Severina Müller

Unemployment is an unfortunate reality, whose overcoming often depends on social support, among other factors. Online social media, such as social network sites and communities, may offer an additional source of such support for unemployed people. This paper posits that online social support plays an important role in unemployed people's ability to cope with unemployment and search for new employment. The paper develops and tests a structural equation model of the influence of online-mediated, enabling and caring social support on job search self-efficacy, which may foster the job search behaviour of unemployed persons. In addition, we control for gender, age, user experience, and attitude towards the Internet. Based on 1322 telephone interviews with unemployed individuals in Germany, we find that online social support drives job search behaviour. Our results show that social support derived from new information and communication technology counteracts the adverse effect of being unemployed to a certain degree. Enabling support and caring support experienced through social media both lead to higher job search self-efficacy, which, in turn, fosters job search behaviour. Furthermore, our model shows that these relationships differ by gender, age, user experience, and attitude towards the Internet.

Escapism, describing a temporary escape from everyday life into the world of media, is considered as a key driver of media use and has been studied extensively in relation to traditional media such as television. However, in the context of social media, little is known about the prevalence and mechanisms of escapism. Against this background, we conducted an online survey with 775 Facebook users that examined the antecedents of Facebook escapism as well as its outcomes on entertainment experiences. The results reveal that Facebook escapism is provoked by a low need for cognition and low life satisfaction. Regarding the effects, the findings indicate that Facebook Escapism not only fulfills the hedonic need for enjoyment but also the eudaimonic needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Furthermore, we found that differentiating between consuming, participating, and producing Facebook user types is insightful for explaining differences in the relationships of escapism with its antecedents and outcomes.

Information Literacy (IL), i.e. the competent dealing with information, is considered a key competence for the networked information and media society that facilitates civic engagement, a self-determined life and lifelong learning. Recent studies have shown that, contrary to the expectations, Digital Natives have low levels of IL. In order to improve IL of Digital Natives formal education and training related to IL is required. In practice, in order to support systematic education and training related to IL from an early age, the development of IL is increasingly considered as an important goal for schools. However, one major obstacle for considering IL in secondary schools is a lack of a scientifically proven model to operationalize and measure IL particularly in schools. The paper contributes to fill this gap by proposing and empirically testing the 7i framework for modelling and measuring IL in secondary schools.

This paper examines the argument that social exclusion perceived during unemployment leads to an escapist usage of online media, which in turn lowers job search efforts. Based on data from 386 unemployed heavy Internet users, the paper shows that online procrastination plays an important role in the lives of the unemployed, but not in a negative manner as to decrease their job search effort. The amount of motivational control the unemployed can muster exerts a strong effect on their job search effort, particularly for individuals with low self-efficacy and/or low job importance. Generally, heavy Internet users with low motivational control struggle more with their job search efforts. Low self-efficacy and/or low job importance increases this tendency additionally. Thus, for increasing the integration of this demographic, online media are not a detriment to reemployment, rather, skill-building and motivational support prove to be key antecedents to overcoming unemployment and should be fostered.

The networked information and media society provides us increasingly with digital information and knowledge. However, the effective and efficient use of information requires a high level of information literacy (IL), i.e. adequate capabilities to deal with information. IL is in general described as the ability to recognize problem-driven information needs, to select information sources, to access, evaluate and use information, and to reflect upon both the applied information searching and processing procedure and the information resulting from it. Despite of its growing importance, IL has been considered only sporadically in information systems research and education. There is a lack of a scientifically proven model to operationalize and measure IL. The paper contributes to fill this gap by providing a synthesis on existing research related to definition, conceptualization and measurement of IL. Based on the findings of the literature analysis the 7i model for measuring IL is proposed.

The networked information and media society provides us increasingly with digital information and knowledge. However, the effective and efficient use of information requires a high level of information literacy (IL), i.e. adequate capabilities to deal with information. Despite of its growing importance, IL has been considered only sporadically in information systems research and education. There is a lack of a scientifically proven model to operationalize and measure IL. The paper contributes to fill this gap by providing a synthesis on existing research related to definition, conceptualization and measurement of IL. Applying the proposed framework through a survey with 86 high school students, we find relatively poor skill levels for the objective IL for most of the students, while the self-assessed IL is distinctly higher. In addition, our study shows that individual differences in IL can be explained by the student’s grade, web experience and the comprehension of the curriculum.

One pathway to alleviate the consequences of technology-induced stress may lie in the role that supervisors may or may not play in mitigating the negative consequences of ICT usage. Based on survey research with 491 salespersons using ICT in their work environment, and tested with structural equation modelling, we discuss the impact of two forms of leadership on individual and organizational outcomes. We differentiate between supervisor influence on ICT use and general leadership, and their influence on ICT-strain (i.e. technostress) as well as on general strain (i.e. work exhaustion). The data show that, in the context of ICT-induced stress, leadership has a significant compensatory influence on work exhaustion and on job satisfaction. The results lead us to the interpretation that leadership constitutes a potential further instrument to ease the negative outcomes of ICT usage in work contexts, and to propose further study into the role of ICT specific supervisor influence.

User trust has been identified as a key success factor for online services. Research has come a long way in identifying antecedents and elements of online trust. Yet trust research is largely focused on the particular context of e-commerce services. Trust formation has been conceptualized as context-specific: Users take the specific risks and benefits of a transaction into consideration when forming trusting beliefs and intentions. Since different business models are associated with specific risks and benefits, we propose that trust formation differs based on the context of different business models. We test this proposition by analyzing trust formation in the contexts of both the e-commerce and social networking business models. Based on a survey of 1'666 German Internet users, we identify paths of trust formation leading from trust cues to trusting beliefs and trusting intentions. We find that the pertinent paths in fact differ between the e-commerce and social networking business models.