Authors: Wan S. Jung1, Won Yong Jang2, and Soo Rhee3

1Department of Professional Communications, Farmingdale State College, New York
2Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, Wisconsin
3Department of Mass Communication, Towson University, Maryland

Corresponding Author:

Wan S. Jung, Ph.D
Knapp Hall 30
2350 Broadhollow Road, Farmingdale, NY 11735-1021
jungw@farmingdale.edu
934-420-2276

Wan S. Jung, PhD is an Associate Professor of Professional Communications at Farmingdale State College, NY. His research interests focus on the credibility assessment process of digital information.

Won Yong Jang, PhD is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. He specializes in 1) international communication, 2) news media and society in East Asian countries, 3) climate change policy & communication, 4) public opinion on North Korea’s Nuclear Program, and 5) territorial disputes in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Soo Rhee, PhD is a Professor at Towson University, Maryland. Her research interests include luxury brand advertising, gender portrayals in advertising, dynamics of electronic word-of-mouth, cross-cultural studies in advertising and message strategies in health advertising.

ABSTRACT
An increasing number of people rely on the Internet as their primary information source and use it to share their opinions and thoughts with others. Generally, individuals adopt a systematic approach when processing sports information, evaluating its completeness and accuracy due to the serious consequences of incomplete or inaccurate information, such as monetary loss and negative impacts on child development. However, our study finds that the heuristics of online information, even with subtle changes in design features, generate more positive attitudinal and behavioral changes compared to central cues (i.e., informational posting). Our findings suggest a dissociation between involvement and the effects of heuristics. This study also provides an empirical framework for predicting how people process information in digital media environments. Additional findings and implications are discussed.

Key Words: youth sport communication, visual impact of social media posting, message appeal

INTRODUCTION
The youth sport market is a huge and fast-growing industry, ranging from organized sports leagues to recreational activities. The market for youth sports in the United States stood at 15.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2017 and grew to 19.2 billion U.S. dollars by 2019 (11). With a fast-growing trend (i.e., a growth rate of 25.4% from 2017 to 2019) with various options, parents became more active in searching for information. As social media are pervasive, rapidly evolving, and increasingly influencing parents’ daily life and their sport consumption, parents increasingly turn to the internet as a source of community, which helps them connect, communicate, and share information (18).

The rapid growth of online sports information production and dissemination through social media parenting communities (e.g., Facebook local groups and Nextdoor) raises important research questions about how individuals process online information provided by other consumers (i.e., experienced parents whose child(ren) have participated in your sport programs) in youth sport consumption decision making. Moreover, since sport consumers make decisions about whether or not to adopt online sports information based on their own judgement (e.g., attitudinal formation), how individuals evaluate online information is central to sports communication agendas.

Although the formation of attitudes toward information can be attributed to multiple aspects of that information (e.g., source credibility, information completeness), sport consumers using online resources are more reliant on how the information is presented than on the quality of the argument (10), and subtle graphical adjustments become relevant when online parenting community members share their own experiences with other members on social media platforms. In order to emphasize their own views, web users often create visual prominence using subtle design elements, such as capitalized subject lines, copy-and-paste text art (also called keyboard art, e.g., ≧◡≦), or bullet-point symbols. In addition to subtle design changes, the characteristics of the online posting can be varied based on the degree of informativeness (i.e., emotion-based versus information-based).

The purpose of the current study is twofold. First, it will explore the effect on attitudinal formation and behavioral intentions of the message appeals and subtle graphical adjustments of posts in online parenting communities in the youth sport consumption context. Second, the study will investigate whether the strength of the relationship between attitude and behavioral intentions varies based on message appeals. Overall, the study will seek to advance understanding of digital media by examining how small graphical changes and message appeals impact youth sport consumers’ attitudes and behaviors when searching for consumer-generated information (e.g., testimonials) in online communities.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Parent-to-Parent Online Information in Youth Sport Consumption
“It takes a village to raise a child” is a proverb to explain the role of and community support in parenting. As social aspect is one of the primary factors that drives parents and their children to be involved in sport program (1), the influence of other parents’ opinion and the role of parent community are even more prominent in youth sport consumer’s decision making process. Braunstein-Minkove & Metz (2019) noted in their research on the role of mothers in sport consumption that youth sport consumption might not always about the sport but the experience. Therefore, parents of youth rely on other parents’ opinion to obtain relevant and sufficient information and evaluate various youth sport program options available. In order to provide the best sporting and exercise experience for their children, parents of young children are willing to hear voices of other parents (i.e., testimonial) regarding the type of sports, sports programs, and sporting events their children would participate in.

