Hye-Jin Paek

• PhD
• Professor at Hanyang University

This study analyzes the mechanisms through which risk messages about climate change lead to people's risk information‐sharing intention, and how digital media platform type serves as a context that moderates those mechanisms. Our analysis is informed by the influence of presumed influence (IPI) model, and we adapt and expand that model in three way...

Background South Korea was one of the first countries to experience a large outbreak of COVID-19. Early on, public health authorities recommended mask wearing as one of the main preventive measures against the virus. Compared to people in other countries, most South Koreans were willing to follow this recommendation. However, during the early stage...

This article introduces and applies an integrative model of cyberharassment victimization. The model combines routine activity theory (RAT), the general theory of crime (GTC), and the personal resources approach to analyze risk factors for victimization while acknowledging the protective role of a sense of mastery. Survey respondents were aged 15 t...

Gambling is a potential hazard to life satisfaction, yet peer relationships online might buffer this risk. This study analyzed the ways problem gambling is associated with life satisfaction as well as the extent to which the use of online-gambling community participation and, alternatively, offline belonging affect this association. A web-based sur...

Now that online media channels have become important sources of risk information, online rumors about risks have become increasingly problematic. Guided by construal level theory and the social-mediated crisis communication model, this study tests direct, mediating, and moderating effects of temporal message frame and digital media channel type on...

Background and aims: Loneliness and a low sense of mastery are associated with excessive gambling, but the underlying processes of these relationships remain unstudied. Because psychological distress can increase vulnerability to excessive gambling, we investigated its mediating role in these relationships among young people. To meet the need for...

Background and aims Loneliness and a low sense of mastery have been associated with excessive gambling, but the underlying processes of these relationships remain unstudied. Because psychological distress can increase vulnerability to excessive gambling, we investigated its mediating role in these relationships among young people. To meet the need...

Based on lifestyle exposure theory (LET), this study examined online dating application (ODA) use and victimization experiences among adolescents using large cross-national samples of Finnish, American, Spanish, and South Korean young people between ages 15 and 18. According to logistic regression analyses in two substudies, ODA use was associated...

Cyberaggression is a harmful behavior, but cross-national studies on cyberaggression including relations among its individual and social predictors are limited. This study aimed to discover the direct and indirect relations among individual and social predictors of cyberaggression in socio-demographically balanced survey data set of 4816 15–25-year...

The Internet and technologies have increased gambling opportunities globally, normalizing gambling among young individuals. Youth are active Internet users and susceptible to group norms, but little is known about group behavior and norms in online interaction. This study examined if following perceived majority opinions about gambling content (i.e...

Problem gambling among young people is an emerging trend globally. The online environment in particular offers various possibilities for gambling engagement. This is the first cross-national survey study using the social ecological model to analyze problem gambling, especially in the online context. The study aimed to analyze how different social e...

Social media tends to gather users around social cliques consisting of similar-minded individuals and shared identities. These online group processes can have significant influence on user behavior, which is alarming when considering risky behaviors such as gambling. This study examined how online clique involvement predicts young people’s interest...

This case study highlights several communication insights that have emerged from the South Korean national response to COVID-19. In particular, it focuses on how innovative disease control programmes and information and communications technologies (ICT) have been used in conjunction with appropriate message strategies. The South Korean government u...

Routine Activity Theory (RAT) and the general theory of crime have been widely employed to understand cybercrime victimization. However, there is a need to integrate these theoretical frameworks to better understand victimization from a cross-national perspective. A web-based survey was conducted among participants aged 15 to 25 years from the U.S....

With specific references to South Korea’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this commentary discusses insights and problems related to the issue of how to communicate uncertainties about health risks to affected publics. First, we discuss examples of uncertainties relating to deficiencies of knowledge and divergent views among experts. Next, we su...

The objective of this study was to examine if belonging to online communities and social media identity bubbles predict youth problem gambling. An online survey was administered to 15–25-year-old participants in the United States (N = 1212), South Korea (N = 1192), Spain (N = 1212), and Finland (N = 1200). The survey measured two dimensions of onli...

