Faculty Research on Email Spam Featured in Elsevier FLASH

Penn State McKeesport faculty members Galen Grimes, Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology;  Dr. Michelle Hough, Assistant Professor of Business Administration; and Dr. Margaret Signorella, Director of Academic Affairs and Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies have had their co-authored article,  "Email end users and spam: Relations of gender and age group to attitudes and actions,"  selected for inclusion in Elsevier FLASH.
 
Elsevier FLASH is a service that hopes to stimulate a broader interest in scientific, technological and medical research.  A monthly email is generated by the company and sent to respected health and science media contacts in the United States and Great Britain.  The email highlights a short selection of article summaries chosen from a list of almost 2000 Elvesier titles. The co-authored Penn State McKeesport article was one of the few articles chosen for this select distribution.
 
The article by Grimes, Hough and Signorella will be published in Computers in Human Behavior, a journal dedicated to examining the use of computers from a psychological perspective.  The article examines computer users? attitudes toward and experience with email spam based on gender and age.  Information was obtained by surveying three different age groups:  college-age, working-age, and retirement-age audiences.  The outcomes of the survey indicate that although most respondents strongly disliked receiving spam, few took action against it.   Age appeared to be the strongest predictor of response with retirement age men indicating their expertise in computer usage as much lower than those of working age.  Predictably, working age respondents confirmed that they spent more time on the computer, but all age groups appeared to receive the same amount of spam, regardless of time online.  Survey results also suggest that older computer users have more of a tendency to make a purchase via spam and thus, may be more vulnerable.  The overall usability of email, the article reports, may be threatened by the inability of users to effectively take action against spam. 
 
The coauthored article was also listed in ScienceDirect, the world's largest electronic collection of science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information.