Academic literature on the topic 'Social psychology|Psychology|Web studies'

The article presents the results of an analysis of studies of the responsibility category, performed in the 21st century by Russian andforeign psychologists. To search for Russian works, we used the databases of the Electronic Library of the Russian State Library and the Russian Scientific Electronic Library eLIBRARY.ru To identify the works of foreign authors, we analysed 2910 journals from the Web of Science database (Social and Behavioural Sciences – Journal List). It was established that in Russian psychology, responsibility is understood as a form of self-regulation, realised in the consciousness of oneself as a subject of behaviour and its consequences. Russian researchers in the 21st century conduct clarifying studies of the formation and evolution of responsibility, studying the features of this mental phenomenon in representatives of various social groups and professions, and exploring the relationship between responsibility and success. In modern foreign psychology of the 21st century, responsibility has still been viewed from the angle of solving the practical problems of social psychology. We have revealed that most of the studies are clarifying in nature and are devoted to the characteristics of collective responsibility, morality and guilt. It seems important that both Russian and foreign researchers widely use the attributive approach.

Recent studies by Fogg and his colleagues have defined a new psychological construct called Web credibility. It describes the principal dimensions which lead people to believe (or not) online information. In this framework, the factorial structure of Web credibility was explored in a sample of 152 Italian students of psychology who were Internet users, using a questionnaire. A consistent four-factorial structure emphasized crucial aspects of Web credibility, namely, Inaccuracy, Efficiency, Social Validation, and Commercial Features. Such results seem in line with Fogg's theoretical model; however, further research is required to identify dimensions of this construct.

During the global pandemic, lockdown policies aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19 have been affecting all demographics. Although they may be continuing their studies online, university students may suffer severe mental consequences because of loneliness and social isolation. To help students improve their psychological well-being, we examined the effectiveness of a web-based positive psychology intervention (PPI) with 886 students who either took part in PPI sessions or received health reminders. Results show that the PPI sessions (vs. regular health reminders) significantly improved positive mood and mitigated negative emotions among the students. The positive effect of the intervention also remained consistent at both 3and 6-month follow-ups. These findings indicate that PPI should be embraced at universities to boost college students' psychological state.

Purpose: The recent decades were witnessed such a rapid rise in wellbeing researches on the field of psychology. Social psychology intervention (SPI) has a strong impact on individual mental health and remarkable achievement in education domain. In this context, subject development within the last years could be illustrated through a bibliometric approach. This research aimed to analyze the scientific productivity while considering global trends of psychological intervention. Methodology: Web of Science Core Collection databases were selected in the period from 1990 to mid-2018. By thoroughly scrutinizing the objects which came to this attention, the trend of documents, publication date, geographic contribution to the field, relevant authorship and most cited articles, as well as frequent keywords from more than thousand references, were investigated. Main Findings: The results clearly indicate that the United States of America dedicates itself with the highest level of attention in the area of social psychology intervention. Whereas, lower attention was focused on the research criteria in Asian continent, except China. Although the majority of the studies on SPI approach is from USA, but performed analysis highlight the vast research potential to validate without any specific considerations to certain region settings or cultures. Implications/Applications: Despite advantages of SPI, the majority of the existed researches has been carried out predominantly in United States. Whereas, from defining the unit of analysis, the hypothesis might worthily be studied by practitioners to generalize the issue over various frameworks.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the current academic research foci in peer-reviewed studies on gambling. The researchers used co-citation analysis as a bibliometrics method. All the gambling-related publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science were identified, and their citation patterns were analyzed. Our dataset includes a total of 2418 peer-reviewed gambling studies published over the five-year period from 2014–2018. The VOSviewer tool was used to visualize bibliometric networks and reveal key clusters among the studies. The findings indicate that gambling researchers mostly cited authors from the disciplines of neuroscience, psychology, health science, and psychiatry. Only 2% of the cited authors were from other disciplines, such as those in the social sciences and humanities. The most frequently cited sources also reveal the same pattern: that gambling researchers mostly cited articles published in neuroscience, psychology, and health science journals. The publications reviewed deal mainly with the pathological and treatment aspects of gambling. We also discovered some unique patterns of citation and collaboration, focusing on topics such as videogames, social network games, family, business, and tourism.

