Unravelling the location-based information sharing on social media among various contexts: from a dual-process perspective

Abstract

With the flourish of mobile network technologies, the utilization of related tools in providing services to users has become an emerging topic in recent studies in information systems. And as one of the most iconic contents within these services, location-based information has been attached with great importance in its effectiveness in facilitating communication, promoting business activities, and drawing attention from users. Given the success of location-based information in supporting many well-known services like Foursquare and Dianping.com, numerous past studies have investigated the factors that drive individuals to share related content with others. However, these past studies mostly assume that sharing such information is solely driven by the rational process and without any considerations from the affective system. Instead, with the foundation of place attachment theory, this thesis has provided an alternative framework from the perspective of behaviour-level dual-process model to test the interactions between impulsive and reflective processing on the sharing behaviour of location-based information. Besides, since the environment of communication has been dramatically reformed in the mobile network, the decision toward information sharing will be largely primarily influenced by the context at the moment. Thus, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at what contexts existed in location-based information sharing and investigate their effects in manipulating the perception and behaviours of individuals. Therefore, by adopting a mixed-method approach, this thesis firstly conducts a qualitative study to explore the concept of contexts for location-based information on social media. Then, based on the findings from the qualitative research, a research framework is proposed and examined to verify the mechanisms of two processing systems under various contexts.
Consequently, the forms of components in the context for location-based information are updated, and a structure that consists of two dimensions (i.e., social and physical context) and four perspectives (i.e., egoism vs. collectivism and distinctiveness vs. connectedness) is constructed. Lastly, the hypotheses are tested and discussed according to different contexts by conducting the scenario-based survey under various contexts for location-based information. This thesis has confirmed that individuals utilize the dual-process model in deciding whether to share location-based information. The interactions between the two processing systems will be influenced by the exact context at the moment of sharing. It also provides insights for practitioners to consider the influence of contexts. The service providers of location-based information could utilize the findings to design a better system in destination design, facilitating information sharing, and content recommendation.

Date of Award	Jul 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Alain Chong (Supervisor) & Patrick Chau (Supervisor)