Research
A Convergence of Information Technology: A Behavioral Study
Face-to- Face (FTF) communication is a high social presence communications technology meaning that the sender’s intended message is not likely to be ignored by the receiver. In comparison, text-messaging is a low social presence communications technology where the sender’s message has a higher tendency to be ignored by the receiver. Text-messaging is by far the most popular communications technology among a sizable percentage of the college population. The act of help-seeking is a behavior that arises out of a human psychological attitude or process that has been studied extensively by psychologists and educational scholars. This study sought to investigate the behavioral intention (BI) of college students to use short messaging service (SMS) text-messaging to complete the behavioral task of academic help-seeking (AHS). The entire student body at a small, private junior college in eastern North Carolina were surveyed. The findings revealing that although text-messaging was extremely popular across all student groups, it did not fare as well as expected as a potential AHS tool.
