Communication Commons^™

A Narrative Review Of Screen Time And Wellbeing Among Adolescents Before And During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Implications For The Future, Verity Yu Qing Lua, Terence B. K. Chua, Michael Y. H. Chia

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of many. In particular, during the height of the pandemic, many experienced lockdowns, which in turn increased screen time drastically. While the pandemic has been declared an endemic and most activities have been reinstated, there appears to still be elevated screen time among adolescents due to poor habits formed during the pandemic lockdowns. This paper explores the factors by which screen time affects well-being among adolescents and how the pandemic may have influenced some of these factors. For example, beyond having greater screen time, many adolescents have also reduced their physical activities and …

Cheating Constraint Decisions And Discrimination Against Workers With Lower Financial Standing, Grace J. H. Lim, Marko Pitesa, Abhijeet K. Vadera

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Workers with lower financial standing face many personal challenges due to the relatively lower level of material resources they have at their disposal. We propose that lower financial standing not just impacts workers themselves, but also engenders discrimination from supervisors. Drawing on social cognition principles, we forward a situational inference perspective whereby supervisors make a naïve inference that workers with lower financial standing pose a higher risk of cheating which leads them to subject such workers to more negative treatment and deprive them of opportunities. We focus on two ubiquitous ways in which organizations constrain cheating behavior: worker surveillance and …

The Persistence Of Ethnopopulist Support: The Case Of Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines, Dean C. Dulay, Allen Hicken, Ronald Holmes

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The past few years have seen an emergence of populist leaders around the world, who have not only accrued but also maintained support despite rampant criticism, governance failures, and the ongoing COVID pandemic. The Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte is the best illustration of this trend, with approval ratings rarely dipping below 80 percent. What explains his high levels of robust public support? We argue that Duterte is an ethnopopulist who uses ethnic appeals in combination with insider vs. outsider rhetoric to garner and maintain public support. Moreover, we argue that ethnic affiliation is a main driver of support for Duterte, and …

Is A Pretrained Model The Answer To Situational Awareness Detection On Social Media?, Siaw Ling Lo, Kahhe Lee, Yuhao Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media can be valuable for extracting information about an event or incident on the ground. However, the vast amount of content shared, and the linguistic variants of languages used on social media make it challenging to identify important situational awareness content to aid in decision-making for first responders. In this study, we assess whether pretrained models can be used to address the aforementioned challenges on social media. Various pretrained models, including static word embedding (such as Word2Vec and GloVe) and contextualized word embedding (such as DistilBERT) are studied in detail. According to our findings, a vanilla DistilBERT pretrained language …

Anchorage: Visual Analysis Of Satisfaction In Customer Service Videos Via Anchor Events, Kam Kwai Wong, Xingbo Wang, Yong Wang, Jianben He, Rong Zhang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Delivering customer services through video communications has brought new opportunities to analyze customer satisfaction for quality management. However, due to the lack of reliable self-reported responses, service providers are troubled by the inadequate estimation of customer services and the tedious investigation into multimodal video recordings. We introduce , a visual analytics system to evaluate customer satisfaction by summarizing multimodal behavioral features in customer service videos and revealing abnormal operations in the service process. We leverage the semantically meaningful operations to introduce structured event understanding into videos which help service providers quickly navigate to events of their interest. supports a comprehensive …

Champions For Social Good: How Can We Discover Social Sentiment And Attitude-Driven Patterns In Prosocial Communication?, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Robert J. Kauffman, Helle Zinner Henriksen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) is pursuing a social media strategy to inform people about displaced populations and refugee emergencies. It is actively engaging public figures to increase awareness through its prosocial communications and improve social informedness and support for policy changes in its services. We studied the Twitter communications of UNHCR social media champions and investigated their role as high-profile influencers. In this study, we offer a design science research and data analytics framework and propositions based on the social informedness theory we propose in this paper to assess communication about UNHCR’s mission. Two variables—refugee-emergency and champion …

Politically Speaking: Ethnic Language And Audience Opinion In Southeast Asia, Jacob I. Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Language is one of the quintessential markers of ethnicity. It allows co-ethnics to easily identify one another and underscores in-group and out-group boundaries. Recognizing this, politicians frequently employ ethnic tongues to enhance their political appeal. To what extent does this shape the opinions of their audiences? Utilizing a survey experiment, I test the impact of an ethnic tongue against that of the common political language among the Javanese in Indonesia, the Tagalog in the Philippines, and the Isan people in Thailand. The experiment demonstrates that the ethnic language has a significant impact in both Thailand and Indonesia, but there appears …

