My Thoughts on "Internet Satisfaction"

The concept of "online satisfaction" is an interesting one. Liu and LaRose argue that the internet can help individuals build positive moods which support social support and relationship development. They use these characteristics to develop judgement about the 195 subjects they surveyed. In their survey, they measure online self efficacy, online social outcome expectations, extroversion, perceived social online support, school life satisfaction, and overall internet use. They readily mention in their research that there is little to no literature about this subject out there today. I acknowledge their efforts, but I have some some reservations about the overall strength of the research. For starters, measuring intangible characteristics like extroversion and using this as a large part of their research can be risky. Aside from this, there wasn't much I could find in the research about the background and the overall upbringing of a lot of these subjects. When I consider the overall effects of internet use in my academic life, I attribute a lot of it to information I've learned along the way. 

Because of this, I decided to take a look at a study which went further in analysis of the overall background of test subjects while taking a look at a similar concept. It was conducted by George Bradford and Shelly Wyatt at the University of Central Florida, and it's titled: "Online learning and student satisfaction: Academic standing, ethnicity and their influence on facilitated learning, engagement, and information fluency." In their study, Bradford and Wyatt examined the overall satisfaction of distance learning vs. traditional in-class students, and looked at factors such as ethnicity and academic standing to examine their effect. As it relates to our Information 3.0 class, there was survey section for "information fluency" which examined simple factors like the student's previous online experience facilitating the student's ability to be able to take in information in an academic environment.  Bradford and Wyatt concluded that ethnicity, for one, has little to no effect in the student satisfaction section of online learning. This is most definitely an interesting finding, but I wish the study had taken more different ethnicities into consideration to see how they varied from one another. I understand this was not the point of the study, but I definitely have found a topic for further research.