TO TWEET OR TO RETWEET? THAT IS THE QUESTION FOR DOCTORS ON MICROBLOGS
Open Access
- Author:
- Lee, Ji Young
- Graduate Program:
- Media Studies
- Degree:
- Master of Arts
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- S Shyam, Sundar, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
S. Shyam Sundar, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- bandwagon
authority
health communication
Twitter
source proximity - Abstract:
- The intent of this study is to investigate the effect of interface cues conveying source attributes on credibility of health messages sent via Twitter, a microblogging platform. Based on the MAIN model (Sundar, 2008), an online experiment (N = 63) was conducted to explore the impact of those cues on perceived credibility of content, content liking, behavior intention, perceived credibility of source and that of a distal source by utilizing a 2 (authority cue: a professional (high) vs. a layperson (low)) X 2 (bandwagon cue: large (high) vs. small number of followers (low)) X 2 (source proximity cue: a proximate source (retweet) vs. distal source (tweet)) mixed factorial design. A significant three-way interaction effect on perceived credibility of content was found, such that for tweets from a high authority source, higher bandwagon means greater perceived content credibility, whereas for low authority sources, higher bandwagon leads to lesser perceived credibility of health content. For retweets from a high-authority source, however, higher bandwagon leads to lesser perceived credibility of the content whereas for a low-authority source, higher bandwagon leads to higher perceived credibility of the content. The study results also show that content credibility was significantly associated with higher perceived expertise of proximal source for tweets, whereas for retweets, perceived trustworthiness of proximal source are significant predictors of content credibility. An indirect effect test shows that when a low-authority source retweets, the distal source becomes appears more authoritative in comparison, thus leading to higher content credibility. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as limitations of this study, are discussed.