Social Access And Representation For Autistic Adult Livestreamers, Terrance Mok, Anthony Tang, Adam Mccrimmon, Lora Oehlberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We interviewed 10 autistic livestreamers to understand their motivations for livestreaming on Twitch. Our participants explained that streaming helped them fulfill social desires by: supporting them in making meaningful social connections with others; giving them a safe space to practice social skills like “small talk”; and empowering them to be autistic role models and to share their true selves. This work offers an early report on how autistic individuals leverage livestreaming as a beneficial social platform while struggling with audience expectations.

Section 377a Repeal: How To Handle Disagreements, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, Professor David Chan (SMU Behavioural Sciences Initiative Director and Lee Kong Chian Professor of Psychology) discussed the repeal of Section 377A of the Penal Code and proposed adopting five practical approaches for a more constructive discussion on the emotive issue.

How Do You Demonstrate Enthusiasm In A Job Interview?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Is there such a thing as being too enthusiastic in a job interview, and how should hiring managers assess candidates on this?

Visualizing Politics In Indonesia: The Design And Distribution Of Election Posters, Colm A. Fox

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Where studies have shown that visuals are the primary means of political communication, research continues to focus largely on text-based information. To add to our understanding of visual-political communications, this article analyses Indonesian election posters since the 1950s. Drawing on historical materials and on a content analysis of 4,000 election posters, it asks why election posters have been designed and distributed in particular ways. Findings indicate that in the past, posters used singular, though powerful, social symbols to mobilize demographic groups behind political parties. However, contemporary posters are more visually complex and more candidate-centered, making arguments as to what the …

Does Social Media Accelerate Product Recalls? Evidence From The Pharmaceutical Industry, Yang Gao, Wenjing Duan, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media has become a vital platform for voicing product-related experiences that may not only reveal product defects but also impose pressure on firms to act more promptly than before. This study scrutinizes the rarely-studied relationship between these voices and the speed of product recalls in the context of the pharmaceutical industry where social media pharmacovigilance is becoming increasingly important for the detection of drug safety signals. Using Federal Drug Administration (FDA) drug enforcement reports and social media data crawled from online forums and Twitter, we investigate whether social media can accelerate the product recall process in the context of …

Investigating Toxicity Changes Of Cross-Community Redditors From 2 Billion Posts And Comments, Hind Almerekhi, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research investigates changes in online behavior of users who publish in multiple communities on Reddit by measuring their toxicity at two levels. With the aid of crowdsourcing, we built a labeled dataset of 10,083 Reddit comments, then used the dataset to train and fine-tune a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) neural network model. The model predicted the toxicity levels of 87,376,912 posts from 577,835 users and 2,205,581,786 comments from 890,913 users on Reddit over 16 years, from 2005 to 2020. This study utilized the toxicity levels of user content to identify toxicity changes by the user within the …

Did Twitter Deliberately Mislead Elon Musk In His Acquisition Bid?, Mark Humphery-Jenner

Perspectives@SMU

Elon Musk has officially ended his bid to acquire Twitter on the grounds that it misled the market in its disclosures, writes UNSW Business School's Mark Humphery-Jenner

Theorizing Gender In Social Network Research: What We Do And What We Can Do Differently, Raina Brands, Gokhan Ertug, Fabio Fonti, Stefano Tasselli

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We review the ways in which gender is theorized in social network research and propose an alternative approach for future research to consider. To assess “what we do,” we undertake an evaluative review. In that review, we first examine how gender is typically theorized in structural approaches to social network research. Then, in greater detail, we review social network research that affords more diversity into such theorizing. We organize this more detailed review around a framework that is based on the level of analysis at which the implications of gender are invoked (cognitive, behavioral) and the focus of relational mechanisms …

Battling Self-Esteem Issues During Sns Use: A Multilevel Latent Variable Path Analysis Approach, Shi Ann Shuna Khoo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Although studies have consistently indicated that heavier social networking sites (SNS) use perpetuates poorer self‑esteem outcomes, no study has examined potential intervention methods that can counteract the ill-effects of SNS use. We sought to examine whether SNS use in a self-affirmative manner could mitigate threats to self that are often experienced during its use. Specifically, we hypothesized that the viewing of one’s SNS profile (i.e., Instagram profile) would have self-affirmative effects on individuals and improve their self-perception, and these effects are mediated by self‑concept clarity. We tested these hypotheses through cross-sectional (Study 1) and intensive longitudinal (Study 2) studies. Across …

