May Lwin

Nanyang Technological University | ntu · Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information

This study examines the effectiveness of incorporating exergaming into physical education lessons as a platform for imparting health education messages and influencing children's beliefs about and attitudes toward physical activity. The authors launched a 6-week intervention program using Nintendo Wii games coupled with protection motivation theory...

This paper describes a social media system to prevent dengue in Sri Lanka and potentially in the rest of the South and Southeast Asia regions. The system integrates three concepts of public health prevention that have thus far been implemented only in silos. First, the predictive surveillance component uses a computer simulation to forewarn health...

The current study aims to understand the factors that influence adolescents' disclosure of personally identifiable information (PII) on social networking sites (SNSs). A survey was conducted among 780 adolescent participants (between 13 and 18) who were Facebook users. Structural equation modeling was used for analyzing the data and obtaining an ov...

What leads to acceptance versus rejection of messages that represent one's own culture/in-group, or a foreign culture/out-group? We investigate how symbols in mass communication might be used to overcome biases toward in-group and out-group messages. We experimentally study these effects across countries representing varying levels of consumer ethn...

Concern toward children's safety in an online environment has resulted in demands for safeguards to protect their online privacy when involved with a wide variety of commercial websites. Unfortunately, little academic research has examined how effective safeguards are in limiting children's disclosure of information. We fill this void by examining...

Background Public health strategies to improve patient adherence to antibiotics rely mostly on raising awareness of the threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and improving knowledge about antibiotics. We aimed to evaluate how adherence to antibiotics relates to knowledge and the threat perceptions proposed by the Protection Motivation Theory (PM...

This study examines factors related to the adoption of mobile phones by healthcare workers in Indonesia. A total of 122 rural midwives participated in the study where each was given a mobile phone for health information sharing and communications. Their adoption was compared with a control group of 101 midwives in the same region. The results show...

Background The first wave of COVID-19 during April to July 2020 in Singapore largely affected the migrant workers living in residential dormitories. A government taskforce working with dormitory operators, employers and non-government agencies came together to deliver behavioral interventions and health care services for migrant worker as dorms wer...

Singapore, a highly urbanized Asian tropical country that experiences periodic dengue outbreaks, is piloting field releases of male Wolbachia-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with the aim of suppressing urban populations of the primary dengue vector Aedes aegypti. This study proposes and assesses a model to explain the roles of hesitancy and recep...

Introduction Measures to mitigate the COVID-19 outbreak in the migrant worker dormitories in Singapore included lockdown and isolation of residents for prolonged periods. In this paper, we explore efforts to ease tensions and support mental health under these conditions. Methods Case study of dormitory residents under lockdown from April to Aug...

Despite being a densely populated international travel hub in Southeast Asia, Singapore ranks at the top globally as the country with the lowest COVID-19 case fatality ratio as of February 2021. This chapter provides key insights into Singapore’s COVID-19 experience, focusing on the role of Singapore’s government, businesses, and non-governmental o...

Background Public sentiments are an important indicator of crisis response, with the need to balance exigency without adding to panic or projecting overconfidence. Given the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have enacted various nationwide measures against the disease with social media platforms providing the previously unparallele...

This research examines how parents in two high digital penetration nations in the Asia-Pacific region, Singapore and Australia, mediate children’s use of digital media and how parental mediation practices in each country are explained by parents’ media perception, digital literacy, and parental self-efficacy. We conducted surveys with parents resid...

Incidence and prevalence rates of dengue have increased over the years, and the disease is quickly becoming cause for concern within the public health community. Globally, 128 countries and slightly under four billion people are at risk of contracting dengue. In Sri Lanka, more than half of dengue cases originate in Colombo, which in previous years...

In 2016, Singapore introduced the release of male Wolbachia-Aedes mosquitoes to complement vector control efforts and suppress Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in selected study sites. With ongoing expansion of Project Wolbachia–Singapore to cover larger areas, a household-based survey was conducted between July 2019 to February 2020 in two Project Wolbach...

This study examines how parents and their children differ in their perceptions of parental mediation strategies implemented to supervise and monitor children’s digital media use. Focusing on the Asian context, we explore reasons for parents to set rules as well as parental roles and strictness in relation to children’s digital media use. In-depth q...

Misuses of antimicrobials in the community have been identified as a salient contributor to antimicrobial resistance in Singapore. However, little is known about the belief, practices, and socio-psychological factors driving antibiotic misuse in the community. As the first nationally representative study to address these gaps, 967 respondents in Si...