Introduction: Despite regulations that forbid cigarette packages from displaying messages such as "mild," "low-tar," and "light," many smokers still have misperceptions about "light" or "low-tar" cigarettes. One reason may be that tar amount displays continue to be permitted. This study examines whether removing tar delivery information from packa...

Research shows identifying with online peer groups influences youth perceptions and behaviors contrarily to offline peer groups. Youths are active Internet users and easily find similar others to connect with online. Concurrently, gambling has increased in popularity among young individuals globally. Employing a social identity perspective, an onli...

Background: In the ever-growing and technologically advancing world, an increasing amount of social interaction takes place through the Web. With this change, loneliness is becoming an unprecedented societal issue, making youth more susceptible to various physical and mental health problems. This societal change also influences the dynamics of addi...

Aims: To examine the continuing role of daily popular social media use in youth hazardous alcohol consumption in four countries across continents. Methods: A web-based survey was given to youths aged 15-25 in the USA (n = 1212), South Korea (n = 1192), Finland (n = 1200) and Spain (n = 1212). Hazardous alcohol use (alcohol use disorders identifi...

This study has two aims: to identify effective strategies for managing false rumors about risks and to investigate the roles that basic and situational trust in government play in that process. Online experiment data were collected nationwide from 915 adults in South Korea. They were exposed to a false rumor about radiation‐contaminated seafood and...

Cybercrime involves offending act directed at individuals using computers and computer networks as mediating tools. Offending acts may range from cyberstalking and cyber harassment to hate crimes, identity theft, fraud, sexual and violent threats. Previous work on cybercrime victimization has been done predominantly from the perspective of Routine...

Background: Youth are known to be susceptible to peer influence and behavior models set by others. Since the emergence of social media, young individuals have adapted and been active users of many of its platforms. Correspondingly, social influence and behavioral diffusion are now taking place through the virtual world. This has been connected to t...

BACKGROUND In the ever-growing and technologically advancing world, an increasing amount of social interaction takes place online. With this change, loneliness is becoming an unprecedented societal issue, making youth more susceptible to various physical and mental health problems. This societal change also influences the dynamics of addiction. OB...

Background In the ever-growing and technologically advancing world, an increasing amount of social interaction takes place through the Web. With this change, loneliness is becoming an unprecedented societal issue, making youth more susceptible to various physical and mental health problems. This societal change also influences the dynamics of addic...

Social media is an emerging source for peer influence, especially among young users. In this study, we tested how personal attitudes and the online group influence determine reactions towards gambling content among American (N = 1212), South Korean (N = 1192) and Finnish (N = 1200) adolescents and young adults. In a vignette experiment, respondents...

Social media facilitates identity bubbles based on shared identity, social homophily and reliance on information from one’s online networks. This study analyzed factors associated with a tendency for being in a social media identity bubble using the Identity Bubble Reinforcement Scale (IBRS-6). Young Americans (N=1200), South Koreans (N=1192) and F...

Background and Aims: Gambling has become an increasingly popular activity among adolescents and young adults worldwide. This study screened whether following perceived group norms regarding gambling and in-group information function as factors in problem gambling. A set of individual characteristics were included in the analysis. Methods: A web-bas...

Background and Aims: Gambling has become an increasingly popular activity among adolescents and young adults worldwide. This study screened whether following perceived group norms regarding gambling and in-group information function as factors in problem gambling. A set of individual characteristics were included in the analysis. Methods: A web-bas...

Social media have become increasingly important in risk and crisis situations. However, little is known about which types of social media have greater influence on risk perceptions and behaviors. This study pursues two goals related to this question. The first is to explicate the cognitive mechanism underlying the process through which exposure to...

Guided by a match-up hypothesis and Fishbein’s expectancy-value theory, this research examines the effects of message sources and appeals in anti-binge-drinking public service ads (PSAs) on college students' binge-drinking attitudes and behavioral intention. College students (N = 251) participated in a 2 sources (expertise vs. similarity) × 2 appea...

