Tai-Quan Peng
Biographic Data
| ID | 201506 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tai-Quan Peng |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tai-Quan |
| FAMILY NAME | Peng |
| SIGNATURE | PENG T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2588-7491 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Social Media Misinformation Wars
This study investigates the effectiveness of public health institutions’ misinformation debunking on social media by examining the impact of message features—social media intermediaries, message framing, and social cues—alongside the moderating roles of political cynicism and conspiracy beliefs. We conducted preregistered survey experiments in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and the United States (total N = 2,769). Results show that sponsored message…
Understanding Polarizing Language
Polarizing language is a key mechanism through which intergroup boundaries are constructed and experienced, yet research has rarely specified how distinct linguistic strategies contribute to perceived polarization. This article develops and validates a coding instrument that conceptualizes polarizing language as a communicative process. Drawing on social identity, facework, and persuasion theories, we identify eight functionally distinct language…
Beyond partisan leaning
Navigating Ambiguities
How Do Individual and Societal Factors Shape News Authentication? Comparing Misinformation Resilience Across Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and the United States
In an era of pervasive misinformation, equipping citizens to counter its spread is increasingly critical. This study examines news authentication—individuals’ proactive verification of news—as a key indicator of resilience to misinformation. Guided by the theory of planned behavior and the resilience model, we examine how individual characteristics and structural contexts interact to influence news authentication. To do so, we adopt a multilevel …
AD-AutoGPT
In this pioneering study, inspired by AutoGPT, the state-of-the-art open-source application based on the GPT-4 large language model, we develop a novel tool called AD-AutoGPT, which can conduct data collection, processing, and analysis about complex health narratives of Alzheimer’s Disease in an autonomous manner via users’ textual prompts. We collated comprehensive data from a variety of news sources, including the Alzheimer’s Association, BBC, …
Time in communication research and theories
Embracing Dialectic Intersubjectivity
This study attempts to advance automated content analysis from consensus-oriented to coordination-oriented practices, thereby embracing diverse coding outputs and exploring the dynamics among differential perspectives. As an exploratory investigation, we evaluate six GPT-4o configurations to analyze sentiment in Fox News and MSNBC transcripts on Biden and Trump during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign. By assessing each model’s alignment with p…
Computational communication research (CCR)
Computational communication research (CCR) has emerged as an early and active subfield within computational social science, offering novel methodological approaches to address classical and emerging questions in communication research. This paper reviews the evolution and methodological developments in CCR in both the international research community and Chinese mainland, emphasizing the role of computational methods such as user analytics, conte…
Human Communication Research at a crossroads
As Human Communication Research begins a new editorial chapter, this editorial reaffirms the journal's longstanding commitment to theory-driven scholarship while addressing recurring challenges that shape how communication research is conceptualized, designed, and interpreted. Drawing from editorial experience and field-wide observations, I identify ten patterns-such as sidelining theory, prioritizing statistical effects over explanatory mechanis…
Understanding sentiment toward racial unrest through temporal and geographic lenses
Racial unrest has long been a salient social issue in the United States. Time and space provide essential contexts for the emergence and evolution of racial unrest. However, the relationships between these contextual factors and public responses to racial unrest remain insufficiently explored. This study seeks to fill that gap, blending geocoded, time-stamped racial unrest tweet data with census information. It aims to explore how temporal elemen…
Do Covid-19 related primary emotions affect risk perceptions, efficacy beliefs, and information seeking and behavior? Examining emotions as audience segments
Introduction Primary emotions among the populace during global health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, provide valuable insights. Guided by appraisal theories of emotions, this study explores emotional segmentation by mapping primary emotions related to COVID-19 and investigating their impact on cognitive and behavioral outcomes, including risk perceptions, efficacy beliefs, behavioral intentions, prevention behaviors, and information seeki…
Understanding Audience Behavior with Digital Traces
In recent decades, significant transformations in audience characteristics and the media environment have necessitated a reassessment of audience analysis. Communication scholars have increasingly recognized the value of utilizing digital traces as valuable resources to understand audience behaviors. This research presents a comprehensive review of 243 audience analyses that incorporate digital traces, covering the period from 2001 to 2022, as pu…