Public health crises like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic appear to be the perfect breeding ground for misinformation. As influential information sources, mainstream news media have a unique opportunity to use their platform to debunk and educate the public about misinformation. Despite evidence lending support to the potential for mainstream news me...

Background With increasing life expectancy and aging populations, the global prevalence of chronic diseases and the long-term care required for people with comorbidities is rising. This has led to an ever-growing need for caregiving. Previous literature has shown that caregivers face problems of isolation and loneliness. However, many health organi...

One major gap in existing health communication research is that few studies have synthesized findings from the literature to map out what are the key factors related to workplace (a) safety awareness, (b) safety risks, (c) health awareness, and (d) health risks. This study bridges the gap by systematically reviewing what these organizational, cultu...

Exergames offer both enactive and vicarious learning through the graphical representations of the self and virtual coach. This study established and tested a model of exergame motivation with Social Cognitive Theory as the foundation. A 2 (User Avatar: Absent versus Present) × 2 (Virtual Coach: Absent versus Present) between-subjects experiment was...

BACKGROUND With increasing life expectancy and aging populations, the global prevalence of chronic diseases and the long-term care required for people with comorbidities is rising. This has led to an ever-growing need for caregiving. Previous literature has shown that caregivers face problems of isolation and loneliness. However, many health organi...

Background Though social sciences are expectedly instrumental in combating antimicrobial resistance (AMR), their research on AMR has been historically lacking. Objectives This study aims to understand the current academic literature on AMR within the social science field by investigating international contributions, emerging topics, influential ar...

BACKGROUND: Public health crises like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic appear to be the perfect breeding ground for misinformation. As influential information sources, mainstream news media can correct misinformation in a timely manner. However, characteristics of misinformation reported by the media and how it has been corrected have received scant s...

Parents are important sources of influence in the development of healthy eating among children and adolescents. Besides gatekeeping and modeling, parents serve as health educators and promoters, using intentional and persuasive communication to encourage healthier eating preferences and behaviors in children. Despite this, a lack of reliable and va...

This study examines how parents, peers, and media use affect adolescents’ attitudinal and behavioral responses to app-based mobile advertising. A survey conducted with 603 smartphone users aged between 12 and 19 in Singapore suggests that parental factors, particularly control-based restrictive parental mediation, are more influential on younger ad...

This research aims to better understand cultural disparities in cancer prevention behaviors. To do this, we investigate how four cultural beliefs – optimism, pessimism, naïve dialecticism, and superstition – associate with cancer fatalism, which has been recognized as a major barrier to cancer prevention behaviors. Based on an online survey of 1,02...

Numerous studies have highlighted the undesirable effects of food advertising on children across the world. However, very few researchers have looked at the impact of food advertising restrictions on the targeted outcomes of these policies. This paper presents three studies that assessed the impact of child food advertising restrictions in Singapor...

Purpose Social media use carries both opportunities and risks for children and adolescents. In order to reduce the negative impacts of social media on youth, the authors focus our efforts on parental mediation of social media. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to enhance the conceptualization and operationalization of parental mediation of...

Social networking sites (SNSs) have become common avenues for young people to share their life experience with peers, including their consumption experience. Although prior research on the media effects of SNSs has shown how online communication on SNSs promotes various volitional behaviors, current understanding is limited with respect to how youn...

Screen-obsessed: Parenting in the Digital Age is the first book solely focusing on parental supervision of children's media use. This book distills important information regarding how parents can effectively guide their offspring living in the multimedia environment. This book discusses an extensive range of theories, issues, and subjects of parent...

In Asia, the public health burden of influenza is significant despite the existence of efficacious influenza vaccines. Annual seasonal influenza vaccination can reduce the incidence of influenza significantly, yet influenza vaccination coverage remains low in this part of the world. As a densely populated region with varying climatic zones and a la...

Background: Dengue is a serious problem around the globe, with 3.9 billion people at risk of the disease. Sri Lanka has recently seen unprecedented rates of dengue with 4.3 times more cases than during the same period over the previous six years. The paper discusses the development of an integrated health systems framework, aided by mobile technol...

Integrated Marketing Communication: A Balanced Approach is your guide to integrated marketing communication (IMC), introducing you to the principles that underpin its practice. This text considers the different theories of how IMC works, taking the empirical evidence available into account, and illustrating its real-world application with relevant...

The study of parenting practices on child food consumption has often been characterized as having great utility but lacking in theory. In contrast, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) has often been suggested to be limited in its utility. To address these gaps, interpersonal constructs – the concepts of active parental guidance (e.g., nutrition ed...

