The aim of this study is to examine the ways in which individuals’perceptions of media use are inji’uenced by others. Traditional theories of media use have proposed that perceptions of media use are shaped by individuals’ demographic characteristics and the media’s characteristics. However, three recent theories--cn’tical mass theory, social inf7uence model of media use, and adaptive structura...

There are two principal theories of why countries or regions trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is virtually no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in accounting for production structure and trade. We use a framework that nests an increasing returns model of economic geography featuring ‘home market effects’ with that o...

The digital divide is usually conceptualized through “goods-dominant logic,” where bridging the divide entails providing digital goods to disadvantaged segments of the population. This is expected to enhance their digital capabilities and thus to have a positive influence on the digital outcomes (or services) experienced. In contrast, this study is anchored in an alternative “service-dominant l...

Developing rating scales for assessing interactional performance is demanding since it is a relatively complicated procedure. The present study investigated the psychometric characteristics of the CAP rating scale (Wang, 2015) for assessing interactional competence at micro-level. To this end, 160 Iranian intermediate EFL learners were selected based on their performance on TOEFL iBT test from ...

moving in line with the postulation that metadiscourse (md) markers help transform a dry and tortuous piece of text into a coherent and reader-friendly one, the researchers in the current study attempted to investigate the effect different metadiscourse markers might have on iranian efl learners’ perception of written texts. to this end, 120 undergraduate english students were given three diffe...