With the modern technology and the advent of social media, the notion of the village (or supporting community) has been expanded from a physical village to a digital community. Social media platforms support a variety of user generated content to be disseminated to other users and allows users to participate in interactive discussions. Among the various types of social media platforms, Facebook have become the most prevalent web-based service in the world (21) and remaining the most popular site by far (12). Also, Facebook recently provides an option to mark the group type as parenting group, which gives parents new ways to discover and engage with their communities (5). Though the role of online community and the influence of information from other youth sport consumers (i.e., testimonials from other parents in such online community) in youth sport consumer’s decision-making process became more prominent, there is no previous research to explore the effects of the presentation of online information on consumers’ attitudinal and behavioral response in youth sport consumption context.

The Impact of Visual Prominence
Quick and low effort cognitive information processing has been investigated in the field of psychology since the 1970s (e.g., 9, 13), and the research indicates that impression formation is the result of the perceiver’s rapid response to selective or incomplete information. In other words, one’s appraisal of an event occurs without intention or conscious thought. Theories of impression formation in the context of digital communication have been developed by Fogg (2003) and Wathen and Burkell (2002), and their studies suggest that visual prominence—the visual salience that allows people to effortlessly notice the presence of graphic elements (e.g., bold vs. non-bold font)—is a primary driver of attitudinal formation, rather than information quality.

The impact of visual prominence can also be explained by individuals’ reliance, when making decisions, on transactive memory systems, which consist of two key elements: internal memory (e.g., personal experience) and external memory (e.g., another person’s expertise; 14). The presence of an external memory will activate a transactive memory system, and such a dependency on external memory increases efficiency and cognitive labor power (20). Thus, external sources of knowledge can have a significant impact on one’s perception of what to accept as true and how confidently to accept it.

The theoretical and empirical evidence for transactive memory systems is based on offline social interactions (e.g., interactions within family groups). However, recent studies suggest that online sources can also trigger transactive memory systems due to the similarity between the process of outsourcing cognitive tasks to other people and the process of outsourcing cognitive tasks to the Internet (6). This nonhuman transactive memory network is further fueled by the unique features of the Internet (e.g., accessibility, breadth, immediacy of information), but such features may distort one’s ability to calibrate personal knowledge because the boundary between internal and external memory becomes unclear. That is, individuals often mix up information obtained through the Internet with information stored in the brain, and this illusion inflates self-ratings of competence regarding personal knowledge and decision-making (17). Recent research on such illusions also suggests that people tend to believe they can solve problems even in unfamiliar domains and that their decision-making processes are often based on heuristics, such as visual prominence (7, 8); the impact of visual prominence would thus be greater in digital media environments.

Since online parenting community members can establish the visual prominence of their postings on social media platforms only with subtle graphical adjustments, the current study will investigate how subtle changes (e.g., capitalizing subject lines, use of text art) to posts in online youth sport communities influence individuals’ attitude formation and behavioral intentions. Given the exploratory nature of the topic of individual information judgment in digital media environments, the following hypotheses are proposed:
H1: Visually prominent postings in online youth sport communities form stronger attitudes than less prominent postings.
H2: Visually prominent postings in online youth sport communities form stronger behavioral intentions than less prominent postings.

The Impact of Involvement on Message Appeals
The persuasiveness and prevalence of various appeal types (e.g., emotional, informative) have been extensively examined in different contexts, such as brand familiarity (Rhee & Jung, 2019), cultural variability (Han & Shavitt, 1994), and involvement (Flora & Maibach, 1990). However, less is known about the differential effects of appeal types in the context of online youth sport communities, and the current study therefore presents an exploration of the question of which type of message appeal is most persuasive in such communities.
The elaboration likelihood model (ELM; 16) is one of the most prominent theoretical frameworks employed in the message appeal literature and is applied in various contexts, such as public health service announcements (Perse et al., 1996), crisis management (Lee & Atkinson, 2019), and advertising (Stafford & Day, 1995). Studies have also commonly found a moderating effect of involvement on message appeals, and according to the ELM, people tend to rely on argument quality (e.g., information completeness, comprehensiveness) when processing information under high involvement conditions, with persuasion less likely to occur through peripheral cues, such as peers’ emotional experiences. The converse is also true under low involvement conditions.

