By Nurina Farzana Zahra
GOMBAK, 10 November 2020: Anxiety due to uncertainty discrepancy leads to increased information seeking behaviour, Dr. Tengku Siti Aisha Tengku Azzman told “WAPOR Asia Kuala Lumpur 2020” virtual conference parallel session on Monday.
Dr. Tengku Siti Aisha from International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) revealed that her research had identified anxiety among university students as an important factor that lead them in managing information on COVID-19.
She said from her findings, participants of the study are relatively knowledgeable about COVID-19 where the main source of information came from social media, and the type of information search on COVID-19 is the country’s updates.
The parallel session, themed “COVID-19 and Higher Learning Institutions”, saw speakers presenting their research papers focusing on community perspective in higher institutions in seeking information and their attitude towards COVID-19.
Meanwhile, Dr. Kamaruzzaman Abdul Manan from Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI) focused on university students’ attitude during COVID-19 pandemic where the study was conducted in both IIUM and UPSI.
He said his findings indicated that “90 percent of students from both universities (UPSI and IIUM) have positive attitude towards the importance of containing the virus.”
“Both universities have been exposed to various media in educating university students about COVID-19, and due to that the students had practised standard operating procedures (SOP) to break the chain of infection,” he said.
Another presenter, Dr. Mohammed Fadel Arandas from Southern University College, emphasised on respondents’ seeking of information from both traditional and social media.
His research revealed that “traditional media such as television have the highest percentage of credibility and accuracy of media platforms.”
“Although the majority of respondents relied on new media as a main source of information, most of them considered traditional media as credible and accurate sources,” he told the audience. ***