Explicating Web Site Interactivity: Impression Formation Effects in Political Campaign Sites

@article{citeulike:1531318, abstract = {This study identifies two distinct conceptualizations of interactivity in the communication literature--the functional view and the contingency view. Although the functional view has predominated academic research on interactivity, this study operationalizes the contingency view in the context of an experiment designed to investigate the impression formation effects of interactivity in Web-based mass communication. A third of the participants in a between-participants experiment (N=60) were exposed to the lowinteractivity version (no hyperlinks) of a political candidate's Web site, another third to the medium-interactivity version (a single layer of related links), and the remaining third to the high-interactivity version (two hierarchical layers of related links). The results indicate that the level of Web site interactivity influenced participants' perceptions of the candidate as well as their levels of agreement with his policy positions. Implications for conceptual development of interactivity are discussed. 10.1177/0093650202239025}, author = {Sundar, Shyam S. and Kalyanaraman, Sriram and Brown, Justin }, citeulike-article-id = {1531318}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0093650202239025}, journal = {Communication Research}, keywords = {blog, campaign, election, politics, web}, month = {February}, number = {1}, pages = {30--59}, posted-at = {2008-06-16 20:40:10}, priority = {2}, title = {Explicating Web Site Interactivity: Impression Formation Effects in Political Campaign Sites}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0093650202239025}, volume = {30}, year = {2003} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:1531318 L3 - citeulike-article-id:1531318 TI - Explicating Web Site Interactivity: Impression Formation Effects in Political Campaign Sites JF - Communication Research VL - 30 IS - 1 SP - 30 EP - 59 N2 - This study identifies two distinct conceptualizations of interactivity in the communication literature--the functional view and the contingency view. Although the functional view has predominated academic research on interactivity, this study operationalizes the contingency view in the context of an experiment designed to investigate the impression formation effects of interactivity in Web-based mass communication. A third of the participants in a between-participants experiment (N=60) were exposed to the lowinteractivity version (no hyperlinks) of a political candidate's Web site, another third to the medium-interactivity version (a single layer of related links), and the remaining third to the high-interactivity version (two hierarchical layers of related links). The results indicate that the level of Web site interactivity influenced participants' perceptions of the candidate as well as their levels of agreement with his policy positions. Implications for conceptual development of interactivity are discussed. 10.1177/0093650202239025 KW - blog KW - campaign KW - election KW - politics KW - web AU - Sundar, Shyam AU - Kalyanaraman, Sriram AU - Brown, Justin PY - 2003/02/01/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0093650202239025 ER -