The Role of Collective Group Orientation and Social Norms on Physical Distancing Behaviors for Disease Prevention
To reduce the impact of communicable diseases like COVID-19, collective action is required and likely to be susceptible to normative influence as well as whether people are more or less collectively oriented. We extend the theory of normative social behavior (TNSB) to account for group orientation and predict the relationships between social norms and physical distancing behaviors. Using a rolling cross-sectional design during 17 weeks of the pan…
The effect of affordance on deliberation when retweeting
Competition, Cooperation, and Coexistence
The public agenda is an ecosystem in which public issues interact and compete to gain public attention. Whether this ecosystem is primarily competitive or cooperative is an unsettled question in the literature on agenda-setting. This study employs an ecological approach to explicate interissue relationships. It quantifies the nature and evolution of the issue ecosystem and examines the roles of the value orientations of issues and of individuals’…
Believe it or not
As individuals make belief decisions on truths and falsehoods, a systematic organization of (mis)information emerges. In this study, we employ a network approach to illustrate how a sample of Americans share a cognitive network of false and true statements related to COVID-19. Moreover, we examine what factors are associated with the formation of misbeliefs. Findings from our US-based rolling cross-sectional survey data indicate that conservative…
Will Time Matter with Cognitive Load and Retention in Online News Consumption
The production and consumption of online news are usually under a bursty temporal pattern. However, little is known about the psychological and cognitive impacts of such bursty consumption of online news. The study employs a 2 (filled-interval length) × 2 (empty-interval length) × 2 (empty-interval burstiness) mixed design experiment to examine how temporal characteristics in online news consumption influence audiences’ cognition and retention. S…
Information and communications technology development, interorganizational networks, and public sector corruption in Africa
Ecological constraints on audience size in the digital media system
The current high-choice media environment is characterized by increasingly intense competition for audience resources among media products. Drawing on research in organizational ecology and communication, audience behavior, and media economics, this study provides an ecological explanation for audience size in the digital media system. The analysis of Comscore's aggregate audience data on the use of 64 digital media platforms over a 38-month peri…
Speaking of Values
This study introduces the concept of value-expressive communication and examines its relationship with behavioral intent. Value-expressive communication is conceptualized as the verbal output of a value-expressive attitude. Value-expressive communication about exercise is examined in relationship to strength of religious faith, exercise attitudes, communication frequency, and intentions to exercise among a sample of self-identified Christians. Th…
Detecting Sentiment toward Emerging Infectious Diseases on Social Media
Despite the popularity and efficiency of dictionary-based sentiment analysis (DSA) for public health research, limited empirical evidence has been produced about the validity of DSA and potential harms to the validity of DSA. A random sample of a second-hand Ebola tweet dataset was used to evaluate the validity of DSA compared to the manual coding approach and examine the influences of textual features on the validity of DSA. The results revealed…
Examining familial role in mobile news consumption as a sequential process
Mixed and blended emotional reactions to 2014 Ebola outbreak
Various discrete emotions are expressed on Twitter which mirror the course of Ebola 2014 outbreak, and geographic distance from locations where Ebola cases are confirmed influence expressions of discrete emotions
From Filled to Empty Time Intervals
Ordinary users fill some intervals on the time continuum by engaging in an online behavior and leave other intervals empty by disengaging from the behavior. Existing time-based measurements of online behaviors exclusively focus on characterizing filled time intervals and completely ignore the information embedded in empty time intervals. Empty time intervals, referring to time gaps between consecutive behaviors, carry important information on how…
When Communication Meets Computation
The recent increase in digitally available data, tools, and processing power is fostering the use of computational methods to the study of communication. This special issue discusses the validity of using big data in communication science and showcases a number of new methods and applications in the fields of text and network analysis. Computational methods have the potential to greatly enhance the scientific study of communication because they a…
Breadth, depth, and speed
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical assessment of the diffusion of advertising messages on microblogging sites. The diffusion properties of advertising messages are quantified based on the following three aspects: diffusion breadth, depth, and speed. Furthermore, this study examines the influence of message- and advertiser-level factors on the diffusion of advertising messages. Design/methodology/approach – The study da…
Mapping the landscape of Internet Studies
