Sharing Internship Experience on the Internet: A Study of Tourism and Hotel Management College Students

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Sharing Internship Experience on the Internet: A Study of Tourism and Hotel Management

College Students Lawrence FONG1, Hee Andy LEE2, Chris LUK1,

Daniel LEUNG3, & Rob LAW1

1School of Hotel & Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

2School of Tourism,The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

3Department of Tourism and Service Management,MODUL University Vienna, Austria

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Agenda

• Introduction

• Literature Review

• Methods

• Results

• Discussions

• Conclusions

• Q & A

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Introduction

• Background

– Online media (e.g., Facebook, Internet forum, etc.) allow information disseminated to family members, friends, acquaintances, and strangers

– Internet is a major vehicle for information dissemination

– Likelihood of using various kinds of online media to

disseminate information may vary

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Introduction

• Background

– No study on college students' internship experience sharing behaviour on the Internet

– Understanding online sharing of personal experience is of great interest among researchers

– Internship officers need to know where the interns share experience, for improvement of internship program

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Introduction

• Objectives

– To investigate whether the likelihood of sharing internship experience on these online media varies with gender and Internet usage

– To compare tourism and hotel management college students' likelihood of sharing internship experience on different online media

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Literature Review

• Online Information Dissemination Media– Given the wide variety of online media, an understanding of the

common characteristics of these media is necessary

– Online-personal media: the online information dissemination media that receivers are known to the senders (e.g., emails, social networking sites, etc.)

– Online-collective media: the online information dissemination media that receivers are unknown to the senders (e.g., Internet forums, weblogs, etc.)

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Literature Review

• Social ties & Information dissemination– Social ties: social relationship between the sender and

receiver (Brown & Reingen, 1987)

– Strong ties: characterised by individuals with similar attributes

• Strong ties (e.g., close friends and family members)

• Weak ties (e.g., acquaintances and strangers)

– Weak ties: characterised by heterophilous individuals

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Literature Review• ... continued– Self-categorisation theory: consider belonging to a group

and emphasize the similarities among in-group members and distinctions from out-group members (Turner et al., 1987)– Sharing of information should be more likely inside the group, characterising by strong ties and homophilous members (Lai & Wong, 2002)

– H1: Online-personal media are more likely to be used by tourism and hotel management college students to share internship experience than online-collective media

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Literature Review

• Gender & Online Information Dissemination

– Gender effect on online behaviour is inconclusive (Akman & Mishra, 2010; Thayer & Sukanya, 2006; Valkenburg & Peter, 2007)

– Gender moderates decision making (Kim et al., 2007)

– Females have more strong tie networks (Ibarra, 1997)

– Females use the Internet to maintain existing relationships, but males use Internet for developing new relationships (Sheldon, 2008)

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Literature Review

• ... continued

– H3: When sharing internship experience, male tourism and hotel management college students are more likely to use online-collective media than their female counterparts

– H2: When sharing internship experience, female tourism and hotel management college students are more likely to use online-personal media than their male counterparts

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Literature Review

• Internet Usage & Online Information Dissemination

– High Internet usage leads to more online communications (Thayer & Sukanya, 2006)

– When sharing internship experience, tourism and hotel management college students with high Internet usage are more likely to use (H4: online-personal, H5: online-collective) media than their low Internet usage counterparts

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Hypotheses• H1: Online-personal > Online-collective

• H2: Females > Males on Online-personal

• H3: Males > Females on Online-collective

• H4: High usage > Low usage on Online-personal

• H5: High usage > Low usage on Online-collective

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Methods• Participants:

– Gender and Internet usage (20 hours or below / Above 20 hours) (Assael, 2005)

– No non-response bias based on Mann-Whitney Tests

– Hotel & tourism management students in a Hong Kong University

• 52 completed questionnaires:– Likelihood of using the two online media (7-point scale)

• Online survey

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Results• H1: Online-personal > Online-collective - Confirmed

• H2: Females > Males on Online-personal - No difference• H3: Males > Females on Online-collective - Confirmed

Notes. ** p < .01; * p < .05

Wilcoxon Signed Rank test (n = 51)

Personal - M (Mdn) Collective - M (Mdn) Z-value

4.98 (5.00) 4.31 (5.00) -3.03**

Mann-Whitney Test – Exact Test Method

Male (n = 8) Female (n = 41) Z-value

Personal: M (Mdn) 4.88 (5.00) 4.95 (5.00) -.17

Collective: M (Mdn) 5.25 (5.50) 4.12 (4.00) -1.93*

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Results• H4: High usage > Low usage on Online-personal - No difference• H5: High usage > Low usage on Online-collective - No difference

Mann-Whitney Test – Exact Test Method

High (n = 29) Low (n = 22) Z-value

Personal: M (Mdn) 5.21 (5.00) 4.68 (5.00) -1.28

Collective: M (Mdn) 4.28 (5.00) 4.36 (4.00) -.09

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Discussions• Online-personal > Online-collective

– Share with strong ties members

– Share with homophilous members (e.g., classmates)– Asians’ collectivism may enhance support of in-group interest (Triandis et al., 1988; Wagner III, 1995)

• Female = Male on Online-personal– Concur with no gender effect on online-communication

(Teo & Lim, 2000; Thayer & Sukanya, 2006; Valkenburg & Peter, 2007)

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Discussions• Male > Female on Online-collective

– Males like to develop new relationship online (Sheldon, 2008)

– Lower risk-taking propensity of females (Byrnes et al., 1999) may hinder their willingness to share with strangers

• High usage = Low usage on both Online Media– Internet usage and familiarity are unable to explain online

information sharing

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Conclusions• Strength of social ties is of concern in internship experience sharing• Internship officers and industry practitioners connect to students via

social networking sites prior to the commencement of internship

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Conclusions• Limitations

– Small sample size & low response rate

– Data collection in one school limits generalisability

– Uneven mixture of male and female respondents

• Future Studies– Examining the influences of social ties, homophily, and self-

categorisation on the use of online media for sharing

– Replicating the study in a context other than internship experience sharing

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Thank You!

Q&A