The article represents the experience of scientometric analysis based on the materials of a Russian journal. The «Siberian Journal of Psychology» was chosen as the object of analysis. The magazine enjoys authority in the psychological community, it is included in the list of State Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles, is referenced in the databases Web of Science and Scopus. The thesaurus method, which is quite widespread in scientometric research in psychology, was used in the work. The whole body of articles published in the journal (1995-2019), including 1237 articles, is analyzed. The article presents the results of statistical analysis: distribution of articles posted in different sections of journals; articles on personalities, psychology as a science (directions, sections, approaches, etc.), various diseases (mental, physical, psychophysiological, etc.), the study of various social groups (normative, professional), the study of age groups (preschool, primary school, adolescent and other age), various concepts and problems. The analysis of publication dynamics in seven most popular sections reflects a living history of changes in the interest and editions of the journal, and researchers themselves to study the problems of clinical psychology, general psychology and personality psychology, social psychology, educational psychology, developmental psycholo-gy, etc. Despite the great variability of the problem field publications, we highlighted the leading sections in the journal, the most significant areas for the journal, approaches and sections of psychological science; social and age groups to which article authors are most interested; concepts, problems, phenomena of psychology, which are the subject of the largest number of articles. The authors of the article believe that over the 25-year history of the «Siberian Journal of Psychology» has acquired not only its own unique face among many other psychological publications, but also has become strongly associated, on the one hand, with a discussion of a very specific field of urgent problems for psychological science. On the other hand, the presence of the leading problems and issues discussed on the pages of the journal is unique and consistent with the high degree of variability of studies presented in the journal. All this allowed the editorial staff of the journal to enter the «Siberian Journal of Psychology» firmly into the recent history of Russian and world psychological science in a relatively short period of its history.

Abstract Introduction: This research applies a bibliometric analysis to articles that have been published in Turkey in the field of social studies. “Social studies” is a discipline that aims to develop a human model with certain features applicable both for researchers’ own countries and globally. In this context, individuals’ social, work, and domestic lives are considered fundamental. Thus, discovering the characteristics of studies on social studies could be useful to interested scholars or policy-makers for determining trends in the field. Methods: In this context, 168 articles from the Web of Science database were analyzed in bibliometric terms. Here, the keywords “social studies teaching,” or “social studies,” or “social studies education” were used when searching the Web of Science database, and Turkey was selected as the study location. Results: Results of the bibliometric analysis showed that the most productive universities in Turkey are Anadolu, Marmara, and Gazi Universities, and the most frequently used keywords on the topic are “social studies,” “social studies education,” and “citizenship education.” Moreover, the most-used words in the manuscripts’ abstracts are “level,” “Turkey,” “participant,” and “impact.” The most-cited authors (judged using co-citation analyses) are Yıldırım, Öztürk, and Creswell, and the most-cited journals (judged using co-citation analyses) are The Social Studies, Journal of Educational Psychology, and Eğitim ve Bilim. Discussion: When the articles in the field of social studies were analyzed by years, it was seen that the first one is published in 2007 and citations have occurred since 2009. It can be understood from the research results that words such as academic success, motivation and social justice keywords also have been recently used. It is understood that most of the journals are not specific to social studies and are general educational journals. Limitations: The only articles examined within the scope of the study were those found in the Web of Science database. This can be considered a limitation of this research. Conclusion: Considering that the most-cited authors, according to the results of the study, are included in the bibliographies of the studies related to this field, examining their works may be a useful guide for interested scholars. The majority of the journals included in the study were general education journals. It was also noted that the majority of the most-cited journals were based in Turkey.