Background: This study examined the impact of superstitious beliefs on influenza vaccine uptake and investigated the role of health beliefs as underlying psychological mechanisms. It is hypothesized that superstitious beliefs predict greater perceived risks in influenza and vaccines, which in turn affect influenza vaccine uptake. Methods: A cros...

Article forthcoming.

Infectious diseases have a huge health and economic burden globally. Vaccination has been found to be a crucial health intervention for diseases. The study aims to compare the drivers of vaccine uptake for influenza and dengue, and to understand the key drivers within each of the diseases in predicting vaccine uptake intentions. Data were collected...

Existing research has highlighted the concept of parental third-person effect, where parents' perceive greater negative media effects on other children versus their own, and act upon those beliefs. Despite this, much of the research has remained rooted in the traditional understanding of the third-person perception, examining how third-person effec...

BACKGROUND Promoting safety and health awareness and mitigating risks are of paramount importance to companies in high-risk industries. Yet, there are very few studies that have synthesized findings from existing online workplace safety and health literature to identify what are the key factors that are related to (a) safety awareness, (b) safety r...

A number of studies of the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs), competencies and capabilities of public relations and communication professionals have been carried out in the USA, UK and other countries. However, most have not engaged to any significant extent with literature in the human resource development field which specializes in defining...

While social media has been increasingly used for communication of infectious disease outbreaks, little is known about how social media can improve strategic communication across various stages of the health crisis. The Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication Model (Reynolds & Seeger, 2005; CERC) outlines strategies across different crisis phases a...

In a series of studies, we demonstrate that moral judgment is impacted by sensory input experienced during the product evaluation process due to its impact on mental construal level. We find that seeing or hearing a product while evaluating it elicits more concrete thought, which entails the consideration of contextual factors and extenuating circu...

Objective This study investigated the extent to which the efficacy of a hypertension awareness programme in Singapore may differ based on age, gender, race and housing type (as proxy for income). Method Pre- and post-programme survey responses on blood pressure (BP) knowledge and beliefs from 9,960 grade 5 students were assessed. Post-programme re...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been found to be a strong predictor of a favorable corporate image [Gray, 1986. Managing the corporate image: The key to public trust. London: Quorum Books]. Websites have become an essential communication platform [Dawkins, 2004. Corporate responsibility: The communication challenge. Journal of Communicati...

With a number of Asia-Pacific countries among the fastest growing in the world, the requirements for public relations and communication management are also growing in terms of both demand and professionalism. It is essential that practitioners and academics keep pace with demand and achieve 'international best practice'. In 2015/16, the largest eve...

Background: Approximately 128 countries and 3.9 billion people are at risk of dengue infection. Incidence of dengue has increased over the past decades, becoming a growing public health concern for countries with populations that are increasingly susceptible to this vector-borne disease, such as Sri Lanka. Almost 55,150 dengue cases were reported...

Using an extended theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study explores how the original TPB variables (attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control), personality traits, privacy concern, past privacy protection behaviors, as well as parental mediation strategies relate to adolescents’ intention to engage in privacy protection measu...

The world decided in December 2015 to take actions to reduce global warming. To contribute toward this goal, this research examines possible policy levers for inclusion in the climate change ratification plan. A case study of the measures taken by the Republic of Singapore, a low-lying 719.2 km2 island without natural resources in Asia, is conducte...

This study investigated how active mediation employed by three key socialization agents—parents, peers, and school teachers—is associated with teenagers’ engagement in online risks. A survey with 746 students aged 12–18 years found that different socialization agents focus on different aspects of the Internet when they engage in active mediation. P...

This study applies the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine how factors in the TPB, along with personality traits (neuroticism and extraversion), need to belong, self-identity, and self-esteem relate to excessive social network sites (SNSs) use and SNSs addiction among Singaporean adolescents and adults. We conducted two nationally represent...

While there is an increasing amount of research investigating the effects of food advertising to children, few researchers have looked at the impact of food advertising restrictions on the targeted child outcomes. Our paper consists of early analyses from three studies that attempt to assess the impact of food advertising restrictions on children i...

Health information seeking has been on the rise globally due to the need to uncover more varieties of health-related information and the rise in access to the Internet. This study aims to compare the reliance on interpersonal and mass media sources of women in their health information seeking behavior from India, Vietnam, Singapore and the United S...

Children’s smartphone use has raised various concerns among parents. The majority of parental mediation and family communication studies have investigated relationships between parental mediation children’s media attitudes and behaviors; while some measured family communication in relation to children’s media attitudes and behaviors. Also, little r...

