users tend to choose profile pictures that enhance their physical attractiveness without being judged deceptive employed content analysis on Facebook accounts to investigate how its users establish their identities.
Problem statementThe rise of popular social media platforms in the early 21st century such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has coincided with a conceptual shift in digital democracy scholarship, moving from a virtual public sphere model of formalized rational deliberation.ObjectivesThe main objective of the study is:To find the Conversation analysis of why women are not using their own profile picture in Facebook.To investigate the relationship between mentality of people and use of social media.Research questionsFollowing are the research questions of our study:Women are not used profile picture because of social concerns, true?It may considered against Islamic values and social values?It may be due to some family issues.Review of literaturePersonality detection from appearance by humans has long been a topic of interest in the domain of psychology, as it has deep implications in studying personal interaction and first impressions. The vast majority of the investigations in brain science have concentrated on outward appearances as individuals every now and again utilize facial qualities as a reason for identity attributions, while different examinations also thought about the posture of the individual (Naumann et al. 2009).
Human raters could effectively assess certain identity characteristics as evaluated through surveys, for instance extraversion (Penton-Voak et al. 2006). While human observation is vital, clinicians likewise raise the likelihood that PC vision calculations would have the capacity to foresee identity consequently as an approach to abstain from gathering expensive survey information (Kamenskaya and Kukharev 2008). With late advances in software engineering and a more extensive accessibility of reasonable client produced information, programmed identity location has turned into a critical research subject. Identity impacts an extensive variety of practices, a large number of which can be straightforwardly seen through social media use. Hence, strategies utilizing a scope of modalities have been effectively created: video (Subramanian et al. 2013), sound content or social information. Social media are winding up progressively prevalent in this day and age (Gonzalez, 2011).
Different examinations have discovered that individuals utilize social networking destinations to keep up long-remove connections and to help physical associations (Anderson et al., 2012; Tosun and Lajunen, 2010). Madge, Meek, Wellens, and Hooley (2009) recommend that Facebook is more utilized for imparting to companions about work as opposed to for doing any real work. For example, understudies use Facebook for venture discourses as opposed to for real work. Rosen and Kluemper (2008) found a positive relationship amongst’s extroversion and good faith with the level of utilization of social media.
The extent of a client’s social system can be frequently controlled by the level of extroversion of the client.Back et al. (2010) also suggest that Facebook profiles are a reflection of the user’s actual personality and are not just a self-idealization.The use of Facebook and Twitter among Arab females has witnessed a slight rise from 32 percent at the end of 2010 to 34 percent in the first quarter of 2012 even though women make up almost half of the Arab population” (Al Arabiya News,2012). The cultural norms and restrictions that are still imposed on women hinder their participation in the political and social change more than they hinder men (Al Arabiya News, 2012). In its report, the Gender and Public Policy Program mentioned that the virtual world is perceived as a means of empowering women despite the discrepancy between the numbers of men and women on the social networking websites (Al Arabiya News, 2012). Another report, the third Arab Social Media Report, says only one third of the Facebook user in the Arab world are women, whereas they are around half of the users globally, and this is a result of the prevailing virtual gender gap (Khaleej Time, 2011).
Social media could enhance women’s participation in economic and political life, and allows them to increase their self-expression and promote social change, and this is a strong belief that has risen up in the society (Tomlin, 2012). Social media tools now expose aspects of millions of Arab’s daily life, and thus affect the way they interact with the government, do business, and engage in civil society movements (Tomlin, 2012). However, women face barriers in real life that hinders women from participating in social media and seeing the impact it has on their lives. One of the barriers is ICT literacy, which is the ability to use digital technology, communication tools, and/or networks to define access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create, and communicate information ethically and legally in order to function in a knowledge society.
Women in the Arab world are not literate, or not enough literate in this matter. This lack of education can be overcome by training. Other kinds of constraints which are highly significant are the social constraints.
Those include family and society barriers and stereotypes placed on women especially in the places where female users operate (Tomlin, 2012).For the aforementioned reasons, it is obvious that Arab women are in need of training on ICT and the use of digital technology in order for them to be able to voice out their thoughts and advocate for women causes in the Arab world. Social media has proved to be a powerful vehicle for bringing women’s rights issues to the attention of a wider public, galvanising action on the streets of cities around the world and encouraging policy makers to step up commitments to gender equality. Recent cases in Turkey and India reflect the potential of social media to bridge the gap that often separates grassroots women’s activism from policy-making processes.