What does ‘Internet studies’ entail as a field of social science research? We aim to answer the question by mapping research themes, theorization, and methodology of Internet studies based on 27,000+ articles published in Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index journals over the last 10 years. In analyzing the articles, we adopt a ‘bottom-up’ approach – classifying keywords of the Internet studies without any a priori …
Mobile Phone Use as Sequential Processes
Mobile phone use is an unfolding process by nature. In this study, it is explicated as two sequential processes: mobile sessions composed of an uninterrupted set of behaviors and mobile trajectories composed of mobile sessions and mobile-off time. A data set of a five-month behavioral logfile of mobile application use by approximately 2,500 users in Hong Kong is used. Mobile sessions are constructed and mined to uncover sequential characteristics…
How to measure sessions of mobile phone use? Quantification, evaluation, and applications
Research on mobile phone use often starts with the question of how much time users spend using their phones. The question involves an equal-length measure that captures the duration of mobile phone use but does not tackle the other temporal characteristics of user behavior, such as frequency, timing, and sequence. In this study, we propose a variable-length measure called “session” to uncover the unmeasured temporal characteristics. We use an ope…
The democratic role of social media in political debates
Live social media commentary increasingly accompanies televised political debates. This study examines the democratic role of live Twitter commentary by analyzing a sample of tweets published during the first 2016 presidential debate between Trump and Clinton. The practices of live commenters – including joke-sharing and fact-checking – are assessed in light of six perspectives on the democratic utility of such commentary. Results show that while…
How Do Individual and Societal Factors Shape News Authentication? Comparing Misinformation Resilience Across Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and the United States
In an era of pervasive misinformation, equipping citizens to counter its spread is increasingly critical. This study examines news authentication—individuals’ proactive verification of news—as a key indicator of resilience to misinformation. Guided by the theory of planned behavior and the resilience model, we examine how individual characteristics and structural contexts interact to influence news authentication. To do so, we adopt a multilevel …
Googling environmental issues
Purpose – Queries as a pioneering measure of public attention on various social issues have elicited considerable scholarly attention. The purpose of this paper is to address two fundamental questions, as follows: first, how do we identify niche queries that internet users search for on specific social issues?; and second, what are the measurement properties of queries data in gauging public attention on social issues? Design/methodology/approach…
A game of win-win or win-lose? Revisiting the internet’s influence on sociability and use of traditional media
This study examines the influence of internet adoption and internet usage on sociability and use of traditional media. With empirical data collected in Hong Kong between 2003 and 2005, it confirms that adoption and usage are two distinct processes, with different social impacts. It is found that, on average, internet users spend significantly less time on traditional media than nonusers, while both groups spend the same amount of time on social a…
Ecological constraints on audience size in the digital media system
The current high-choice media environment is characterized by increasingly intense competition for audience resources among media products. Drawing on research in organizational ecology and communication, audience behavior, and media economics, this study provides an ecological explanation for audience size in the digital media system. The analysis of Comscore's aggregate audience data on the use of 64 digital media platforms over a 38-month peri…
From Filled to Empty Time Intervals
Ordinary users fill some intervals on the time continuum by engaging in an online behavior and leave other intervals empty by disengaging from the behavior. Existing time-based measurements of online behaviors exclusively focus on characterizing filled time intervals and completely ignore the information embedded in empty time intervals. Empty time intervals, referring to time gaps between consecutive behaviors, carry important information on how…
Examining the effects of network externalities, density, and closure on in-game currency price in online games
Purpose Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) create quasi-real social systems in which players can interact with one another, and quasi-real economic systems where players can consume and trade in-game items with virtual currency. The in-game currency price, an important indicator of a virtual economy, is highly contingent on players' behavioral interaction in MMORPGs. The purpose of this paper is to adopt a network perspecti…
A game of win-win or win-lose? Revisiting the internet’s influence on sociability and use of traditional media
This study examines the influence of internet adoption and internet usage on sociability and use of traditional media. With empirical data collected in Hong Kong between 2003 and 2005, it confirms that adoption and usage are two distinct processes, with different social impacts. It is found that, on average, internet users spend significantly less time on traditional media than nonusers, while both groups spend the same amount of time on social a…
