Growing as social beings: How social media use for college sports is associated with college students’ group identity and collective self-esteem

The Relationship between Football Participation and Sport Trait Confidence for Adolescents: A Chain-Mediated Effect of Collective Self-Esteem and Self-Esteem

To investigate the relationship between sports participation and sport trait confidence, 1659 teenagers in primary and secondary schools who regularly play football were asked to complete the Sports Participation Scale, Collective Self-Esteem Scale, Self-Esteem Scale, and Sport Trait Confidence Scale. The results show that (1) the positive prediction of football participation on sport trait confidence is not significant; (2) collective self-esteem and self-esteem play a mediating role between football participation and sport trait confidence; (3) the mediating effect occurs through three pathways. The study provides theoretical guidance and empirical evidence for the lead and intervention of adolescent football participation on sport trait confidence. This study created a chain-mediated model to examine the mediating role of collective self-esteem and self-esteem in their relationship, as well as the impact of the two as chain mediators on football participation and sport trait confidence.

General Self-Esteem as the Mechanism Through Which Early-Childhood Parental Trust and Support Affect Adolescents' Learning Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model

Parental trust and support are machineries for children's cognitive growth and behaviors exhibited at a later age. Their influence on students' learning engagement at school has been reported, but little is known about the mechanisms through which such a proposed causal effect occurs. This study tested 2 major proposed hypotheses; (1) general self-esteem (GSE) mediates the causal relationship between parents' trust and support (PTS) and Learning engagement (LE). (2) The mediation effect is further moderated by students' college grade level. Data was collected from 1139 college students in Tanzania (M_age = 22.5, SD_age = 0.681) who filled out an online-designed questionnaire. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science), PROCESS macro of SPSS, and JASP (Jeffrey's Amazing Statistical Program) were used for analyzing data. The results indicated that GSE had a mediating effect (β = .0912, SE = 0.0134, P < .001) on the causal relationship between PTS and LE. The unmediated (direct) effect of PTS on LE (β = .2125, SE = 0.0419, P < .001) was lower than the total effect (β = .3037, SE = 0.0553, P < .001) after the mediation. The interaction effects of PTS (β = .0463, P < .001) and GSE (β = .0495, P < .001) on students' college grades were statistically significant, indicating that the mediation effect of GSE on the causal relationship between PTS and LE was moderated by college grades. Parental trust and support enhance students' behavioral learning at school through their general self-esteem, built from the family level (parenting).

#NotHolidayButDistance Education: a study on social media use for K-12 education during the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose

This study aims to explore Twitter posts of Turkish government agencies and the public under a specific hashtag, #NotHolidayButDistanceEducation, specifically related to online distance education during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used a thematic analysis on 22,547 original tweets posted by 6,970 users during the first month of online distance education in Turkish K-12 schools. Based on like and retweet counts, the study further explored the extent of stakeholders’ engagement with the observed themes.

Findings

The findings showed that government agencies and citizens used Twitter to provide technical and psychological support, appreciate and motivate stakeholders, demonstrate sample distance education activities, share information and offer suggestions about the ongoing online distance education. It was also observed that the hashtag has been used for expressing negative views about online distance education and for political purposes. A positive relationship was found between social media engagement and providing technical support or sharing information for online distance education.

Practical implications

This study highlights the role of social media in providing practical and emotional support to education stakeholders in times of crisis. Thus, governments can use social media to provide evidence-based psychological and physical health support to their citizens during a pandemic. Social media can serve to improve education practices in schools through the interactions between the public and policymakers.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study can be considered unique because it demonstrates the civic use of social media for educational crisis management. This study highlights the influence of social media in educational policy and practice development in the contemporary era.

Research on the Path of Network Opinion Expression in AI Environment for College Students

Network interaction has evolved into a grouping paradigm as civilization has progressed and artificial intelligence technology has advanced. This network group model has quickly extended communication space, improved communication content, and tailored to the demands of netizens. The fast growth of the network community on campus can assist students in meeting a variety of communication needs and serve as a vital platform for their studies and daily lives. It is investigated how to extract opinion material from comment text. A strategy for extracting opinion attitude words and network opinion characteristic words from a single comment text is offered at a finer level. The development of a semiautonomous domain emotion dictionary generating technique improves the accuracy of opinion and attitude word extraction. This paper proposes a window-constrained Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model that improves the accuracy of extracting network opinion feature words and ensures that network opinion feature words and opinion attitude words are synchronized by using the location information of opinion attitude words. The two-stage opinion leader mining approach and the linear threshold model based on user roles are the subjects of model simulation tests in this study. It is demonstrated that the two-stage opinion leader mining method suggested in this study can greatly reduce the running time while properly finding opinion leaders with stronger leadership by comparing the results with existing models. It also shows that the linear threshold model based on user roles proposed in this paper can effectively limit the total number of active users who are activated multiple times during the information diffusion process by distinguishing the effects of different user roles on the information diffusion process.

