The Tendency To Tell: Understanding Publics' Communicative Responses To Crisis Information Form and Source

Abstract

Through 22 in-depth interviews and an experiment with 162 college students, this study applies the social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model to understand why and how publics communicate about crises. Specifically, the study focuses on how the source and form of the initial crisis information publics are exposed to affect their crisis communication. The findings confirm the validity of the SMCC model's core components related to publics' crisis communicative tendencies under the influence of traditional media, social media, and offline word-of-mouth communication. The results also indicate that traditional media, compared to other media forms, seems to exert a stronger influence on how publics communicate about crises.