Predicting Internet Non-Users' Adoption Intention and Adoption Behavior
A conceptual framework based on theory of planned behavior is developed to examine the impacts of social and psychological variables on Internet non-users' adoption intention and adoption behavior. A two-wave revolving panel design is adopted in the study based on the data collected from a longitudinal telephone survey conducted in Hong Kong. The study finds incongruence between individuals' attitude toward the Internet and adoption behavior and …
Mapping the landscape of Internet Studies
What does ‘Internet studies’ entail as a field of social science research? We aim to answer the question by mapping research themes, theorization, and methodology of Internet studies based on 27,000+ articles published in Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index journals over the last 10 years. In analyzing the articles, we adopt a ‘bottom-up’ approach – classifying keywords of the Internet studies without any a priori …
Breadth, depth, and speed
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical assessment of the diffusion of advertising messages on microblogging sites. The diffusion properties of advertising messages are quantified based on the following three aspects: diffusion breadth, depth, and speed. Furthermore, this study examines the influence of message- and advertiser-level factors on the diffusion of advertising messages. Design/methodology/approach – The study da…
Googling environmental issues
Purpose – Queries as a pioneering measure of public attention on various social issues have elicited considerable scholarly attention. The purpose of this paper is to address two fundamental questions, as follows: first, how do we identify niche queries that internet users search for on specific social issues?; and second, what are the measurement properties of queries data in gauging public attention on social issues? Design/methodology/approach…
Understanding interactions in virtual HIV communities
This study investigated the driving mechanism of building interaction ties among the people living with HIV/AIDS in one of the largest virtual HIV communities in China using social network analysis. Specifically, we explained the probability of forming interaction ties with homophily and popularity characteristics. The exponential random graph modeling results showed that members in this community tend to form homophilous ties in terms of shared …
Examining the effects of network externalities, density, and closure on in-game currency price in online games
Purpose Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) create quasi-real social systems in which players can interact with one another, and quasi-real economic systems where players can consume and trade in-game items with virtual currency. The in-game currency price, an important indicator of a virtual economy, is highly contingent on players' behavioral interaction in MMORPGs. The purpose of this paper is to adopt a network perspecti…
How to measure sessions of mobile phone use? Quantification, evaluation, and applications
Research on mobile phone use often starts with the question of how much time users spend using their phones. The question involves an equal-length measure that captures the duration of mobile phone use but does not tackle the other temporal characteristics of user behavior, such as frequency, timing, and sequence. In this study, we propose a variable-length measure called “session” to uncover the unmeasured temporal characteristics. We use an ope…
When Communication Meets Computation
The recent increase in digitally available data, tools, and processing power is fostering the use of computational methods to the study of communication. This special issue discusses the validity of using big data in communication science and showcases a number of new methods and applications in the fields of text and network analysis. Computational methods have the potential to greatly enhance the scientific study of communication because they a…
The democratic role of social media in political debates
Live social media commentary increasingly accompanies televised political debates. This study examines the democratic role of live Twitter commentary by analyzing a sample of tweets published during the first 2016 presidential debate between Trump and Clinton. The practices of live commenters – including joke-sharing and fact-checking – are assessed in light of six perspectives on the democratic utility of such commentary. Results show that while…
Mobile Phone Use as Sequential Processes
Mobile phone use is an unfolding process by nature. In this study, it is explicated as two sequential processes: mobile sessions composed of an uninterrupted set of behaviors and mobile trajectories composed of mobile sessions and mobile-off time. A data set of a five-month behavioral logfile of mobile application use by approximately 2,500 users in Hong Kong is used. Mobile sessions are constructed and mined to uncover sequential characteristics…
Mixed and blended emotional reactions to 2014 Ebola outbreak
Various discrete emotions are expressed on Twitter which mirror the course of Ebola 2014 outbreak, and geographic distance from locations where Ebola cases are confirmed influence expressions of discrete emotions
From Filled to Empty Time Intervals