However, a recent study by Jung et al. (2017) found evidence that contradicts the prevailing literature on the role of involvement in digital media environments; the study claims that individuals often find it hard to motivate themselves to process information thoroughly, regardless of involvement levels, due to the nature of the Internet, which inundates them with massive amounts of non-verifiable information. Individuals therefore tend to compromise the accuracy of their decisions, which can require extensive cognitive effort, by relying on the heuristic aspects of information.

In addition, in the context of online youth sports communities, people tend to seek others’ prior experiences (e.g., a coach’s personality) and emotionally supportive messages because any objective information about a youth sports program (e.g., fees, coach’s experience, facilities) can be easily found through sources such as the program’s website. It can therefore be assumed that the moderating role of involvement in appeal types might be limited by the dominance of social media. Nevertheless, because there is still insufficient evidence for the limited role of involvement in the social media context, we propose the following research question:
RQ1: What effect does involvement have on the appeal types of posts in online youth sport communities?

The Moderating Impact of Involvement on the Attitude–Intention Relationship
Attitudes are among the most significant predictors of behavioral intentions in psychology. According to the theory of planned behavior (TPB), intention functions as an antecedent of behavior and is attributable to individual attitudes, together with subjective norms and perceived behavioral control (Ajzen, 1991). Although a number of studies have provided strong evidence for the relationship between intentions and the three causal variables of the TPB, a meta-analytic study by Cooke and Sheeran (2004) also noted that less than 42% of the variance in intentions can be explained by those variables.

Consequently, there have been numerous attempts to increase the predictive power of the TPB by exploring moderators of the relationship between intention and the TPB variables, such as attitudinal ambivalence (Armitage & Conner, 2000) and certainty (Bassili, 1996). In addition to these moderating variables, Petty et al. (1983) has offered theoretical and empirical evidence that the attitude–intention relationship is more consistent under high involvement conditions, because attitudes established by highly involved people are more stable than those of lowly involved people. Verplanken (1989) also examined whether involvement can explain additional variance in the attitude–intention relationship, although that study was in the context of nuclear energy.

Therefore, the current study will examine the moderating role of involvement in the attitude–intention relationship in the sport communication context.
H3: High involvement will be associated with greater attitude–intention consistency than low involvement.

METHOD
Subjects and Procedure
192 participants who had parenting experiences (male = 64%) from the United States between the ages of 20 and 55 completed the study through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). For participants’ ethnicity, the most common ethnicity was Caucasian (53.6%), followed by Asian (33.9%), African American (5.2%), Hispanic (3.6%), and other racial backgrounds (3.6%). To participate in the study, subjects were requested to provide electronic consent. And subjects were debriefed and compensated upon completion of the study.

Experimental Treatment Conditions
To investigate the effects of visual prominence (high vs. low prominence) and message appeals (emotional vs. informative message) on online youth sport program postings, four versions of online postings were created as stimuli, and the subjects were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions: low prominence and emotional (n = 49), high prominence and emotional (n = 49), low prominence and informative (n = 49), and high prominence and informative (n = 45).

The postings contained an online community member-created message about a local youth soccer program. The community member-created posting consisted of either factual information about the soccer program (informative appeal) (i.e., up to 12 kids in one session with two coaches, all are CPR first aid and AED certified, and having an indoor field) or user experiences (emotional appeal) (i.e., it was such an amazing experience and my son loves his current coach). A youth soccer program was selected as the topic for this study because of popularity of the sport among young parents. The manipulation of visual prominence was carried out by differentiating graphic elements between high prominence and low prominence conditions. Since parent community members on social media platforms can emphasize their posting with subtle graphical alterations, the high prominence version was designed to help the study participants notice the key messages by capitalizing key words, using a bulleted list and line-breaks in order to increase readability, and using a text art. The low prominence version lacks those design features.

