Despite potential benefits of podcasts for college education, little research has examined students’ psychological drives for using podcasts. To explore the relationship between the use of podcasts and college students’ appreciation of them, this study investigated students’ motivations, attitudes and behaviors with regard to podcasts use including their learning environment. Based on a survey ...

Building and using social networks is an important factor in individuals’ personal as well as professional success. In the present work, we examine how individuals’ regulatory focus relates to their networking behavior. Findings from a sample of 300 entrepreneurs across 25 networking groups showed that a general focus on motivations for growth and advancement (promotion) predicted an increase i...

Recent research on entrepreneurship has focused largely on macro-level environmental forces. Although researchers adopting this focus have rightly criticized much of the existing empirical research on the role of human motivation in entrepreneurship, we believe that the development of entrepreneurship theory requires consideration of the motivations of people making entrepreneurial decisions. T...

We used a quasi-experimental research design to study the extent of motivational crowding in a recent sustainable development intervention in northern India. The project provided participants with both private and communal material benefits to enhance their incomes, and environmental and social information to inculcate pro-environmental motivations. We compared changes in reported motivations o...

Despite the impact that influential American political bloggers have had on public policies and the mainstream media agenda in recent years, very little research is currently available on the most widely read political bloggers. Through a survey of 66 top American political bloggers, the present study examines this elite group by analyzing their initial and current motivations for blogging as w...

Companies' Facebook pages have emerged as a commonly used marketing channel but consumers' underlying motivations to use these pages and their effect on members' intentions to purchase the host company's products are currently unclear. The present study examines consumers' hedonic and utilitarian motivations to use company-hosted Facebook pages in relation to the community usage behavior (brows...

The authors applied functionalist theory to the question of the motivations underlying volunteerism, hypothesized 6 functions potentially served by volunteerism, and designed an instrument to assess these functions (Volunteer Functions Inventory; VFI). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on diverse samples yielded factor solutions consistent with functionalist theorizing; each VFI moti...

OBJECTIVE To describe scales that measure motivations for changing dietary behaviour, and to examine associations of these scales with current diet and dietary change. DESIGN A secondary analysis of a randomised trial of a self-help intervention to promote lower fat and higher fruit and vegetable consumption. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING Participants were 1205 adults selected at random from enr...

Most work in ‘evolutionary linguistics’ seeks to motivate the emergence of linguistic universals. Although the search for universals never played a major role in semantics, a number of such universals have been proposed concerning connectives, property and preposition denoting expressions, and quantifiers. In this paper we suggest some evolutionary motivations for these proposed universals usin...

This paper provides motivation as well as a method of construction for Hopf algebras, starting from an associative algebra. The dualization technique involved relies heavily on the use of Sweedler’s dual.