A Source Accessibility Effect on Media Selection

Understanding information acquisition behavior is increasingly important because the amount of and access to information is growing at a staggering pace. Combining the media and source selection literature, we hypothesize that both task routineness and source accessibility influence media selection. The hypotheses are tested in an experiment where subjects selected among media to acquire the requisite information for a strategic task. Results show an interaction effect of task routineness and source accessibility on media selection. The implications of this effect and directions for future research are discussed.