The explosion of social media and unprecedented use by women of new technologies represents important opportunities to bring gender equality and women’s rights issues to the forefront of both policy making and media attention. In 1995, the Beijing Platform for Action recognised and predicted the media’s “potential to make a far greater contribution to the advancement of women” (para. 234). This call has been echoed in the proposed targets under Goal 5 of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Like in 1995, challenges remain in utilising media to combat discrimination, counter gender stereotypes and raise awareness of women’s rights issues. While globally, women are greater users of social media than men (McPherson, 2014), many women, especially in developing countries, still do not have access to this technology due to infrastructure, costs and discriminatory social norms (ICRW, 2010). This briefing note examines the extent to which social media can be an effective lever to amplify women’s voices and identify strategies to better facilitate their impact on decision-making processes.
Over the past seven years, the OECD Development Centre’s Wikigender platform1 has been engaging with a cross-section of gender equality actors, from civil society to governments, as a means of promoting women’s voices in policy-making fora.MethodologyFor this study we will collect the data from the females of age 15 to 20 years Islamabad and Rawalpindi area. We will develop a questionnaire for the collection of data. The data will be collected from 200 patients for the analysis of our objectives. The first part of questionnaire will contain the demographic information and second part will consist of questions related to the use of profile picture on facebook and other social media sites.QUESTIONNAIREConversation analysis of why women are not using their own profile picture in FacebookRespected Respondent,I am student of ……….
at the institution of…………………
I am pursuing thesis under the title of “Conversation analysis of why women are not using their own profile picture in Facebook”.I would be grateful if you could fill in this questionnaire. The information provided by you will be kept confidential and will be used only for research purposes. Thanks.Section I: Demographic InformationName: ________________________ (optional) Department —————————————Gender: Female Name of the Institution: ___________________________________________________Age (years): 15-25 403860032067548539402876555848350347345Qualifications 3310890-196852428875-48260Academic: M.A/ MSC: M. Phil: B.
Ed M.Ed. M.A Edu. Any other: _______________ (Please mention) srStatement Agree Strongly Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree1 I find it hard to imitate the behavior of other people 2 I believe I am the type of person who can put the picture on facebook. 3 I believe I can learn well. 4 I feel that I will be able to do well in future put my picture.
5 I guess I put on a show to impress or entertain others. 6 I sometimes appear to others to be experiencing deeper emotions than I actually am. 7 I am not particularly good at making other people like me. 8 I have considered being an entertainer. 9 I get tense when I appear at facebook. 10 I get nervous when taking a picture.
11 In order to get along and be liked, I tend to be what people expect me to be ratherthan anything else. 12 I feel a bit awkward in public and do not show up quite as well as I should. 13 I feel confident when taking a picture at public place. 14 I may deceive people by being friendly when I really dislike them. 15 My religious value don’t allow me AnalysisStudent’s t-test was performed to evaluate the differences in roughness between groups.
Two-way ANOVA was performed to study the contributions. A chi-square test was used to examine the difference in the distribution of the fracture modes (SPSS 19.0 for Windows, SPSS Inc., USA).
ResultsRespondents rated how often they used different social media platforms as information sources for academic and everyday information seeking. The answers ranged from 1 to 5, with 5 indicating “almost always.” The top five platforms in the academic context were: wikis (M=3.58), Q&A sites (M = 2.43), media sharing services (M = 2.24), internet forums (M = 1.73), and blogs (M = 1.
57). The top five platforms in the everyday context were: social networking sites (M = 3.88), media sharing services (M = 3.56), wikis (M = 3.31), user reviews (M = 2.81), and microblogs (M = 2.77).
These top five platforms in both contexts yielded a total of eight unique platforms: wikis, social networking sites, media sharing services, user reviews, Q&A sites, blogs, microblogs, and internet forums. These platforms are used for the subsequent analyses. Figure 1 shows the frequency of information seeking via the eight platforms by context and sex. Overall, respondents used social media for information seeking in everyday contexts (M = 2.
