ABSTRACT
Newspapers and other mass media outlets are critical in shaping public opinion on a variety of contemporary issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examines how the pandemic is portrayed in the news and how the public reacted differently in the West and East using archival data from Facebook posts about COVID-19 news by English-language mass media between January 2020 and April 2022 (N = 711,646). Specifically, we employed the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (Vader) to measure the news tone on each COVID-19 news item shared on Facebook by mass media outlets. In addition, we calculated a polarity score based on Facebook special reactions (i.e., love, angry, sad, wow, haha, and care) received by each post to measure public reactions toward it. We discovered that people in Western countries reacted significantly more negatively to COVID-19 news than their East counterparts, despite the fact that the news itself, in aggregate, generally contained a relatively similar level of neutral tone in both West and East media. The implications of these distinctions are discussed in greater detail.
ABSTRACT
Single sign-on (SSO) enables users to authenticate across multiple related but independent systems using a single username and password. While the number of higher education institutions adopting SSO continues to grow, little is known about the academic community's security awareness regarding SSO. This paper aims to examine the security awareness of SSO across various demographic groups within a single higher education institution based on their age, gender, and academic roles. Additionally, we investigate some psychological factors (i.e., privacy concerns and personality traits) that may influence users' level of SSO security awareness. Using survey data collected from 283 participants (faculty, staff, and students) and analyzed using a hierarchical linear regression model, we discovered a generational gap, but no gender gap, in security awareness of SSO. Additionally, our findings confirm that students have a significantly lower level of security awareness than faculty and staff. Finally, we discovered that privacy concerns have no effect on SSO security awareness on their own. Rather, they interact with the user's personality traits, most notably agreeableness and conscientiousness. The findings of this study lay the groundwork for future research and interventions aimed at increasing cybersecurity awareness among users of various demographic groups as well as closing any existing gaps between them.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many countries to close their schools and to change their education system to adopt the learning from home (LFH) method, which arguably requires more direct involvement from parents to succeed. This study explored parent's attitudes toward LFH policy based on a survey of 261 participants from 16 provinces in Indonesia. Employing latent class analysis, we revealed three distinct groups of parents with unique compounds of attitudes toward LFH (i.e., disengaged, positive, and negative). Disengaged parents neither consider LFH useful, nor do they see it as demanding. In contrast, the other two groups of parents have quite the opposite views on the usefulness and demandingness of LFH. Further analysis using multinomial logistic regression revealed that older parents from low-income households tend to be disengaged while fathers of young children tend to have negative attitudes toward LFH. Interestingly, the ownership of a personal computer at home seems to be a key indicator of parents with positive attitudes toward LFH after controlling for other demographic factors. How the findings provide a firsthand insight on the existence of digital divide by highlighting the importance of access to personal computers at home is further discussed.
