A Study of Online Film Reviews’ Reliability and Watching Film’s Intention

INTRODUCTION Today myriads of people search for information online rather than non-internet channels. According to the statistics reported by clickz.com (2005), the quantity of netizens has reached nine million in Taiwan. They make use of the internet to gain knowledge and search for information. Moreover, they also take advantage of the internet to browse the film reviews on film reviews’ websites. Among those netizens, a part of group is made up by college students. However, the deficient reliability of websites was found by college students. What exactly college students would have that thought in mind was the research purpose. As the computer technology grows rapidly, people are bombarded by a large reservoir of information which offers the marketers a challenge because “… as consumers adopt new technologies, their behaviors change” (Zinkhan, 1998). When college students want to see a movie, they check the online review website before they really go to that movie. Yet some of online comments are not matched to the reality. Because the comments on the film review website said the movie was good, the college students didn’t like the “good movie” which was commented on the website. Because of this situation, some people trust the comments on online film review but some do not. Within the extensive literature on the influence of online film review, little research has been done on different regions of college students in southern Taiwan. The different situation between north and south parts of Taiwan may be on account for local culture.

Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to investigate how online movie reviews influence college students’ consuming behavior. Research questions of this study are (1) Whether do college students trust in online movie reviews or not? (2) Do college students believe the completion of the movie reviews website? (3) Do the comments on film review websites influence college students’ decisions-making on choosing movie? The research of online film reviews is beneficial to marketers and college students. For marketers, they can complete the deficiencies of their websites which can appeal more people to browse the websites because the pages are becoming much more reliable. For college students, they can trust the information that is provided and won’t be misled by the online movie review websites’ comments.

LITERATURE REVIEWS
Brief introduction of movie industry Because of the high societal interest and involvement there are a myriad of factors controlling the success of a motion movie. Nevertheless, the argument about the causal character of this relationship is ongoing. Hennig (2003) argues that production costs, star and director power, release timing and reviews influence the extent of movie advertising spent. While Reinstein and Synder (2000) argue that consumers’ decision-making were influenced be reviewed, Eliashberg and Shugan (1997) claim that the reviewer’s ability to forecast a movie’s success is the only reflection of correlation, to imply that reviewer work as predictor.

Online film review comments Nowadays, the internet has many different functions such as entertainment, obtaining information, gaining knowledge, sharing experience by using online chat rooms and so on. Netizens can increase their confidence through these online functions. Greater confidence is associated with reduced uncertainty and greater trust (Ganesan, 1994, pp. 1-19). Word of mouth of the internet, unlike the reality word of mouth vanished into the air, it could be found in the online forums such as chat rooms, review sites and discussion groups. Some of this information may be biased that is suggested by anecdotal evidence and is sometimes given unknown by the companies themselves (White, 1999; Harmon, 2004). Products for word of mouth, online evaluation can be regarded as a useful proxy (Dellarocas, 2004). People's imaginations were captured by a few types of products as much as motion pictures. Thus, a myriad of online communities which covered diverse aspects of films and film industry all in all on the Web have sprung up unsurprisingly. Some of these communities are very popular. In order to increase the usefulness of movie comments, some of online film reviews websites compiled a general opinion. Figure 1 shows the top 2 movie comments websites according to the subjects. 1. Yahoo! Movies (http://tw.movie.yahoo.com/) 2. PTT Movie (http://www.ptt.cc/bbs/movie/index.html)

Behavioral intention Behavioral Intention indicates that in what extension people will agree to try and make an effort to realize their plan for performing the behavior. The function of salient beliefs and/or information about the possibility of performing a particular behavior called intentions which will lead to a specific result. Intention can be changeable by time. The unforeseen events might create changes in intentions by the long time period between intention and behavior.

Behavior intention is the most critical decisive factor of a person’s behavior based on the theory of attitudes towards behaviors. A combination of attitude to perform the behavior and subjective norm is the individual’s intention to perform a behavior. The person will have a positive attitude to perform the behavior if he/she observes a positive behavior result from performance.