86) more frequently than in academic contexts (M=1.98).Figure 1: Frequency of using social media for information seeking, by context and sexProblem-solving style used these two platforms rather sparingly while ineffective problem solvers used the platforms frequently.The results of the eight 2×2 ANOVAs in the everyday context differ from the findings for the academic context (Figure 4).
Here, out of the eight platforms, a significant sex effect was found in four platforms while a significant effect of problem-solving style was found in one platform only. No interaction effect was found. Significant sex effects were found in wikis, social networking sites, microblogs, and internet forumsRespondents rated how frequently they took different actions for evaluating information from social media. The answer scale ranged from 1 to 5, with 5 indicating “almost always.” Averaging across the eight social media platforms, the top five evaluative actions in the academic context were: Compare the content with external/official sources (M = 2.51), Check the posting date (M = 2.47), Check tone/style of writing/argument (M = 2.
38), Check the length of the article/posting (M = 2.37), and Check other users’ reactions to a posting (M = 2.37). In the everyday context, the top five actions were different: Check other user’s reactions to a posting (M = 2.73), Check the posting date (M = 2.67), Check tone/style of writing/argument (M = 2.49), Check quality of images/graphs/sounds (M = 2.
49) and Check the length of the article/posting (M = 2.40). These top five evaluative actions for the academic and everyday contexts yielded six unique evaluative actions and they are included for the subsequent analyses. The frequency of taking evaluative actions by context and sex is shown in Figure 5.
Overall, respondents evaluated the social media information only occasionally. On average, they took evaluative actions slightly more frequently in the everyday context (M = 2.53) than in the academic context (M = 2.
41).Six 2×2 ANOVAs were conducted on how frequently respondents took specific evaluative actions when using information from social media in the academic context. No significant sex effect was found. A significant effect of problem-solving style was found in one strategy: Compare the content with external/official sources. Respondents with effective problem-solving style used this strategy more often than those with ineffective problem solving:The six ANOVA results in the everyday context again differ from those in the academic context (Figure 7). Compared to the academic context where no significant sex difference was found, sex had significant effects on two evaluative actions in the everyday life context.Figure 7: ANOVA results on frequency of taking evaluative actions: a summary. Note: Shaded area indicates statistically significant differences (p < 0.
05). Notation in the shaded box shows the user group with higher frequency of evaluative actions.DiscussionThe principle of least effort is commonly observed in human information behaviour (Case, 2005). Individuals often turn to familiar information sources and behaviour, even when those sources might not be the most suitable for a specific task or context. This is common among students. For example, students often turn to general Web resources, even when they are conducting academic tasks (George , 2006? Kim and Sin, 2011? Lee, Paik, and Joo, 2012). Interestingly, the current study shows that context makes a difference in students’ social media use and evaluation. Individuals used social media as information sources in the everyday context more often than in the academic context? and they took evaluative actions more frequently in the former than in the latter.
This affirms the value of contextual analysis in the research of social media information behaviour. Studies will yield richer data and insights when questions specific to contexts and platforms are explored.The differing results between academic and everyday contexts in evaluative actions are worth mentioning. There were only two significant effects in the academic context, while eight in the everyday context.
It is speculated that information literacy training makes a difference. Through their training, students are likely to be aware of the types of criteria and general strategies for evaluating information in academic contexts. This training may have contributed to more consistent evaluative behaviours and reduced the extent of individual differences. In contrast, there is less information literacy training specifically focused on everyday life information seeking.
This may leave everyday information seeking behaviour more prone to individual differences. Another possible explanation is related to the diversity of problems in the everyday context. Compared to the academic context where typical tasks requiring information search exist (e.g.
, research paper), tasks in the everyday context may vary widely (e.g., online shopping, celebrity search, social networking). A study investigating social media information behaviours for specific tasks carried out in the academic and everyday contexts may help elicit more indepth and precise findings on evaluative behaviours.
