University of Twente Student Theses
Personalizing Warning Messages: Sensation seeking as a predictor of risk perception, information sufficiency and self-efficacy
Broermann, Christina (2018) Personalizing Warning Messages: Sensation seeking as a predictor of risk perception, information sufficiency and self-efficacy.
|
PDF
367kB |
| Abstract: | As social media and mobile phones become increasingly popular, it became much easier and faster to spread news and information. Cell-broadcasting systems such as NL-Alert are used to spread emergency information to everyone within a certain distance to the danger. Furthermore, news stations, authorities and organizations which are responsible for public safety use social media to inform the public. Users have access to additional information online, including pictures and videos of an emergency. According to the Extended Parallel Processing Model by Witte (Rintamaki & Yang, 2014) and the Protection Motivation Theory by Rogers ((Maddux & Rogers, 1983), it is important to communicate the right amount of risk-perception and reach an adequate level of information sufficiency so that the individual feels capable of performing tasks to reduce risks to themselves and not become overwhelmed. How such warning messages are processed also depends on personality traits of the individual. Sensation seeking is a personality trait that is often associated with risk behavior. Personalizing warning messages on social media or NL-Alert could therefore be a way of reaching adequate levels of risk perception, information sufficiency and self-efficacy for high- and low-level sensation seekers. To test if the amount of information in a warning message has an effect on the above mentioned variables, a between subject-design was chosen, with two conditions. In condition one, participants were presented with a standard NL-Alert message while participants in the other condition read the same message in combination with a Facebook post including additional information in condition two. In total, 124 participants were included in the analysis. An ANOVA showed no significant differences among the two conditions. A regression analysis did not confirm that sensation seeking is a good predictor of risk perception, information sufficiency and self-efficacy. In further research, the vignette should be improved so that participants can better imagine themselves in the emergency situation and the information sufficiency scale should be improved so that all items measure indeed one construct. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 77 psychology |
| Programme: | Psychology BSc (56604) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/75189 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
Show download statistics for this publication
Show download statistics for this publicationRepository Staff Only: item control page