Abstract Background The family is an important social context where children learn and adopt eating behaviors. Specifically, parents play the role of health promoters, role models, and educators in the lives of children, influencing their food cognitions and choices. This study attempts to systematically review empirical studies examining the influ...

Populated by a diverse spread of cultures, Southeast Asia is represented by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a regional organization comprising some 622 million people in ten countries. While food and beverage labeling policies differ across ASEAN member states, organizations such as the ASEAN Food and Beverage Alliance (AFBA) ha...

This study proposes that parental mediation of television advertising and parental guidance of food consumption differentially influence children's attitude, intention, and behavior toward the consumption of healthy and unhealthy foods. Structural equation modeling based on a survey of 1,119 children aged 9-12 supported our model, revealing that pa...

Singapore is a hotspot for emerging infectious diseases and faces a constant risk of pandemic outbreaks as a major travel and health hub for Southeast Asia. With an increasing penetration of smart phone usage in this region, Singapore’s pandemic preparedness framework can be strengthened by applying a mobile-based approach to health surveillance an...

Exergaming has been discussed as a possible strategy to encourage children to engage in physical activity. This study explores presence as a mechanism through which exergames may be associated with positive mood experiences and game enjoyment among children. Structural equation modeling using survey data from children aged 9–12 in Singapore reveale...

BACKGROUND Approximately 128 countries and 3.9 billion people are at risk of dengue infection. Incidence of dengue has increased over the past decades, becoming a growing public health concern for countries with populations that are increasingly susceptible to this vector-borne disease, such as Sri Lanka. Almost 55,150 dengue cases were reported in...

Social networking sites (SNSs) have become common avenues for young people to share their life experience with peers, including their consumption experience. Although prior research on the media effects of SNSs has shown how online communication on SNSs promotes various volitional behaviors, current understanding is limited with respect to how youn...

Background and Objectives: Fast-food companies have been reproached for rising obesity levels due to aggressive marketing tactics targeted at children. They have countered that parents should be held responsible considering their critical role as nutritional gatekeepers. This study examined the comparative effects of media exposure and parental med...

Despite public programs to promote healthy eating among populations in developed and developing countries, the increase in obesity as a result of poor dietary patterns continues to persist. As food advertising has been implicated for contributing to this global health challenge, this study aims to provide empirical evidence on food advertising in a...

This research draws upon the extended social cognitive model to examine how external factors such as adolescents’ relationship with their parents, and personal antecedents including depression, loneliness, self-reactive outcome expectation, self-identity, deficient self-regulation, and habit strength, relate to Singaporean adolescents’ time spent o...

Apology has been found to be the most effective strategy in times of crises. However, there is a dearth of research on the kinds of apology used and how primary stakeholders, in particular consumers, received them. This study aims to examine consumer responses to the types of apologies offered post crises against the levels of attribution of respon...

The prevalence of social network sites (SNSs) has sparked a growing interest in understanding the development of problematic SNSs use among adolescents. Yet, this nascent area of research is marked by some deficiencies in existing theoretical paradigms. This manuscript seeks to review the state of research in problematic SNSs use—broadly with a spe...

Although culture is acknowledged as an important factor that influences health, little is known about cultural differences pertaining to cancer-related beliefs and prevention behaviors. This study examines two culturally influenced beliefs-fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention, and optimistic beliefs about cancer risk-to identify reasons for c...

Although interventions targeting the health of students in schools are becoming common, few studies have examined how health messages operate at the group level in school environments. This study examines the effects of message-based health interventions (extrinsic vs. intrinsic goal framing) in group environments (exergame competitive vs. exergame...

Purpose: This research investigates how the business communication-related variables of reputation, communication quality, and information sensitivity are mediated by trust and privacy concern to influence the privacy dyad (i.e., promotion-focused and prevention-focused privacy behaviors). Design/methodology/approach: Regulatory Focus Theory is us...

Background: Sri Lanka has witnessed a series of dengue epidemics over the past five years, with the western province, home to the political capital of Colombo, bearing more than half of the dengue burden. Existing dengue monitoring prevention programs are exhausted as public health inspectors (PHIs) cope with increasing workloads and paper-based mo...

Studies have shown the effect of food advertisements on consumption, but few have examined the singular influence of television viewing on the process of consumption of sweet foods and beverages (F&B). At the same time, the issue of over-consumption of sweet F&B among children has increasingly become a concern for authorities and health professiona...

This study aims to examine how adolescents' textual and visual personal information disclosure is influenced by their narcissistic personality and parental mediation. The moderation effect of parental mediation on narcissism was also explored. A total of 780 secondary school students aged between 13 and 18 participated in the study. Multiple regres...