It is notable that significant effects of problemsolving style were found in all six evaluative actions in the everyday context, where respondents with effective problemsolving style conducted more evaluations. Overall, respondents made only average level of evaluative efforts in both the academic (M = 2.41) and everyday contexts (M = 2.53). Given that the quality of information from social media has been of a concern ( HYPERLINK “http://www.informationr.
net/ir/20-1/isic2/isic24.html” l “kar13” Karlova and Fisher, 2013?Kim, Sin and YooLee, 2014), this medium level of evaluative efforts may suggest a need for intervention.Interestingly, male respondents were found to use two of the evaluative actions more often than females in the everyday context. This, at first sight, differs from the view of the selectivity model in which women are considered to be more comprehensive information processors who would take more information cues, including incongruent cues, into account.
On the other hand, men are viewed as more heuristic in their approach and use fewer cues for information processing and decision making (Benyamini, Leventhal, and Leventhal, 2000? Chung and Monroe, 1998? Darley and Smith, 1995? MeyersLevy and Maheswaran, 1991? MeyersLevy and Sternthal, 1991?O’Donnell and Johnson, 2001). The difference between the model and the study finding may be attributed to the problemsolving style introduced and controlled in the current study. That is, some of the previous discussion on sex and information processing may in part be confounded by the relationship between information processing and problem solving styles. An alternative explanation may be related to the type of tasks that male students are typically engaged in the everyday context and the purpose of such typical tasks.
Male students seem to be taskoriented: they tend to use social networking sites more for taskoriented reasons rather than interpersonal purposes, for example (Lin and Lu, 2011). To test this, it will be helpful to conduct a study where evaluative actions are examined for various types of tasks that are typically carried out in the everyday context. In such a study, effects of sex, problemsolving style and the context may be more easily and accurately tested.This divergent evaluative behaviour in the everyday context prompts the question whether individuals taking different evaluative actions are similarly effective in obtaining quality information to meet their everyday needs.
Future study may test the outcome of social media information seeking, such as the resolution of one’s information needs and one’s quality of life. This can help detect potential individual differences in information barriers and inform the development of suitable intervention strategies.The study also found significant sex differences. Worth noting here is that the current study used multivariate analyses even after individuals’ cognitive and affective approaches to problem solving have been taken into account, sex differences remain significant. As physical access to information and communication technologies has improved over the years, especially among younger generations, thesex gap is viewed as less of a concern (Weiser, 2000). The current study, however, corroborates findings of extant research on specific platforms, such as in the use of Wikipedia (Lim and Kwon, 2010) and the information sharing through blogs (Lu, Lin, Hsiao and Cheng, 2010), that sex differences in information behaviour remain salient.
For example, findings of the current study suggest that females value social aspects of social media sources more than males when using social media for information seeking in the everyday context. As such, sex should still be a factor under investigation in information behaviour research. However, it may be more fruitful if the sex effect is studied in relation to the specific types of tasks carried out under each of academic and everyday contexts, because this could help tease out effects of sex and context more accurately.The significant interaction between sex and problemsolving style is worth highlighting, as it is rarely examined. Significant interactions were found in the use of social networking sites and microblogs in the academic context. Most surveys found that a larger share of women than men used social networking sites and microblogs ( HYPERLINK “http://www.informationr.net/ir/20-1/isic2/isic24.
html” l “bee12” Beevolve, 2012? Duggan and Smith, 2014). These studies, however, are not specifically on the use of social media for information seeking purposes. Because the current study specifically asked about social media uses for information seeking in different contexts, it was able to show different and more nuanced findings. Female respondents used these two platforms more frequently than males only in the everyday context, but not so in the academic context. It was actually male respondents with ineffective problemsolving style, who used social networking sites and microblogs more frequently in the academic context.
From the angle of information literacy education, social networking sites and microblogs do not appear to be particularly suitable channels for academic tasks. Information literacy professionals may want to identify and address potential issues in social media information seeking in this user group.On a conceptual level, the interaction between sex and problemsolving style found on the evaluative action, ‘Check other users’ reactions’. is intriguing (Figure 5). More research is needed to uncover the mechanism behind this pattern. One angle is to draw from the social cognitive theory and the sex role theory. Both suggest that through learning, socialization, incentive motivation, and incentive structure in one’s environment, individuals learn what is considered sexnormative behaviour in one’s society, which can influence one’s behaviour ( HYPERLINK “http://www.informationr.
net/ir/20-1/isic2/isic24.html” l “bus99” Bussey and Bandura, 1999? HYPERLINK “http://www.informationr.net/ir/20-1/isic2/isic24.html” l “eag91” Eagly and Wood, 1991). A common theme in information technology usage research seems to be that sex differences largely conform to prevailing sex norms. Men’s internet use is considered more agentic and instrumental, whereas women’s usage is more communal and communicative (Lin and Lu, 2011? Muscanell and Guadagno, 2012? Sheldon, 2008?Venkatesh and Morris, 2000).