Dependent Measures
Attitude toward the online posting
The attitude toward the online youth program posting was measured using
three semantically differential items (i.e., good/bad, favorable/unfavorable, negative/positive) emerged from the literature on the scale (Lee & Hong, 2016). The scale was internally consistent (Cronbach’s  = .91, M = 4.70, SD = 1.81).

Behavioral Intentions
Subjects were also asked to answer their intentions to 1) recommend the youth soccer program on the posting you just read and 2) register for the soccer program in the future on 7-point Likert-type scales ranging from 1 (not at all) 7 (extremely). The items were averaged to create a behavioral intention scale (Cronbach’s  = .83, M = 4.33, SD = 1.73).

Independent Measure
Involvement
Involvement in sports activities may influence the attitudinal formation and behavioral intentions. Thus, this study measured personal involvement with sports activities by using three 7-point (1 = strongly disagree, 7 strongly agree) Likert-type scales, the participants reported on how much they agreed with the following three statements: “I enjoy playing sport,” “Sport plays a central role in my life,” and “Sport says a lot about who I am.” The three items were averaged to measure involvement (Cronbach’s  = .86, M = 5.38, SD = 1.35). This study used a median split to categorize high-involvement (N = 86) and low-involvement conditions (N = 83).

RESULTS
Manipulation Checks
The visual prominence manipulations were examined. Using two seven-point sematic differential items, the participants were asked to rate the extent to which they thought the format of the online posting they just read were “attractive/not attractive” and “likable/not likable” (Cronbach’s  = .83, M = 4.81, SD = 1.75). A t test between the two prominence conditions (low vs. high prominence) showed subjects felt that the youth sport program posting was more visually prominent when it included noticeable graphic elements (M = 5.60, SD = 1.23) than when it lacked the elements (M = 4.05, SD = 1.84), t (190) = 6.82, p < .001.

This study measured the degree of informativeness of online postings (emotional versus informative) by asking participants to rate the extent to which they though the posting they just read was “emotional” and “warmhearted” (Cronbach’s  = .80 M = 4.39, SD = 1.61). A t test between two message appeal conditions showed that the emotional appeal group (M = 4.94, SD = 1.27) perceived the posting to be significantly more emotional than the informative appeal group (M = 3.82, SD = 1.73), t (190) = 5.11, p < .001.
H1 and H2: Visual Prominence Main Effects

Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted to determine the significant impacts of visual prominence, message appeal, and involvement on attitudes and behavioral intentions. H1 and H2 suggest that participants reading visually prominent postings would form stronger attitudes and behavioral intentions than did participants reading less prominent postings. Follow-up analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were also performed the examine the effect of visual prominence for each of the dependent variables. Findings revealed that the effect of visual prominence was pronounced in relation to being able to determine consumers’ attitudes (M_High Prominence = 5.30, SD = 2.02 vs. M_Low Prominence = 4.14, SD = 1.38; F (1, 169) = 20.90, p < .001, partial η2 = .12) and behavioral intentions (M_High Prominence = 4.69, SD = 1.64 vs. M_Low Prominence = 4.01, SD = 1.73; F (1, 169) = 7.24, p < .01, partial η2 = .04). Thus, H1 and H2 were supported.



RQ1 and RQ2: Influence of Involvement on Visual Prominence and Message Appeals
The impact of consumers’ involvement on visual prominence and messages appeals were examined by 2 (visual prominence) X 2 (involvement) ANOVAs and 2 (message appeal) X 2 (involvement) ANOVAs with attitudes toward the online posting and behavioral intentions as dependent variables. The ANOVA results showed that that there were not significant interaction effects of the involvement-appeal relation and the involvement-visual prominence relation. The p values of the aforementioned relations were greater than .37. However, the impacts of visual prominence and message appeals were greater under both involvement conditions (see Figure 1 and 2).

H3: Moderating effect of involvement on the attitude-intention relation
This study anticipated that the attitude toward the online posting would form a stronger impact on the formation of behavioral intentions for high involvement conditions. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to examine whether involvement modifies the magnitude of the attitude-intention relation. Then, each correlation coefficient values for the high- and low-involvement conditions was converted into z scores by using Fisher’s r to z transformation. In order to compare the z scores for the two conditions, the following formula was implemented to determine the observed z score: Zobserved = (Z1−Z2) ∕ (square root of [1∕N1−3] + (1∕N2−3))

For the high involvement condition (n = 83), the correlation coefficient for the attitude-intention relation was .49 (p < .001). For the low involvement condition (n = 84), the correlation was .25 (p < .05). The test statistics, z = 1.78, p < .001 (one-tailed test), indicate that the correlation in the high involvement condition is significantly higher than it is in the low involvement condition. Therefore, Hypothesis 3 is supported.

