Exploring social and psychological factors that influence the gathering of political information online

Qualitative analysis of college students who searched online during the 2008 US presidential election contributes to three research areas: uses and gratifications, media credibility, and selective exposure. The findings identified new social factors that trigger motivations and psychological factors that affect patterns of media use for political information gathering. Word-of-mouth communication from strong, weak, and nonexistent social ties triggered social utility and information seeking motivations. Offline media contributed to online information seeking. Moderate credibility perceptions of media and weak party loyalty limited ideological selective exposure. Results add to research that links social and psychological factors to motivations and media use.