Measuring Facts of Media Richness

Abstract

Current research regarding media richness has concluded that richness is an emergent property of the media and its context. The notion that media richness is an emergent property of the environment implies that it should be measured through perceptions as a psychological reaction to the media and its context. Recent studies have suffered from the lack of a standard set of tools by which to measure perceptions of the media. In an effort to provide a valid and reliable measurement tool for the perception of media, an instrument was developed and tested extensively in two different studies. Results in both a field study and laboratory study show strong evidence for the construct validity of our perceptual measure of media richness. The combined results of the two studies provide support of the usefulness of the media richness instrument developed and tested here. This instrument not only provides a means of measuring the perception of richness, but also allows researchers to be able to identify which characteristics of communication media are most important for defining richness in practice.

• media richness
• scale development
• uncertainty
• equivocality
• email
• communication technology