This paper considers mental processes unfolding during humans’ movement in a foreign environment and aims to overcome theoretical discrepancies concerning culture and acculturation between sociocultural anthropology and cross-cultural psychology under the frame of cultural psychology. I propose to perceive culture as a multi-self-centered semiotic field, which is populated by signs and meanings, necessarily emphasizing its heterogeneity and incoherence. Cultures have hazy boundaries and are embedded into the wider web of meanings. In fact, there is one big global culture and all humans are involved in mediating it through intersubjective interactions. Further, the term proculturation is used to fill the gaps left by mainstream acculturation research, which has been mainly oriented on measuring ontologized trait-like characteristics in terms of bidimensional mechanic relationship between cultures and related correlations. Namely, proculturation specifically reflects real-life human experiences and the role of (inter)subjectivity in the process of adaptation in emigration or elsewhere in any unfamiliar environment. Most importantly proculturation implies triadic semiotic relations and the possibility of the creation of novel fusions of meanings, by mixing various ingredients in the process of mediation between familiar and unfamiliar ideas and experiences. Proculturation is catalytically conditioned by references to temporal dimensions and essentially is ever-continuing process.

ObjectivesThis review aims to: (1) explore the social support measures in studies examining the association between social support and depression among community-dwelling older adults in Asia and (2) the evidence of association.DesignA systematic review was conducted using electronic databases of CINAHL, PubMed, PsychINFO, Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection, SocINDEX and Web of Science for articles published until the 11th of January 2018.Eligibility criteriaAll observational studies investigating the association between social support and depression among community-dwelling older adults in Asia were included.ParticipantsOlder adults aged 60 years and more who are living in the community.Exposure measuresSocial support.Outcome measuresDepression.ResultsWe retrieved16 356 records and screened 66 full-text articles. Twenty-four observational studies were included in the review. They consisted of five cohort studies and 19 cross-sectional studies. Social support was found to be measured by multiple components, most commonly through a combination of structural and functional constructs. Perceived social support is more commonly measured compared with received social support. Good overall social support, having a spouse or partner, living with family, having a large social network, having more contact with family and friends, having emotional and instrumental support, good support from family and satisfaction with social support are associated with less depressive symptoms among community-dwelling older adults in Asia.ConclusionsThere were 20 different social support measures and we applied a framework to allow for better comparability. Our findings emphasised the association between good social support and decrease depression among older adults. Compared with western populations, family support has a greater influence on depression among community-dwelling older adults in Asia. This indicates that the family institution needs to be incorporated into designed programmes and interventions when addressing depression in the Asian context.Trialregistration numberCRD42017074897.

Sentiment analysis from microblog platform has received an increasing interest from web mining community in recent years. Current sentiment analysis methods are mainly based on the hypothesis that each word expresses only one sentiment. However, human sentiment are prototyped and fuzzy-confined as declared in social psychology, which is conflicting with the hypothesis. This is one of the barriers that impede the computation of complex public sentiment of web events in microblog. Therefore, how to find a reasonable computational model, combining learning technology and human sentiment cognition theory, is a novel idea in event sentiment analysis of microblog. In this paper, a new sentiment computation approach, which is defined as public sentiments discriminator (PSD), considering both fuzzy logic and sentiment complexity, is proposed. Unlike traditional machine learning methods, PSD is based on the rational hypothesis that sentiments are correlated with each other. A three-level computing structure, sentiment-term level, microblog level and public sentiment level, is employed. Experiments show that the proposed approach, PSD, can achieve similar accuracy and [Formula: see text]1-measure but more cognitive results when compared with traditional well-known machine learning methods. These experimental studies have confirmed that PSD can generate an interpretable result with no restriction among sentiments.

An online survey was utilized where 31 participants answered questions about their Facebook usage and activities. In addition, information was provided about their partner and issues that stemmed from Facebook such as relationship strain and depressive symptoms. Moreover, time spent on Facebook was also examined. Results indicated a correlation between Facebook activities and levels of depression, meaning that participants reported experiencing depressive symptoms after engaging in Facebook activities and viewing their partner’s Facebook profile. In addition, the results revealed that there was no significant association between time spent on Facebook and levels of depression. In other words, those who reported spending more time on Facebook did not report experiencing increased depressive symptoms or relationship strain. The social comparison theory posits that if individuals cannot evaluate themselves using physical standards, they will attempt to do it using social standards, especially when they experience uncertainty about their attitudes and opinions. Results revealed that individuals were less likely to access Facebook when they were unsure of their own thoughts, feelings, and intuition about the relationship. The results of this study indicated that Facebook activities can negatively affect relationships and cause individuals to experience depressive symptoms. More attention should be paid to Facebook usage and to the activities and behaviors of its users. Despite the positive effects of utilizing social network sites, negative experiences can occur due to the nature of the environment.