Understanding The Impact Of Emotional Support On Mental Health Resilience Of The Community In The Social Media In Covid-19 Pandemic, Xuan Hu, Yanqing Song, Ruilin Zhu, Shuang He, Bowen Zhou, Xuelian Li, Han Bao, Shan Shen, Bingsheng Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Background: Emotional support in social media can act as a buffer against the negative impact of affective disorders. However, empirical evidence relating to emotional support in social media and how it influences the wider public remains scanty. The objective of this study is therefore to conduct a prototype investigation into the translation mechanism of emotional support in social media, providing empirical evidence for practitioners to use to tackle mental health issues for the wider public. Methods: A regression model is proposed to examine the relationship between perceived and received emotional support. Received emotional support is set as the dependent variable …

Engaging Individuals In Disease Prevention Behaviours During A Pandemic, Su Lin Yeo, Smu Office Of Research

Research@SMU Infographics

While research has shown that individuals’ belief in a dangerous world can lead to disease prevention behaviours, the combined effects of this belief and the perception of the effectiveness of government’s messages in adopting disease prevention behaviours were not known previously. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided SMU Associate Professor Yeo Su Lin and her collaborators the opportunity to study the influence of the two constructs and the effectiveness in driving disease prevention behaviours.

How Do Information Specialists Keep Up To Date?, Aaron Tay

Research Collection Library

The working environment of information specialists is undergoing profound changes. This is primarily due to rapid advances in digitalization and automation. New databases are being set up or new functions added to established databases. At the same time, data processing and analysis have reached a new level (e.g. through machine learning). In addition, many new software tools to support daily work are being developed. But how do information specialists find out about new developments and assess the practical suitability of new tools?

Nowadays, an abundance of information on new developments in information retrieval can be found on the Internet. In …

Who Is Missing? Characterizing The Participation Of Different Demographic Groups In A Korean Nationwide Daily Conversation Corpus, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Kunwoo Park

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A conversation corpus is essential to build interactive AI applications. However, the demographic information of the participants in such corpora is largely underexplored mainly due to the lack of individual data in many corpora. In this work, we analyze a Korean nationwide daily conversation corpus constructed by the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) to characterize the participation of different demographic (age and sex) groups in the corpus.

Legitimizing Viewing Publics Through Nostalgia: The Mediated Tropicality Of Singapore's 'Kampong Spirit', John Lowe, George Wong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Using two recent films-Long Long Time Ago and Diam Diam Era-this article analyses how Jack Neo communicates a sanitized nostalgia for the "kampong spirit" through his films, which calibrates willing acceptance of the Singapore government's authoritarian rule. In supporting the state's presentist historiography, the films of Jack Neo induce a depoliticization of unpleasant memories arising from the ruling party's unpopular housing and language policies of the past. The nostalgia mediated in both films is aligned towards an imaginary geography and mental map of a First World nation, which exhorts Singaporeans to disavow "the tropics" by nostalgizing the state's modernization efforts. …

Responses To Covid-19 Threats: An Evolutionary Psychological Analysis, Stephen M. Colarelli, Tyler J. Mirando, Kyunghee Han, Norman P. Li, Carter Vespi, Katherine A. Klein, Charles P. Fales

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Responses to Covid-19 public health interventions have been marginally effective. For example, only 64% of the US population has received at least two vaccinations. Because most public health interventions require people to behave in ways that are evolutionarily novel and are mismatched with evolved human perceptual and decision-making mechanisms, it is imperative that we gain a better understanding of how people respond to public health information—including how they respond under different pandemic conditions and how specific groups may differ in their responses. We conducted two studies using data from primarily public sources. We found that state-level Covid-19 threats (e.g., infection …

A Cross-Country Investigation Of Social Image Motivation And Acceptance Of Lab-Grown Meat In Singapore And The United States, Mark Chong, Angela K. Y. Leung, Verity Lua

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This research has three goals. First, it sets out to compare consumer acceptance of lab-grown meat in the U.S. and in Singapore. Second, it seeks to explain the difference in Americans' and Singaporeans' acceptance of lab-grown meat by examining their eating motivations. Specifically, we focused on social image motivations – the motivations to present oneself positively in social contexts. Third, this study also aims to assess if exposure to information about lab-grown meat communicated by celebrity versus expert social media influencers (SMIs) can impact people's acceptance of lab-grown meat products. Our analysis showed that Singaporean participants had greater acceptance of …