DISCUSSION
Our findings suggest a lack of association between involvement and the effects of heuristics. The moderating role of involvement has been well established since the introduction of Petty et al.’s (1983) ELM and Chaiken’s (1987) heuristic-systematic model. According to those theories, involvement is a significant determinant in the selection of an information processing route (peripheral versus central). It is also commonly acknowledged in the sport communication field that individuals generally use a systematic mode (i.e., evaluating completeness/accuracy) when processing online sport information under high-involvement conditions in order to avoid the serious consequences of incomplete or inaccurate information (e.g., monetary loss, negative impacts on child development). However, our study found that the non-systematic mode is often activated for both high-involvement and low-involvement participants, and this finding thus contributes to the literature on individuals’ approaches to online information processing.

According to evidence-accumulation models (2), individuals reach a conclusion once there is enough evidence to support a particular case, but they can also alter the amount of evidence needed for coming to that decision. Although individuals generally want to make accurate decisions, Internet users often compromise the accuracy of their decisions by reducing the amount of evidence required to validate the information they are investigating. This tendency is attributable to online information overload, in which individuals experience difficulties in understanding the nature of a particular topic (Robin & Holmes, 2008). The tendency suggests a new general pattern of the speed–accuracy trade-off (SAT) in social media environments. In line with the SAT, there are two driving forces in the decision-making process (4); one emphasizes faster (or more efficient) decisions, while the other emphasizes higher accuracy. Although there are trade-offs between speed and accuracy, the two can be pursued independently, but they produce a wide spectrum of outcomes, from slower but more accurate decisions to quicker but less accurate decisions. In social media environments, individuals are motivated to engage in less-effortful information processing and are more likely to trade accuracy for speed in the decision-making process.

The current study also found another reason for further examining the role of involvement in social media environments. It has been assumed that persuasion is less likely to occur through emotional messages when an individual is highly involved in an issue because people tend to scrutinize issue-relevant information. However, our findings suggest that emotional messages can be more persuasive than informational messages regardless of the level of involvement, especially in the online youth sport community context, and these findings can be explained by the types of information individuals seek in online communities. Objective information about a youth program (e.g., fees, coaches’ experience, facilities) can be easily found through sources such as the youth program’s website, but people also tend to seek others’ prior experiences and emotionally supportive messages when joining online communities.
It is important to stress that the attitude–intention relationship varies with involvement levels. Our study shows that the attitudes of high-involvement participants are more predictive of the intention to perform a specific act (e.g., signing up a youth sport program) than the attitudes of low-involvement participants. Our findings regarding the attitude–intention relationship suggest that the moderating effect of involvement on that relationship is applicable to not only traditional media environments (e.g., Krosnick, 1988; Verplanken, 1989), but also to social media environments.

In addition to the theoretical implications of this study, understanding parents’ information processing in assessing youth sport program is an integral part of the sport communication landscape. With the growing importance of (local) parenting community groups on social media and the impact of user generated message, this study will help youth sport service providers understand the effective way of crafting online information. This study will shed lights on communication strategies for youth sport providers when they try to utilize a form of testimonial in introducing their services to the market. This study will also lead how social influencer marketing would be employed in delivering and disseminating the promotional messages to the consumers.

This study has some limitations. All its subjects were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Although MTurk respondents tend to be more diverse than student samples in terms of demographic, psychographic, and geographic characteristics, some reliability issues (e.g., the work ethic of MTurk respondents) are unavoidable (3). Another limitation is that this study was conducted with samples of people who had parenting experiences because the study used a youth soccer program to develop the experimental stimuli, and the context of parenting might amplify reactions to emotional messages. We therefore recommend that future studies be conducted with more diverse samples and more popular sports topics (e.g., local sports events) in order to exclude the specific study topic and characteristics of the sample as potentially confounding factors.

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