Social network use is often accompanied by a seductive allure that compels people to showcase themselves in the best light possible. This allure may theoretically be possible due to the concept of social comparison, a notion that is measured in part by the Facebook “friend count,” a numerical value representing the user’s number of online friends in the Facebook community. As there is no known research measuring this effect on current states, to close this gap in the literature it is asserted here that a memorable loss of one of these friends can have negative consequences. This study attempted to gauge the effect of the loss of these friends, colloquially known as “being unfriended.” This piece posits that being unfriended will increase state shame and decrease state self-esteem. To that end, a quantitative, experimental study was employed using 41 male and female, college-enrolled participants from a Midwest junior college to determine vicissitudes to state shame and state self-esteem after being unfriended on Facebook. An independent measures t-test was used to compare group mean differences between those who could adequately remember being unfriended and those who had little to no recollection of a recent unfriending episode. Results of the statistical analysis revealed that participants in the treatment group had no statistically significant increase in shame or decrease in self-esteem than those in the control group. Additional research in this area is recommended to further investigate additional variables used in this study, overcome limitations, and to fully explore superfluous possibilities such as potential mediators.

Social media posts are used to examine what people experience in their everyday lives. A new method is developed for assessing the situational characteristics of social media posts based on the words used in these posts. To accomplish this, machine learning models are built that accurately approximate the judgments of human raters. This new method of situational assessment is applied on two of the most popular social media sites: Twitter and Facebook. Millions of Tweets and Facebook statuses are analyzed. Temporal patterns of situational experiences are found. Geographic and gender differences in experience are examined. Relationships between personality and situation experience were also assessed. Implications of these finding and future applications of this new method of situational assessment are discussed.

Mate Poaching is one strategy used for attracting a mate. Under principles of evolutionary theory, mating strategies are driven by inter-sexual selection and intra-sexual competition creating Sex specificity in the way strategies succeed or fail. The relatively recent emergence of the Internet raises questions about its interaction with evolutionary mechanisms that people use to attract a mate. The purpose of this study was to identify whether or not Mate Poaching exists within virtual Social Networking Sites (SNS), and whether or not poaching tactics used in a Face-to-Face Environment are still considered effective in a Virtual one. This study asked whether there was an association between the environment of Mate Poaching and the Sex of a poacher in three environments (Face-to-Face, Virtual, and Blended); the study also asks whether there is a significant interaction between the environment and Sex of a poacher on the Perceived Efficacy of three Mate Poaching tactics (Enhancing Physical Appearance, Demonstrating Resources, and Humor). The study consisted of a mixed design: Part one was a causal-comparative design answered with a modified Anonymous Romantic Attraction Survey (ARAS). Part two was an experimental design, randomly assigning participants to rate the Perceived Efficacy of 42 tactics from the Expanded Acts and Tactics from Schmitt and Buss (2001). The convenience sample (N=233) was drawn from adults 18 years or older who have had at least one romantic relationship in their lifetime, and were residents of the United States. The sample, consisting of 71 males and 162 females, was 84.1% heterosexual, and split evenly on marital status; ages ranged from 18 to 78, with a mean age of 40. Data were analyzed for part one with six chi-square tests of association, and part two with three two-way factorial ANOVAs. Part one found a significant association between Sex and Environment for “Have you ever poached?” in the Face-to-Face and Blended Environments. The Virtual Environment and all three (Face-to-Face, Virtual and Blended) Environments for “Have you frequently poached?” did not find a significant association with Sex. Part two found no significant interactions between Sex and environment on the Perceived Efficacy of the three tactics; there was a main effect of Sex on both Enhancing Physical Appearance and Demonstrating Resources, further confirming previous literature. There was no main effect of Sex or environment on the tactic of Humor, consistent with mixed results around this construct in the literature.

