The Roles of Information Seeking and Information Evaluation for Decision-Making Behaviors
This study examines the roles of information seeking and information evaluation for decision-making behaviors, 25 undergraduate students (7 males and 18 females, M age = 18.60, SDage = 1.12) participated in an experiment about information choices on three
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Abstract This study examines the roles of information seeking and information evaluation for decision-making behaviors, 25 undergraduate students (7 males and 18 females, Mage = 18.60, SDage = 1.12) participated in an experiment about information choices on three different types of tasks—academic, affective, and life event. They sought and evaluated information from two major sources—via the Internet or human interactions. The results showed that there was a full mediation effect of information evaluation on the relationship between preference of information seeking and decision-making of information choices for academic and life event-related tasks. Information evaluation had a partial mediation effect for affective task. It showed that evaluation of information by participants played an important role in decision-making behaviors, depending on the contents and natures of the tasks. The effect was relatively high in academic and life event-related tasks, and relatively weak in affective task. Keywords Information seeking Information choice
Information evaluation
Decision-making
1 Introduction Internet has been changing human behaviors in information seeking and decision-making. Some people prefer using Internet to gather information more than from interpersonal interactions and vice versa. Byström and Järvelin (1995) suggested that information-seeking preference predominately predicted people’s decision-making. However, does people’s information-seeking preference necessarily mean they blindly use those information sources for making decision? Robson and Robinson (2013) summarized and found out that all of the P.-Y. Chiu C.-K. Chan (&) Department of Counselling and Psychology, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 W.W.K. Ma et al. (eds.), New Ecology for Education – Communication X Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4346-8_21
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Fig. 1 Conceptual framework of this study
Preference of Information Seeking
Decision Making of Information Choices
Evaluation of Acquired Information
information-seeking models include a process of information evaluation, that is, how people evaluate acquired information. Byström and Järvelin (1995) further suggested when making decision on different types of tasks, the information needs are different. It raises a question whether information-seeking preference or information evaluation plays a more important role in human decision-making behaviors across different types of tasks. This study aims to examine the roles of information-seeking preference and information evaluation in decision-making behaviors across different types of tasks. Figure 1 illustrates the conceptual framework for this study and there are four hypotheses in this study: 1. Preference of information seeking (via Internet or human interactions) significantly predicts decision-making. 2. There are different preferences in information seeking across different types of tasks
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