This study examines multiple aspects of e-cigarette mentions on different online media channels during the announcement and implementation of a cigarette tax increase policy in South Korea. It consists of three parts. First, a Naive Bayes classifier was used to sort 59,147 tweets about e-cigarettes into five pre-designated themes — promotion, healt...

Background: Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Africa, has a total fertility rate of 4.6, a decrease from 5.5 in 2000. However, only 35.3% of women in the reproductive age group use modern family planning (FP) methods, and the 22.3% of them who have an unmet need for family planning is among the highest rates in sub-Saharan African coun...

Background Many smokers still have misconceptions about “light” or “low tar” cigarettes. In South Korea, low-tar (< 3 mg) cigarette sales have increased sharply from 1.8% in 2002 to 49.2% in 2015. Although government regulations forbid cigarette packages from displaying messages such as “mild,” “low-tar,” and “light,” numbers indicating tar amounts...

This article explores how Charles Taylor's account of moral personhood and Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's account of justificatory regimes can add breadth, depth, and specificity to discussions of ethical dilemmas in public relations. These frameworks are analyzed for their potential to make the following contributions to public relations eth...

During the outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome, the Korean government responded with inadequate speed and thoroughness. As a result, serious damage occurred not only to public health, but also to socioeconomic life and public trust in the government. Although people are becoming increasingly aware that risk and crisis communications are im...

*** READERS: Click the DOI link above for the text. *** Risk perception refers to people’s subjective judgments about the likelihood of negative occurrences such as injury, illness, disease, and death. Risk perception is important in health and risk communication because it determines which hazards people care about and how they deal with them. Ri...

As people have become increasingly concerned about their health, programs about health have proliferated on South Korean television. This study’s purpose is to identify the factors associated with and processes through which Korean adults intend to view health TV programs. The comprehensive model of information seeking (CMIS) was tested using struc...

This study examines the roles that the media effects and persuasion ethics schemas play in people’s responses to an antismoking ad in South Korea. An online experiment was conducted with 347 adults. The media effects schema was manipulated with news stories on an antismoking campaign’s effectiveness, while the persuasion ethics schema was measured...

Building on the theoretical arguments of the impersonal-impact and differential-impact hypotheses, this study has a twofold purpose: first, to demonstrate how fear-arousing media messages about risk are associated with personal-level risk perception, as well as, and perhaps more so than, societal-level risk perception; and second, to examine how th...

Objective: This study examined how knowledge, risk perception, health beliefs and multidimensional health locus of control (HLC) were associated with caregivers' intention to vaccinate their child, and how these associations varied across child age groups. Setting: South Korea. Methods: The cross-sectional survey was conducted via a face-to-fa...

Project FIT was a two-year multi-component nutrition and physical activity intervention delivered in ethnically-diverse low-income elementary schools in Grand Rapids, MI. This paper reports effects on children's nutrition outcomes and process evaluation of the school component. A quasi-experimental design was utilized. 3rd, 4th and 5th-grade studen...

This study tests how media messages that have different risk presentation formats and include fear independently and jointly affect people's risk perceptions. An online experiment was conducted nationwide among South Korean adults regarding three major health risk topics: carcinogenic hazards, H1N1, and mad cow disease. The risk presentation format...

This study explicates the mechanism underlying the process through which news and entertainment media shape people's personal- and societal-level risk perceptions. It combines the psychometric paradigm with the impersonal- and differential-impact hypotheses, highlighting the roles that cognitive and emotional dimensions of risk characteristics play...

This paper examines audience assessments of public service announcement (PSA) messages that exemplify three ethical approaches to health promotion: paternalism, liberalism, and empowerment. An exploratory message evaluation study using an antismoking PSA was conducted online among 384 South Korean adults and analyzed to pursue three objectives: fir...

Food marketing is under increased scrutiny for its implicated role in the childhood obesity epidemic. Free branded online advergames are ubiquitous. Using a customised online game, this study examined how food advergames exert their influence on children. The findings of the experiment demonstrate the effects of brand integration and interactivity...