The purpose of this study was to determine if getting personal information from a social media page, specifically Facebook, affects the final selection decision. This study aimed to examine the effect personal information, specifically race and sexual orientation, has on ratings of hirability and salary offers for male candidates. The study used the data of 105 Mechanical Turk participants who participated in a survey for a monetary incentive. It was hypothesized that homosexual candidates would receive lower hirability ratings and salary offers than heterosexual candidates. Additionally, it was hypothesized that African American candidates would receive lower hirability ratings and salary offers than Caucasian candidates. Finally, it was hypothesized that African American homosexual candidates would receive lower hirability ratings and salary offers than their counterparts. No significant main effects or interactions were found. Additional findings are discussed.

Social networking services are used by a large segment of society; Facebook claims that 1 billion users are active on their website. The potential role for social networking in civic engagement is substantial, and this dissertation expands upon previous research in its examination of the relationship between social networking use and civic engagement. Prior research into the effect of social networking services on social capital creation is limited in terms of generalizability and predictive power. The dissertation explores the determinants of social networking service use, the impact that social networking services have on the creation of social capital, and how social networking website use modifies a respondent's level of generalized trust and political efficacy.

The sample utilized in this dissertation includes 2,303 respondents from the Social Side of the Internet Survey, conducted in November and December of 2010. The dissertation utilizes this data to examine social networking intensity as a hypothesized determinant of indirect and direct forms of social capital. Models explore the decision to utilize the internet, social networking services (SNS), and to join traditional groups, evaluating the hypothesis that SNS usage creates social capital through a different pathway than online or physical interactions. Results provide early support for this hypothesis, as the factors influencing the decision to utilize social networking are separate from those modifying online or group activity.

The explanatory power of social networking intensity is compared to demographic and group-centered conceptions of social capital generation. The data supports the conception that SNS intensity is a significant determinant of external political efficacy and social capital, but is unable to identify a relationship between social networking intensity and generalized trust.

By examining the role that social networking services play alongside factors such as age, education, internet use, gender, race, socioeconomic class, technology, and group association, the dissertation tests hypotheses important to political science sub-fields including American politics, civic engagement, and political theory. Future research examining social networking and civic engagement needs to consider how governmental representatives view the social capital generated by social networking services.

The ubiquity of social media has enhanced consumers’ ability to stay in touch as well as save and access information about others at will. This easy access to information on social media has the potential to change the way consumers seek and remember information. This dissertation sheds light on how information accessibility on social media shapes users’ cognitions. Using a professional social network context, we examine two types of information that consumers pay attention to – content (i.e., ‘who knows what’) and connections (i.e., ‘who knows who’) and how different types of social media influencers (content generators vs. content diffusors) strategically seek information under specific contingencies - when they are vs. are not connected to others (i.e., when information accessibility is high vs. low). We also suggest that individual differences in executive attention moderate this type of content seeking. Results across five studies reveal that content generators tend to focus on others’ content when they are not linked (vs. linked) but content diffusors tend to demonstrate the opposite, i.e., increased focus on content when they are linked (vs. not linked). Alternatively, when it comes to information about connections, content diffusors tend to focus on it when they are not linked (vs. linked) while content generators demonstrate no such active information seeking behavior. Interestingly, selective content seeking manifests only in users who rank high in working memory capacity – a factor that determines strategic attention control. Overall, this research shows that strategic content seeking happens on account of attention control processes and its outcome depends upon users’ social media roles. This thesis contributes to the emerging social media literature in marketing by outlining a new phenomenon, strategic content seeking, explicating its underlying cognitive mechanism and delineating relevant social and cognitive moderators.

Social networking websites can have a positive and negative, psychological impact on individuals who use them, especially if these individuals have previously experienced depressive symptoms. The Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) informs the curriculum in master's and doctoral level counseling graduate programs, yet the extent to which social networking websites and their psychological impacts is explored in these programs is unknown.

