Batting Outside the Field

This study examines the relationship between cognitive awareness and perceived knowledge of sports fans’ social media engagement behaviors. Data were collected through an online survey of 236 adults from India who identified as Indian Premier League (IPL) fans. The findings of the study suggest that perceived knowledge and cognitive awareness of sports are precursors to social media engagement behaviors of sports fans. Further, sports fandom mediates links between perceived knowledge and cognitive awareness with social media engagement. The findings hold special significance for contemporary COVID scenarios because physical engagement is being substituted by digital engagement.

Virtual Learning Post COVID-19

The impacts of COVID-19 on education have changed how many schools and education providers deliver education with the rapid transition to online learning environments. This research highlights the critical factors influencing student and teacher engagement while also highlighting opportunities for educators to enhance the engagement for their students, utilising results from two focus groups and qualitative surveys through a case study on school districts across South Australia. This provided an understanding of the critical factors influencing teacher and student engagement and identified opportunities for improvements to the levels of student engagements through online learning environments. This research has identified best practices within schools and across the Department of Education that can support virtual learning and digital engagement into the future. In addition, through the identification of critical factors influencing student and teacher engagement, exploration of opportunities to support students and improve overall digital engagement can be identified.

Customer Digital Engagement and Lifetime Value: An Empirical Study of Telecom Services in India

Digitalization has posed severe challenges to traditional businesses. Traditional firms are still not sure of the benefits of digitally engaging their customers. In contrast, the new-age firms have successfully leveraged digital media. This article examines the relationship between digital adoption by customers and customer lifetime value (CLV). This study analysed the mobile recharges by 13 million rural and urban prepaid telecom customers over 60 million transactions from January 2019 to June 2019 in the Indian telecom industry. The computed predictive CLV has been computed and compared across various customer segments (digitally engaged, partially digitally engaged and digitally unengaged customers). The studied data were statistically validated using the Kruskal–Wallis test. The data proved to be non-normally distributed as per the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. The results supported that digital adoption helps increase customer engagement, loyalty and CLV. The study presents several managerial implications, such as digitally engaged customers being a surrogate for high value and more profitable customers. Also, digitally engaged customers are relatively more loyal, contributing higher CLV than digitally unengaged customers.

Population Aging and Multicultural Diversity in the United States: Implications for Older Consumers’ Needs and Expectations

Looking ahead to 2030 and beyond, the United States will be both older and more multicultural than presently. To explore the impacts and characteristics of an increasingly diverse population beginning to age, the MIT AgeLab conducted online focus groups in August 2020 (n=92) with ethnically diverse participants ages 40-69 on topics related to household composition, use of technology and digital engagement. Regarding household composition, Black and Latinx participants were more likely to report living with grandchild(ren), and Asian, Latinx, and White participants were more likely to report living with a parent(s) or parent(s)-in- law. Latinx participants often described ways in which caregiving for aging parents was a cultural value, but many participants who had raised children in the United States but who were not born in the United States themselves described cultural gaps in family attitudes that had sometimes widened across the generations. While all participants were using some technology, due to the coronavirus pandemic, digital tools were being used more widely than ever before. Racial/ethnic identity groups were more similar than different in terms of their responses to questions around consumer digital engagement. There were notable differences in overall trust in technology across racial/ethnic groups, with Asian participants reporting the highest average overall level of trust in technology and Multiracial participants reporting the lowest. Looking ahead, the intersection of aging and growing racial/ethnic diversity in the United States will yield a wider array of consumer needs and expectations.

Broadband Adoption and Ethnographic Approaches

Digital inequality scholarship has shifted toward an interest in the “tangible outcomes” of broadband adoption and the role individual attitudes may play in shaping digital engagement. However, much of this emerging research remains quantitative in nature and has not offered an extensive sociocultural explanation of why poor attitudes toward digital technology may endure in marginalized communities, or why broadband outcomes remain stratified by class and race. Ethnographic research is especially well-suited to fill this research gap. Critical ethnography offers a useful analytical toolbox: (a) providing a particularized portrait of everyday life; (b) rooting analysis within a social justice perspective; and (c) emphasizing building trust and “rapport” with marginalized communities, thus uncovering hidden practices or behaviors. In offering greater context to our understanding of digital attitudes and outcomes, ethnographic research can help digital inequality scholars further refine research questions, generate new categories of measurement, and better map complex sociotechnical relationships.

Telehealth Adoption and Patient Engagement

Successful implementation of telehealth services should incorporate adoption and engagement strategies for all key stakeholders, including clinicians, patients, and administration, to maximize utilization and benefit. These strategies should be included in an implementation plan developed by an invested leadership team. This team will build the infrastructure, bring resources, assess their institution and population needs, and review policies and regulations needed to execute their strategic plan. Successful telehealth programs live within a comprehensive digital engagement and population health strategy. In this chapter we examine multiple tools and concepts to drive adoption and engagement from each stakeholder’s perspective.