This study pursues the following aims: to examine how news stories use frames, emotions, and uncertainty to present environmental risk information; to identify which aspects of risk issues they highlight; and to analyze how these stories’ representations of risk and uncertainty might differ according to the sources they use. Content analysis of 641...

The purpose of this study is to explicate the complexities of the mechanism through which norm messages achieve their intended goals, and to examine how the normative mechanism differs according to the collectivism orientation of two culturally distinct countries. To analyze data collected from 464 US and Korean college students, it uses the O-S-O-...

Objective To evaluate the short-term outcome of the social marketing approach used in Project FIT, we developed a school- and community-based programme for promoting healthful eating and physical activity in kindergarten to 5th-grade children and their parents. Design A 2-year quasi-experiment for children and two cross-sectional surveys for paren...

Social responsibility is a key aspect of advertising that has generated considerable legal and ethical debate. This chapter provides a review and critique of current research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in advertising, with particular attention to CSR in the international advertising setting. Three popular forms of CSR programs identif...

This study examines two types of online health information behavior: vertical, one-way online health information behavior oriented toward receiving messages from elites and professionals, and horizontal, two-way online health information behavior oriented toward sharing communication among ordinary Internet users. The purpose is to investigate how...

The interdisciplinary intersections between communication science and health-related fields are pervasive, with numerous differences in regard to epistemology, career planning, funding perspectives, educational goals, and cultural orientations. This article identifies and elaborates on these challenges with illustrative examples. Furthermore, concr...

This study analyzed a social media campaign promoting child welfare to explore the associations among people's social media use, their engagement with different social media platforms (blog, Facebook page, Twitter account), and three intended behavioral outcomes (social media behavior, offline communication behavior, and helping behavior). An onlin...

E-cigarettes are widely promoted on the Internet, but little is known about what kinds of information about them are available online. This study examines message, source, and health information characteristics of e-cigarette videos on the popular online video-sharing platform YouTube. A content analysis of 365 e-cigarette videos indicates that 85%...

In efforts to curb and prevent youth smoking, school tobacco policies have become an important and effective strategy. This study explores the degrees and types of tobacco-free school policy (TFSP) enforcement that are associated with adolescent smoking. A multilevel analysis was performed using 983 students who are nested in 14 schools. The indivi...

This online experiment investigates how marketers could maximize favorable consumer responses to brand pages on social network sites (SNSs) through the strategic use of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Two types of CSR, cause-related marketing (CRM) and cause sponsorship (CS), and the control group (control) are compared. The results reveal t...

Food marketing has emerged as an environmental factor that shapes children's dietary behaviors. "Advergames," or free online games designed to promote branded products, are an example of evolving food marketing tactics aimed at children. Our primary objective was to classify foods marketed to children (aged 2-11 y) in advergames as those meeting or...

To determine the joint association of junk food consumption (JFC) and screen time (ST) with adiposity in children. Two hundred fourteen (121 girls, 93 boys) third-to-fifth-grade students (54% Hispanic, 35% African American, 8% white) completed a lifestyle behavior survey, which included self-reported JFC and ST, as part of a school-based lifestyle...

Abstract This study simultaneously explored direct, indirect, and joint effects of types of norm messages, guilt, and culture on smokers' behavioral intentions in the anti-secondhand smoking context. An online study among 310 smoking students in an individualistic (United States) and a collectivistic (Korea) country indicated that (1) norm messages...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the content of food advergames and the nutritional quality of foods promoted in those advergames with the presence of child visitors. Design/methodology/approach – This study integrates three different sources of data, first, characteristics of the audience from internet audience measurement me...

For several years, child welfare advocates have claimed that the U.S. news media misrepresent child abuse and fail to highlight its societal dimensions. To investigate the accuracy of this diagnosis, the following study examines findings of a content analysis of child abuse coverage in major national and urban U.S. newspapers from 2000 to 2008. Fir...

This study reports data from the website monitoring tools Google Analytics and Sprout Social and an online survey for a child welfare social media campaign on three social media platforms -- a blog, Facebook, and Twitter. This study has two purposes: (1) to identify characteristics of visitors to cause-related social media platforms and (2) to exam...

