Title: Ethical influence of social media by academic communities

Authors: M. Vijayalakshmi; C. Somashekar; Preeti S. Desai; G. Badri Narayanan

Addresses: Department of MBA, Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkuru Karnataka, India ' Department of MBA, Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkuru Karnataka, India ' Department of MBA, Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkuru Karnataka, India ' School of Environmental and Forestry Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Abstract: Social media is capable of providing overall connections among the academic communities by giving a structural transformation to the educational organisation by providing an open way of communication. A confirmatory research study was conducted to understand the ethical environment in the online academic community towards social media platforms, their usage, and time spent, social media habits and also the social media word-of-mouth influencing factors. In the present study, a model is framed based on the previous review and a field survey was conducted. A structured questionnaire was constructed having questions on demographic data, tools, social media usage and activities. Following a pilot study, the questionnaire was reframed. The main survey was conducted and data was collected from 300 samples from the academic community. Data analysis was done using IBM-SPSS 21.0. The result shows that the social media platform acts as a significant role in the ethical environment in the online academic community and also showed that individuals spend more than two hours accessing different social media. The study confirmed factors such as information usefulness, interactivity and credibility as the determinant for social media word-of-mouth.

Keywords: academic community; social media word-of-mouth; social media word-of-mouth adoption; interactivity; information usefulness; credibility.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBSR.2023.133212

International Journal of Business and Systems Research, 2023 Vol.17 No.5, pp.587 - 602

Received: 01 Jun 2021
Accepted: 29 Sep 2021
Published online: 01 Sep 2023 *

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