Ordinary users fill some intervals on the time continuum by engaging in an online behavior and leave other intervals empty by disengaging from the behavior. Existing time-based measurements of online behaviors exclusively focus on characterizing filled time intervals and completely ignore the information embedded in empty time intervals. Empty time intervals, referring to time gaps between consecutive behaviors, carry important information on how…
Examining familial role in mobile news consumption as a sequential process
Speaking of Values
This study introduces the concept of value-expressive communication and examines its relationship with behavioral intent. Value-expressive communication is conceptualized as the verbal output of a value-expressive attitude. Value-expressive communication about exercise is examined in relationship to strength of religious faith, exercise attitudes, communication frequency, and intentions to exercise among a sample of self-identified Christians. Th…
Detecting Sentiment toward Emerging Infectious Diseases on Social Media
Despite the popularity and efficiency of dictionary-based sentiment analysis (DSA) for public health research, limited empirical evidence has been produced about the validity of DSA and potential harms to the validity of DSA. A random sample of a second-hand Ebola tweet dataset was used to evaluate the validity of DSA compared to the manual coding approach and examine the influences of textual features on the validity of DSA. The results revealed…
Will Time Matter with Cognitive Load and Retention in Online News Consumption
The production and consumption of online news are usually under a bursty temporal pattern. However, little is known about the psychological and cognitive impacts of such bursty consumption of online news. The study employs a 2 (filled-interval length) × 2 (empty-interval length) × 2 (empty-interval burstiness) mixed design experiment to examine how temporal characteristics in online news consumption influence audiences’ cognition and retention. S…
Information and communications technology development, interorganizational networks, and public sector corruption in Africa
Ecological constraints on audience size in the digital media system
The current high-choice media environment is characterized by increasingly intense competition for audience resources among media products. Drawing on research in organizational ecology and communication, audience behavior, and media economics, this study provides an ecological explanation for audience size in the digital media system. The analysis of Comscore's aggregate audience data on the use of 64 digital media platforms over a 38-month peri…
Understanding sentiment toward racial unrest through temporal and geographic lenses
Racial unrest has long been a salient social issue in the United States. Time and space provide essential contexts for the emergence and evolution of racial unrest. However, the relationships between these contextual factors and public responses to racial unrest remain insufficiently explored. This study seeks to fill that gap, blending geocoded, time-stamped racial unrest tweet data with census information. It aims to explore how temporal elemen…
Do Covid-19 related primary emotions affect risk perceptions, efficacy beliefs, and information seeking and behavior? Examining emotions as audience segments
Introduction Primary emotions among the populace during global health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, provide valuable insights. Guided by appraisal theories of emotions, this study explores emotional segmentation by mapping primary emotions related to COVID-19 and investigating their impact on cognitive and behavioral outcomes, including risk perceptions, efficacy beliefs, behavioral intentions, prevention behaviors, and information seeki…
Understanding Audience Behavior with Digital Traces
In recent decades, significant transformations in audience characteristics and the media environment have necessitated a reassessment of audience analysis. Communication scholars have increasingly recognized the value of utilizing digital traces as valuable resources to understand audience behaviors. This research presents a comprehensive review of 243 audience analyses that incorporate digital traces, covering the period from 2001 to 2022, as pu…
The Role of Collective Group Orientation and Social Norms on Physical Distancing Behaviors for Disease Prevention
To reduce the impact of communicable diseases like COVID-19, collective action is required and likely to be susceptible to normative influence as well as whether people are more or less collectively oriented. We extend the theory of normative social behavior (TNSB) to account for group orientation and predict the relationships between social norms and physical distancing behaviors. Using a rolling cross-sectional design during 17 weeks of the pan…
The effect of affordance on deliberation when retweeting
Competition, Cooperation, and Coexistence
The public agenda is an ecosystem in which public issues interact and compete to gain public attention. Whether this ecosystem is primarily competitive or cooperative is an unsettled question in the literature on agenda-setting. This study employs an ecological approach to explicate interissue relationships. It quantifies the nature and evolution of the issue ecosystem and examines the roles of the value orientations of issues and of individuals’…
Computer Science (22 works) · Psychology (20 works) · World Wide Web (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (10 works) · Social Media and Politics (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Social media (9 works) · Business (8 works)