This is an exploratory, mixed methods study that explores the extent to which CACREP graduate programs address this topic and prepare mental health professionals to address this topic in their practice as well as exploring the extent to which, and how, mental health professionals are seeing social networking sites impact their clients. Thirty-two participants completed an online survey that consisted of open-ended and closed-ended questions. The data collected was analyzed through frequency distributions and by developing themes using in vivo coding. These themes were then used with the frequency distribution results to inform the findings in this study.

Conclusions were drawn from this study that CACREP programs are not formally addressing social networking websites psychological impacts on clients in their curriculum and mental health professionals shared that clients are being psychologically impacted by social networking websites. Mental health professionals are experiencing a need for education and/or training in this area in order to address this area with clients. Lastly, from this study there are several recommendations for additions to the CACREP curriculum in relation to social networking websites psychological impacts as well as suggestions for interventions to address these issues.

This study investigates how professional sports organizations are using social media to develop long-term relationships with supporters as well as to explore additional functionalities social media have within their marketing and communication strategies. This qualitative comparative case study uses relationship marketing as the base theory and semi-structure interviews as the method of data collection. The interviews were performed to key marketing and communication personnel of the Saint Louis Rams (Rams) of the National Football League (NFL) and the LA Galaxy (Galaxy) of the Major League Soccer (MLS) in order to gather valuable insight into this phenomenon.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, 2009.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 20, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: B, page: 7900. Adviser: Kathleen R. Gilbert.

This chapter describes techniques for sociocognitive inquiry based on conceptual grid elicitation and analysis using web-based tools, such as WebGrid, which are designed to elicit conceptual models from those participating in a networked community. These techniques provide an interactive web-based experience with immediate payback from online graphic analysis, that provides an attractive alternative to, or component of, conventional web-based surveys. In particular, they support targeted follow-up studies based on passive data mining of the by-products of web-based community activities, allowing the phenomena modeled through data mining to be investigated in greater depth. The foundations in cognitive sociology and psychology are briefly surveyed, a case study is provided to illustrate how web-based conceptual modeling services can be customized to integrate with a social networking site and support a focused study, and the implications for future research are discussed.

This chapter describes techniques for sociocognitive inquiry based on conceptual grid elicitation and analysis using web-based tools, such as WebGrid, which are designed to elicit conceptual models from those participating in a networked community. These techniques provide an interactive web-based experience with immediate payback from online graphic analysis, that provides an attractive alternative to, or component of, conventional web-based surveys. In particular, they support targeted follow-up studies based on passive data mining of the by-products of web-based community activities, allowing the phenomena modeled through data mining to be investigated in greater depth. The foundations in cognitive sociology and psychology are briefly surveyed, a case study is provided to illustrate how web-based conceptual modeling services can be customized to integrate with a social networking site and support a focused study, and the implications for future research are discussed.

The link between “Going Green” in research practices and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is studied using general ethics and social psychology literature. This paper investigates and concludes that a researcher’s ethical judgment is the strongest factor influencing their intention to follow green research practices (GRP). Their ethical judgment is molded indirectly by the researcher’s attitude towards environmental awareness. Their intention towards GRP is influenced by existing research practices and experience in using a technology touted as a greening enabler, Web 2.0. The strength of the relationship suggests there is no pivotal turning point in the research practices to become green. This paper concludes that GRP represent a smaller, albeit important, paradigm shift affecting the conduct and dissemination of research with positive spillover effects for the environment.

The so-called “Internet revolution” has dramatically changed the way people communicate and work nowadays. Attending to The Word Factbook developed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), there are 1,018,057,389 Internet users in the world by 2005 (CIA, 2006). Fostering of the Internet revolution from a business perspective is out of question and the evergrowing number of Web functionalities has implied a significant and dramatic change in all business management areas. Within these areas, this revolution has not gone unnoticed, particularly for human resources management. Mentoring, which has been used as a tool for human capital development leverage in organizations has also been deeply impacted by the emergence and generalized use of Internet technologies giving birth to the so-called “e-mentoring.” The origins of the term must be looked for in Ancient Greece. In the Homer masterwork “Odyssey,” Ulysses, king of Ithaca, recommends mentor Alcímida his house, properties, and his son, Telemachus, education on leaving for the Troy War (traditionally dated from 1193 BC-1183 BC). Apart from the word ethimology, several modern disciplines literature (such as management, social psychology, sociology, or knowledge management) have provided with mentoring studies from the late seventies of the XX century, particularly, from the mid-nineties. As a consequence of the growing interest of the topic and its broad application in business ecosystems, thousands of definitions have popped up, trying to cover the semantics of the concept. Due to the aforementioned popularity of the concept, Friday and Green (2004) accomplish a re-conceptualization of the term stemming from a deep and detailed study about existing literature definitions. Subsequently, a definition for the mentoring concept is provided, aiming at being universal, following the authors goal: Mentoring is a guidance process that takes place between a mentor and a protégé (also known as mentee). Authors define similarly the mentor term as “wise and trusted counselor or teacher.”