Objectives: This study presents the role, design, and results of the social marketing approach used in Project FIT, a school-, and community-based program for promoting healthy eating and physical activity (PA) in four low-income, urban, and ethnically diverse elementary schools and neighborhoods in Michigan. Method: The process evaluation includ...

This study evaluated a community-based and social marketing healthy corner store program (FIT store) to improve the affordability and availability of healthy foods in low-income, urban, and ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Michigan. The Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores data were analyzed for the FIT (N = 4) stores. Two cross-secti...

Objective To examine how norm appeals and guilt influence smokers’ behavioural intention. Design Quasi-experimental design. Setting South Korea. Method Two hundred and fifty-five male smokers were randomly assigned to descriptive, injunctive, or subjective anti-smoking norm messages. After they viewed the norm messages, their norm perceptions, g...

This study explicates mechanisms of media campaign effectiveness in the context of children's physical activity. The authors' model expands the theory of planned behavior by integrating injunctive and descriptive norms into its normative mechanism. Analysis of a 3-wave nationally representative evaluation survey among 1,623 tweens indicates that ca...

Perceived effectiveness (PE) has been studied as an important antecedent of persuasion. But judgments of PE may vary its persuasive impact depending on whom people think about as message referents. This study explores PE judgment for both self and different others as well as their independent roles in the persuasion process. Theoretical rationales...

To explore the feasibility of social media for message testing, this study connects favorable viewer responses to antismoking videos on YouTube with the videos' message characteristics (message sensation value [MSV] and appeals), producer types, and viewer influences (viewer rating and number of viewers). Through multilevel modeling, a content anal...

Despite calls for research on the use of utilitarian versus identity appeals more than a decade ago, few advertising studies have examined which appeal may be more persuasive for whom. Guided by the functional matching effects thesis, our two experiments test the separate and interactive roles of product function (social identity-SI, utilitarian-UT...

Using the Foote, Cone and Belding (FCB) grid model and functional matching effects as theoretical frameworks, this study analyzed 1356 primetime TV commercials to assess the extent to which there is a functional match-up between think and feel product types and utilitarian and value expressive message appeals in contemporary TV advertising. Additio...

This study analyzes US and South Korean news coverage of the H1N1 pandemic to examine cross-cultural variations in attention cycle patterns, cited sources, and news frames. A content analysis was conducted on 630 articles from US and Korean newspapers during the period of April to October 2009. It found that attention cycle patterns, news frames, a...

While adolescents are increasingly using the Internet for health information, little research has been done to assess and improve their "eHealth literacy"-the abilities to find, evaluate, and apply online health information. This study examines the extent to which adolescents' levels of eHealth literacy can be improved by known determinants such as...

Guided by the assumptions of the social ecological model and the social marketing approach, this study provides a simultaneous and comprehensive assessment of 4 major alcohol reduction strategies for college campuses: school education programs, social norms campaigns, alcohol counter-marketing, and alcohol control policies. Analysis of nationally r...

This study examines frequencies and types of promotion techniques featured in five decades of cigarette advertising relative to five major smoking eras. Analysis of 1,133 cigarette advertisements collected through multistage sampling of 1954 through 2003 issues of three youth-oriented magazines found that 7.6% of the analyzed ads featured at least...

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which recently prevalent nutrient-content claims in food advertising are effective and how the level of effectiveness might differ between food products perceived as healthy and unhealthy. Guided by the match-up hypothesis and its theoretical underpinnings, a set of 2 (nutrient-content vs taste...

This paper describes Project FIT, a collaboration between the public school system, local health systems, physicians, neighborhood associations, businesses, faith-based leaders, community agencies and university researchers to develop a multi-faceted approach to promote physical activity and healthy eating toward the general goal of preventing and...

This study tests the processes through which child abuse public service announcements (PSAs) are effective. The proposed model builds upon the persuasion mediation model of Dillard and Peck (2000 ), which integrates emotional response and perceived effectiveness as antecedents of issue attitudes and behavioral intention. The model tested the mediat...