Comparing Intention and Behavior: Characteristics of Valuable Information and Information Verification

Young users, particularly students, can access various sources of information nowadays. However, theynormally lack of experiences to assess the information credibility. This study is aimed at exploring students' choices of information sources, gathering their points of view about the information characteristics and information verification approaches, and comparing these perceptions/ intention to their behavior. An exploratory study is applied. Results show the top most selected information sources and differences in the students' perceptions and their behaviour in terms of the ranked quality characteristics and the information assessment methods. Gaps between intention and behaviour could be applied by future studies to guide students in information seeking for academic projects.