It is thus interesting that female respondents with effective problem solving style favoured checking other users’ reactions, a seemingly social strategy? whereas male respondents with effective problem-solving style were less involved in such socially oriented actions. This suggests that perceived sex norms, problem-solving approaches, and information behaviours may be interrelated. It may be that individuals with effective problem solving style, armed with higher emotional and behavioural control, may select strategies that are congruent with prevailing sex norms. Perhaps they may choose these strategies even when, at the personal level, the strategies are not one’s preference or favorite. As from an utilitarian angle, strategies fitting prevailing norms are likely to be endorsed by the society at large, which will reduce one’s needs for efforts in overcoming societal resistance, and allow the individual to focus his/her energy on the problem at hand.
Certainly, more research is needed to explore this proposition. Regardless of the specific mechanism behind this interaction, the role of social learning and perceived norms in information behaviour is a fascinating area to explore.ConclusionThe study findings suggest significant impacts of the context on the use and evaluation of social media platforms. The study also reveals interesting interactions between sex and problem-solving style in the academic context. That is, among female respondents, the effectiveness of their problem-solving style does not affect the use of social networking sites and microblogs whereas among male respondents, those with ineffective problem solving style used social networking sites and microblogs more often than those with effective problem-solving style. Interestingly, females with effective problem-solving style checked other users’ reactions more often than those with ineffective problem-solving style.
In the everyday context, main effects of sex and problem-solving styles are found but not their interaction effects.The study supports that the context is again an important factor to consider in social media studies as it influences the behaviour of using and evaluating social media as information sources. In academic contexts, tasks tend to be better defined and individuals often apply a set of strategies they have learned through information literacy training. In everyday life contexts, on the other hand, tasks are less clear, and users seem to rely on their own preferences, which results in more individual differences in information behaviour. A future study, to help tease out effects of user and context variables more efficiently, might examine behaviour in the use of social media for a set of typical tasks in the everyday context.Regarding user factors, both sex and problem-solving style seem to affect the information seeking through social media. The interaction between sex and problem-solving style found on evaluative strategies is especially interesting. The findings could not be fully explained by sex and problem-solving styles only.
It seems to suggest that other actors such as sociocultural factors may have intervened and influenced the social media information behaviour. It has been pinpointed that sex seldom receives central attention in information behaviour research (Ford, Miller, and Moss, 2001? HYPERLINK “http://www.informationr.net/ir/20-1/isic2/isic24.html” l “hup06” Hupfer and Detlor, 2006? Urquhart and Yeoman, 2010).
Of special interest to future research is to discover the factors and mechanisms that contribute to sex differences. In light of this research gap, the authors of this paper propose that a series of research can be developed to pair sex with other factors as explanatory factors of information behaviour. For example, researchers may test effects of sex and information seeking motivations on information behaviour, or effects of sex and perceived sex norms as suggested by sex role theory. There are a variety of perspectives concerning the sources of sex differences, among them: biological approach? sociocultural approach that focuses on macrostructure such as the division of labour? sociocultural approach that focuses on microstructure such as social role theory and symbolic interactionism? psychological approach that includes behavioural, cognitive, or social cognitive perspectives? or combinations of the above ( HYPERLINK “http://www.
informationr.net/ir/20-1/isic2/isic24.html” l “bus99” Bussey and Bandura, 1999?Chafetz, 1999). Factors may be derived from these perspectives to be empirically tested with sex as explanatory variables of information behaviour. Such multivariate analyses will begin to shed light on whether sex moderates the influence and the direction of such influence that other individual and social factors have on information behaviour? and what factors mediate and explain the relationship between sex and informationReferencesBack, M. D., Stopfer, J.
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