From Cognitive-Emotional Interaction to Identity Construction: How Personality and Technology of Religious Virtual Influencer Affect Behavioral Intention

Description

This cross-sectional questionnaire dataset originates from an empirical study on religious virtual influencers, grounded in the SOR-PAD theoretical framework. It adopts a stimulus-organism-response chain model: external stimuli cover personality traits (professionalism, interactivity, attractiveness) and technical features (immersive environment, AI-driven interaction, real-time feedback); emotional experience and religious identity are sequential mediators; religious behavioral intention is the outcome variable, and digital literacy acts as the moderator. The data supports complete PLS-SEM analyses including reliability, validity, path testing, mediation/moderation, R²/Q² prediction and common method bias detection. Research hypotheses assume positive correlations between stimulus variables and audience emotional experience as well as religious identity. Emotional experience mediates relationships between perceived traits, religious identity and behavioral intention; the two mediators form a chain mediation effect on behavioral intention. Digital literacy positively moderates partial trait-emotion paths and the religious identity-behavioral intention linkage. Anonymous online questionnaires were distributed via Wenjuanxing. Participants were adults aged 18+ who engaged with religious virtual influencers on mainstream Chinese social platforms. After removing invalid responses, 392 valid samples were retained. All measurements used a 7-point Likert scale adapted from mature scales. SPSS 27.0 and SmartPLS 4.1 were used for data cleaning, statistical testing and model analysis. The dataset contains raw scores of all latent variables and demographic information, covering core dimensions plus three behavioral intention facets: religious learning, virtual ritual participation and religious product purchase. It supports result replication, model re-estimation, multi-group analysis and scale revision. Key findings: Most traits positively predict emotional experience. Professionalism and interactivity enhance religious identity, while attractiveness does not. Immersive environment and real-time feedback promote religious identity, whereas AI-driven interaction has no significant effect; real-time feedback cannot trigger positive emotion. Emotional experience exerts partial mediation, and together with religious identity forms a stable chain mediation effect. Digital literacy strengthens the paths from professionalism and AI interaction to emotional experience, as well as religious identity’s effect on behavioral intention. All variables show good psychometric properties, with strong model explanatory and predictive power and no serious common method bias.

Institutions

• Nanjing Forestry University

  Jiangsu, Nanjing

Categories

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