Researches On Social Network Dependence In Everyday Life Information Seeking Behavior From The Perspective Of Information Cocoon

Everyday life information seeking(ELIS)is an important part of information behavior.Under the context of public health emergencies caused by the Novel Coronavirus,it is of great significance to deepen the behavior characteristic cognition of everyday life information seeking.In the term of information sources and channels,something of ELIS is informal communication based on social relationship network.Therefore,it is helpful to study the social network dependence in everyday life information seeking behavior to further understand its behavior characteristics.At the same time,the Internet surfing time during the epidemic has increased compared to normal situations,especially for young users of major social platforms.These young users have rapidly increased their usage of apps such as Douyin and Kuaishou,which may cause a significant phenomena of information cocoon.Based on this,combining with the information cocoon among the users on Internet platform,this study focused on social network dependence in everyday life information seeking behavior during the peak of the epidemic,and aimed to describe the performance characteristics of information cocoon,explore the social network dependence during the epidemic,and reveal the relationship between the information cocoon and the social network dependence in everyday life information seeking behavior.The qualitative and quantitative methods were adopted in this study.Firstly,semi-structured interviews were used to collect data,the grounded theory to encode the original interview data at three levels,and build a preliminary relationship model;secondly,combining with the results of related literatures,a questionnaire was designed to collect data,and difference analysis,correlation analysis and regression analysis were used to analyze the data from 395 valid cases to verify the hypothesis and explain the relationship.Based on data analysis,the following conclusions were drawn:(1)There is a large number of information cocoon in everyday life,which mainly manifested the following characteristics: homogeneous information enveloped,partial prominent absorption,low degree of contagious effect,and universal acceptance of closed information.(2)Everyday life information seeking behavior shows a strong dependence on social network,mainly showing the following characteristics: strong correlation between relationship strength and trust,outstanding performance of mutual assistance,high dependence on other formal or informal networks,significant differences in dependence on social network types among different age groups.(3)Individuals in different epidemic-risk areas only showed significant differences in information homogeneity,and low-risk areas are more obvious than medium-risk areas;there are no significant differences in other aspects of social network dependence.(4)There is a correlation between the information cocoon and the social network dependence in everyday life information seeking behavior,which is specifically expressed as: information homogeneity is highly correlated with other formal or informal organization types,information closure is significantly correlated with kinship type,contagion effect is highly correlated with cultural type,and partial absorption is highly correlated with relationship trust.(5)The four dimensions of information cocoon,which are information homogeneity,information closedness,contagion effect,and partial absorption,are used as independent variables for stepwise regression analysis.The results show that the four variables are positively correlated with everyday life information seeking behavior,social network content and relationship strength,partial absorption has greater impact,and information closeness has the least impact.Among the four variables,only information homogeneity,information closeness and contagion effects are effective variables,which are positively correlated with social network types in everyday life information seeking behavior,of which information homogeneity has the greatest impact.There is a positive correlation between the information cocoon and the social network dependence in everyday life information seeking behavior,which can explained 34.4% of the dependent variable changes.It is indicated that,under the background of COVID-19,the information cocoon in the everyday life can explain some extent its social network dependency characteristics,and there are other factors that have a significant impact on the social network dependence in everyday life information seeking behavior.