Communicative Strategies For Building Public Confidence In Data Governance: Analyzing Singapore's Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Initiatives, Gordon Kuo Siong Tan, Sun Sun Lim

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Effective social data governance rests on a bedrock of social support. Without securing trust from the populace whose information is being collected, analyzed, and deployed, policies on which such data are based will be undermined by a lack of public confidence. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalization and datafication by governments for the purposes of contact tracing and epidemiological investigation. However, concerns about surveillance and data privacy have stunted the adoption of such contact-tracing initiatives. This commentary analyzes Singapore's contact-tracing initiative to uncover the reasons for public resistance and efforts by the state to address them. The government's contact-tracing program …

Linking Online Vaccine Information Seeking To Vaccination Intention In The Context Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Han Zheng, Shaohai Jiang, Sonny Rosenthal

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This study examines how online vaccine information seeking is related to vaccination intention in the United States and China during the initial stage of their coronavirus disease 2019 vaccination programs. Analysis of the pooled sample showed a positive relationship between online vaccine information seeking and vaccination intention. There was also a negative indirect effect via perceived information overload, vaccine risk perception, and negative affective response. Multigroup analysis revealed differences between the United States and China. This study highlights the bright and dark sides of online health information during a global pandemic and has practical implications for communication campaigns to promote …

Balancing Learning And Enjoyment In Serious Games: Kerbal Space Program And The Communication Mediation Model, Sonny Rosenthal, Rabindra A. Ratan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

When designed well, serious games can support effective learning. This study used the communication mediation model to examine the process and outcomes of playing serious games, in this case, the science-themed game, Kerbal Space Program. During a 4-h research session, 241 undergraduate students played through the game's tutorial missions and completed surveys to measure variables of interest. Results of structural equation modeling showed that game progress was positively related to self-efficacy in computer gaming (β = 0.26) and ordinary science intelligence (β = 0.13). Knowledge acquisition was positively related to game progress (β = 0.21) and positively predicted experiential attitude …

Designing Successful Strategic Partnerships, Anurag Vij

Asian Management Insights

The Achilles’ heel of digital transformation.

A Global Experiment On Motivating Social Distancing During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Nicole Legate, Thuy-Vy Nguyen, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Finding communication strategies that effectively motivate social distancing continues to be a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country, preregistered experiment (n = 25,718 from 89 countries) tested hypotheses concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of social distancing messages that promoted personal agency and reflective choices (i.e., an autonomy-supportive message) or were restrictive and shaming (i.e., a controlling message) compared with no message at all. Results partially supported experimental hypotheses in that the controlling message increased controlled motivation (a poorly internalized form of motivation relying on shame, guilt, and fear of social consequences) relative to no message. …

Hci In Southeast Asia: The Journey Forward, E. Sari, J.A. Tedjasaputra, Y. Kurniawan, E. Zulaikha, A. Asfarian, M. Ghazali, A. Sivaji, J.A. Abu Bakar, C.Y. Wong, N.M. Norowi, Tamas Makany, D. Perera-Schulz, T. Chintakovid, S. Nuchitprasitchai, Ethel Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

SEACHI 2022 has been conducted to bring HCI and UX leaders in Southeast Asia to discuss the current state-of-the-art HCI and UX teaching, practice, and support they experience in their region. This activity aims to explore the potentials and challenges and identify the gaps amongst different sectors in different countries. Through this workshop, we will have a common understanding of what we face. It explores how we can work collaboratively to achieve a better purpose, i.e., to grow HCI and UX fields in Southeast Asia. This one-day online workshop was conducted as a collocated event of CHI 2022 and was …

Storm The Capitol: Linking Offline Political Speech And Online Twitter Extra-Representational Participation On Qanon And The January 6 Insurrection, Claire Seungeun Lee, Juan Merizalde, John D. Colautti, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The transfer of power stemming from the 2020 presidential election occurred during an unprecedented period in United States history. Uncertainty from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing societal tensions, and a fragile economy increased societal polarization, exacerbated by the outgoing president's offline rhetoric. As a result, online groups such as QAnon engaged in extra political participation beyond the traditional platforms. This research explores the link between offline political speech and online extra-representational participation by examining Twitter within the context of the January 6 insurrection. Using a mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative thematic analyses, the study combines offline speech information with Twitter …