The growth in multimedia technology has revolutionized the way people interact with computer systems. From personal software to business systems and pedagogic applications, multimedia technology is opening up new pathways to increase the efficiency of existing systems. However, the utilization and implementation of new technologies has been occurring at such a rapid pace that theory and research has been unable to keep up. This is particularly evident with data collection methods in the social sciences. With the growth in use of the Internet passing the 1 billion user mark in 2006 (Internet Usage Statistics, 2006), social scientists are turning to the Internet for data collection purposes in increasing numbers (few, if any, advances have revolutionized data collection more than the use of the Internet). Often referred to as Internet-based research, Web-based research, and cyberresearch, this mode of data collection refers to the administration of questionnaires and acquisition of response data in an automated manner via the World Wide Web. Collecting participant responses was a task that once required hours of direct interaction, created problems in scheduling, and limited the diversity of the population being studied. Now data collection can be automated and conducted at any time with increased efficiency (MacWhinney, 2000) and at reduced costs (Cobanoglu, Warde, & Moreo, 2001). Moreover, depending on the nature of the research, the questionnaire can be delivered to Internet users around the world; additionally, research can be targeted to specific populations that have traditionally been underrepresented in the research literature (Im & Chee, 2004; Mathy, Schillace, Coleman, & Berquist, 2002). However, the advantages of using the Internet as a medium for data collection are not without their shortcomings. Theory has not been able to keep up with the proliferation of Internet-based research projects. Further, creative methodologies to facilitate data collection are being proposed in the empirical literature with increased frequency, raising questions about the construct validity of associated studies. The creation of new research methodologies has led to the need for new ethical guidelines for the protection of Internet research subjects, and thus are posing new challenges for research review boards at many institutions (Flanagan, 1999). Academic disciplines that currently use the Internet as a vehicle for data collection are multifarious, and a discussion of the major issues relevant to each is beyond the scope of this article. Thus, for the sake of brevity, and because it is the discipline of which our knowledge is the most up to date, we will limit our discussion to the specific discipline of psychology, as its wide range of methodologies allow for examples of different challenges relevant to other areas of research. It is important for the reader to note that these issues are similar across the many fields that have implemented Internet-based data collection models for empirical research. This article will provide a summary of the conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges for the researcher considering the Internet as a tool for data collection and will make suggestions for the ethical and effective implementation of such studies. Due to its brief length, the depth of our discussion is neither expansive nor comprehensive; rather we will focus on what we feel are the key issues for the nascent cyberresearcher. Readers interested in a comprehensive review of this topic are directed to Birnbaum (2000).

This article seeks to gain a better understanding of how to address some of the challenges in the digital world. In order to do this, the authors presented some of the emerging issues in the psychology of human behavior and the ever changing nature of cyber threats in the digital world. They reviewed both the theories of crime (i.e., self-control and rational choice theories) and the empirical studies that have examined user behavior on social networking sites leading to victimization. Importantly, they mentioned the role of social engineering as the entry point of many of these sophisticated attacks. They went on to examine the relevance of the human element as the starting point of implementing cyber security programs in organizations as well as securing individual online behavior. Furthermore, issues that are associated with the emerging trends in human behavior research as well as ethics were also discussed. They acknowledge that much more academic attention is needed in this area to avoid the exponential growth of future information breaches.