Preceding trust of consumers In order to build assessment and make decisions, it is usually for people searching the opinions from experts. It is an efficient way to reduce uncertainty by using the reliance on knowledgeable sources in situations that insufficiency of information. Nevertheless, nowadays no matter what the experts say about products, events, services and preference people would not accept them all without consideration. The experts should make the comments base on their expertise rather than personal biases and orientations which might permeate their evaluations and recommendations. “Movies are mass-consumption, highly visible, and very popular experiential products (Cooper, 1992, pp. 756-759) that are reviewed, analyzed, and critiqued by numerous people.” “Trust seals connote a certain level of credibility that may influence consumer’s trust” (Endeshaw 2000, pp. 161-167). Therefore, it is easier for people to trust the internet website when experts appear on a website (Palmer, 2000; MCKnight, 2002, pp. 35-53), consumers’ trust would increase by using experts. To sum up, a great many elements are the factors among a successful movie. Review passed for foretelling the success of a movie amid so many controlling factors. With the diverse services on the internet, people and websites owner can benefit from each other. People would behave differently after they receive the information like after people browsed the film reviews their decision would be affected by it. To date, however, there has been relatively little research conducted the college students’ behavior intention toward choosing film after browsing the online reviews in southern Taiwan. As a consequence, it is necessary to do the research which puts the premium on college students in southern Taiwan.

METHOD
Subjects
The subjects of the present research were college students from three universities in Kaohsiung City-one private and two public universities. The subjects all had gone to theaters to see a movie before. Part of subjects sees movies frequently at least once a week and part of them sees movies at least once two to three months. Most of them had used the internet to survey movies’ comments for the intention of watching a movie. Some of them did not search the movie comments online but asked friends who had seen the movie but some did not.

Data collection and instrument Data on examining students’ overall choosing a movie’s intention were collected from the subjects using a questionnaire. The questions for this research questionnaire were designed by San-San Lim’s (2006) “Movies’ Comment Investigation Questionnaire.” The questionnaire used the seven-point Likert scale evaluated by "1 = strongly disagree" to 7 = strongly agree." The questionnaire illustrated in Appendix, containing forty questions in total. Chinese versions of questionnaires were provided for the subjects.

Data collection procedure The data was gathered through the analyses of questionnaire. The research was conducted in 2011. The questionnaire was distributed in Kaohsiung with the requirement that respondents had browsed website of a film review. All the questions were in Chinese in order to avoid misunderstanding. Also, they were required to comment on each question as detailed as possible. After collecting the data, the researcher analyzed the data.

Data analysis All of copies were used for the final analysis. The results of questionnaires were analyzed by the descriptive statistics. The results of the questionnaire were analyzed by the descriptive statistics including standard, frequencies deviations, and percentages were completed. All of them can investigate the subjects’ watching film intention. According to the results of the data analysis we could know each elements influence choice of subjects’ movie watching intention.

RESULTS The questionnaire was distributed to two universities’ students in Kaohsiung with the requirement that respondents had browsed film reviews website previously. A total of 40 copies of the questionnaires were distributed and 32 copies were returned. Cases with missing values were dropped. In total, 30 copies were used for the final analysis. The results of the questionnaire were mixed. In this study, there were 80% of female students and 20% of male students answered the questionnaire. The research revealed that more than 70% of students would surf the internet for about three to six hours per day and only three percent of them would exceed 11 hours. Among all of the subjects, more than 80% of them would hunt for online movie comments rather than ask people such as their family or friends. Moreover, there were more than 70% of students had the habit to search for online movie comments before watching the movie and about 20% of people would not do the research before watching the movie. As shown in Table 1, it is obvious that when searching for the film reviews, most of students browsed Yahoo Movie, upwards of five percent of people used PTT Movie and around 20% of people browsed other film reviews websites as Table 1 below revealed.
Table 1 Frequent Movie Comments Websites
|Item |Frequency |Percentage |
|Yahoo Movie |19 |63.33% |
|PTT Movie |2 |6.67% |
|Yahoo Answers |1 |3.33% |
|Google |1 |3.33% |
|Motion-picture review |1 |3.33% |
|Film critic |1 |3.33% |
|Kingnet |1 |3.33% |
|Uncertain |1 |3.33% |
|NO |3 |10% |

The research also showed that a majority of students would browse the film reviews website less than five times a month. Ten percent of them would surf the website around six to ten times and another ten percent of them would surf the website for about eleven to fifteen time a month. Among the six items, Items 1 had the highest means (M>4.09), whereas Items 6 received relatively low means (M