How Does Social Currency Influence Prosocial Behavior? The Role of Collective Self-Esteem and Communication Network Heterogeneity

The social currency, the existing potential resource in the social networks and communities of an individual, has become more significant in the era of information technology. Meanwhile, the rapid development of Internet service, especially its application on mobile devices, brings many new contents of prosocial behaviors (PBs), which benefits both individuals and communities. Specifically, social currency plays a positive role in promoting PB, forming positive personalities, promoting positive social adaptation, and contributing to human survival and social development. However, the theoretical research in this field still lags far behind the development of practice, and the research on the impact of social currency on PB remains exceedingly scarce. Grounded in the social exchange theory (SET), the present study collects a total of 497 WeChat user questionnaires, constructs a model for the influence mechanism of social currency on PB, and tests the hypothesis through hierarchical regression. According to the results obtained, it was found that the social currency is positively associated with PB, and users with a more social currency are more likely to act prosocially on their own. The PB of an individual is then influenced by the social currency generated through collective self-esteem (CS) so that the perception of CS can be considered as a mediating variable. Moreover, the communication network heterogeneity (CNH) moderates the above relationship, and the degree of heterogeneity will have different effects on the relationship of CS. The obtained conclusions enrich the previous theoretical results of PB and provided new insights for social managers to enhance the prosocial-related behaviors for the group, organization, and society.

Collective Self-Esteem and School Segregation in Chilean Secondary Students

Chile has established hybrid policies for the administrative distribution of its educational establishments, leading to significant gaps in educational results and school conditions between public, mixed, and private schools. As a result, there are high levels of segregation, and social and economic vulnerability that put public schools at a disadvantage, affecting their image and causing a constant decrease in enrollment. An abbreviated version of Luhtanen and Crocker’s (1992) collective self-esteem scale was adapted and validated for the Chilean educational context because of its usefulness in studying processes of social segregation and cultural coherence, seeking to identify student perception about the appreciation of school actions in the context of belonging and identification with schools, in order to compare between groups according to types of establishment and assess the effects of school conditions on the perception of students. A representative sample of Chilean secondary students between 9th and 12th grades participated (n = 3635, 52.8% women, average age 15.9 years, SD = 1.1). Descriptive analyses, comparison of means between groups, confirmatory factorial analyses, and multi-group analyses were conducted to test the adjustment and invariance of the unifactorial structure of a reduced version of four items. The results indicated that the scale satisfactorily complies with the proposed adjustment indexes, presents total invariance by gender and partial invariance by administrative dependence, and allows establishing statistically significant differences in the collective self-esteem, indicating a higher score for students in the private system, and a lower score for those in the public system. These results show the negative effects of high school segregation on students’ collective self-esteem, affecting the appreciation of personal, collective, and institutional activities and the sense of belonging. Although previous research has explored some of the effects of school segregation, the present study focuses on collective self-esteem, which is closely related to identity and belonging, and allows for further innovative research on school segregation. The scale is useful as an instrument for researching social conditions of student well-being, in regards to educational management.

Using Virtual Gifts on Live Streaming Platforms as a Sustainable Strategy to Stimulate Consumers’ Green Purchase Intention

As the use of live-stream marketing by corporations to sell products is increasing, the sustainability of this marketing model has been a controversial topic in recent years. In this study, we propose that live-stream marketing can be used as a sustainable strategy to improve the relationship between customers and the companies endorsed by broadcasters. Based on signal theory and the framework of “affordance--psychological outcome--consumer behavior”, this study answers the question from the perspective of virtual gift visibility, and finds that social presence and self-esteem serve as mediators, and self-monitoring personality as a moderator, of the relationship between online visibility of virtual gifts and green purchasing. Our research model was tested using structural equation model analysis. Data were collected from 552 users of Chinese live streaming platforms in China, and it was found that online gift visibility of live-stream marketing can be used as a sustainable strategy to stimulate customers’ purchase intention. Social presence is a full mediator of the relationship between the online visibility of virtual gifts and green purchases. Furthermore, self-monitoring personality moderates the relationships among the online visibility of virtual gifts, social presence, and green purchase intention. Our research not only extends the understanding of online gifts as a link between consumers and broadcasters, but also clarifies the process of how online gifts lead to green purchase intention.