The Order Effect on Electronic Word of Mouth to Online Religious Service Usage: Using Daoism as an Example in Taiwan

Abstract

As we known, the continuing improvements in information technology have led to many new and fascinating applications in physics, engineering, and so on. Besides, the innovative information and communication technology (ICT) applications also denote a significant effect on the religion issues. Daoism, a traditional religion being affected with Internet has been mounted steadily for a number of decades. In order to attract the young group, online service will be the possible choice when traditional Daoism service providers consider how to provide the better service model. People choose to use the online service based on recommendations received not only by word of mouth (WOM), but also from cyberspace such as website, electronic bulletin boards, blogs, and facebook. In psychological terms, one result is cognitive bias, i.e., subjects tend to have better recall for the information presented early compared to information presented later, and this research is spawned from this theory. This work explored the relationship between the order effect on electronic word of mouth (eWOM) and online religious service usage. We constructed the research framework and established the hypotheses. In order to study completeness, we investigated the users who used the online religious services including websites, social network sites, blogs and facebook. The e-questionnaire surveys on online worshippers’ data are collected. Totally, 271 valid formal questionnaires were collected and analyzed (N = 271; mean age = 22.1; 56 % male). The SPSS 20.0 software was used for analysis and hypothesis testing. The findings are as follows: