The research, published in the open-access journal Heliyon by Kim Quoc Trung Nguyen of Ho Chi Minh City Open University, surveyed 375 Vietnamese online shoppers who had previously bought green or eco-friendly products over the internet. Using a statistical technique known as partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, the study tested a single integrated model of how environmental stimuli on e-commerce platforms are converted into the intention to buy. The results, the author argues, overturn a comfortable assumption of digital marketing: that engagement with green content automatically breeds green purchasing.

The theoretical backbone of the study is the stimulus–organism–response framework, a classic model of environmental psychology that traces a causal chain from external cues to internal states to behavior. In this case, the stimuli are four features of the green e-commerce environment: green perceived value, meaning the environmental and personal benefits a consumer believes a product delivers; eco-brand credibility, the trustworthiness of a brand’s environmental claims; mobile shopping experience, the quality and usability of the shopping app itself; and platform sustainability features, such as eco-labels, green filters, and transparent environmental information. The “organism” in the middle of the chain is digital engagement behavior, the reading, commenting, sharing, and recommending of green content online. The “response” is online shopping intention.

What the model found was strikingly consistent. All four stimuli were positively and significantly associated with digital engagement, and all four were also directly associated with purchase intention. Green perceived value showed the strongest pull toward engagement, with a path coefficient of 0.334, followed closely by mobile shopping experience at 0.323 and eco-brand credibility at 0.322. Platform sustainability features, at 0.287, were also robust, and notably carried the largest direct effect on intention among the four, suggesting that visible cues like eco-labels and green filtering tools do more than invite interaction; they reduce the uncertainty that surrounds environmental claims, which consumers often cannot verify before a parcel arrives.

Digital engagement itself did predict purchase intention, but only weakly. Its direct path coefficient was a modest 0.163, with a small effect size of 0.052. In plain terms, people who read, discuss, and share green content online are somewhat more likely to intend to buy green products, but engagement alone explains little. The study interprets engagement instead as a transmission mechanism, a bridge that carries evaluations of value, trust, and experience toward intention, rather than an engine that drives purchasing by itself. The model explained 51 percent of the variance in digital engagement and a substantial 75.3 percent of the variance in online shopping intention, but the interaction terms, not the engagement pathway, accounted for much of that explanatory power.

Those interaction terms are the heart of the paper. The author tested two consumer competencies as moderators of the engagement-to-intention link: digital literacy, the ability to find, evaluate, and use online information, and environmental knowledge, the understanding of environmental facts and the ecological consequences of consumption. Both strengthened the relationship, but environmental knowledge did so more powerfully. The interaction between engagement and environmental knowledge produced an effect size of 0.810, classified as large, while the digital literacy interaction produced 0.623, also large but clearly smaller. The corresponding path coefficients were 0.453 and 0.377 respectively, both highly significant.

The simple-slope analysis makes the pattern vivid. When environmental knowledge was high, one standard deviation above the mean, the effect of engagement on intention was strongly positive, with a slope of 0.616. At average knowledge levels the slope was 0.163. But when knowledge was low, the slope turned significantly negative, at minus 0.290. The same reversal appeared for digital literacy, with slopes of 0.540, 0.163, and minus 0.214 at high, mean, and low levels. In other words, for consumers lacking these competencies, more engagement with green content was actually associated with less intention to buy, a result the author links to the elaboration likelihood model, in which the ability to process information centrally determines whether persuasion succeeds.

Why would knowledge matter more than digital skill? The author’s answer is that the two competencies operate at different levels of specificity. Digital literacy is instrumental and domain-general: it helps people navigate interfaces, assess reviews, and adapt to new apps. Environmental knowledge is value-laden and sustainability-specific: it enables consumers to judge whether a green claim is credible, to recognize greenwashing, and to align a purchase with their own environmental principles. A digitally fluent shopper can scroll effortlessly through eco-marketing without ever asking whether the claims are true. A knowledgeable shopper asks that question first, and the answer determines whether engagement ripens into a purchase.

The Vietnamese setting adds an important layer of interpretation. The country’s e-commerce market has grown among the fastest in Southeast Asia since the pandemic, with platforms such as Shopee, Lazada, Tiki, and TikTok Shop becoming mainstay shopping channels, particularly for young, mobile-first consumers. In such a market, stimulating engagement with green content is comparatively easy; the harder task is converting that engagement into sustainable purchasing, which depends on whether consumers can critically evaluate environmental information. The author cautions that in more mature green markets, where formal certification systems and established eco-labels carry more institutional weight, individual environmental knowledge may play a less dominant role, so the findings should be generalized carefully.

The practical implications are concrete. Platforms and sellers, the study suggests, should invest in transparent, specific, and consistent environmental information, including clear eco-labels and user-friendly green filters, to counter the skepticism that greenwashing breeds. They should also design digital experiences that genuinely foster engagement, since engagement remains a meaningful pathway even if it is not sufficient on its own. Most importantly, businesses and policymakers should treat consumer competencies as strategic infrastructure: educational initiatives that build environmental knowledge and digital literacy will, on this evidence, do more to convert clicks into sustainable purchases than any amount of promotional content alone. The study’s limitations, a convenience sample, cross-sectional self-reported data, and a single national context, mean the results are associative rather than causal, but the central message stands: in green e-commerce, what consumers know shapes what engagement is worth.

Subject of Research: The role of digital engagement, digital literacy, and environmental knowledge in green consumer purchase intention in Vietnamese e-commerce

Article Title: Green consumer behavior in e-commerce: The mediating role of digital engagement and the moderating effects of literacy and environmental knowledge

Article References: Nguyen, K. Q. T. (2026). Green consumer behavior in e-commerce: The mediating role of digital engagement and the moderating effects of literacy and environmental knowledge. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45511. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45511

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45511

Keywords: green consumer behavior, e-commerce, digital engagement, digital literacy, environmental knowledge, sustainable consumption, PLS-SEM, greenwashing, Vietnam, online shopping intention, eco-labels, consumer psychology

The study drew on data from the Widely Hokkaido Individual Training for Elderly (WHITE) Study, a community-based health checkup program conducted across 2024 and 2025 in Hokkaido, Japan. Of 158 individuals initially assessed, 97 smartphone-using older adults met the inclusion criteria after the researchers excluded non-users, participants with cognitive impairment defined as a mini-mental state examination score below 23, those with neurological or psychiatric histories such as stroke, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, or Parkinson’s disease, people certified as requiring long-term care, and those with missing key data. The final sample had a median age of 77 years, an interquartile range of 75 to 82 years, and was 73 percent female, reflecting the demographic reality of aging rural Japanese communities where such checkup programs operate.

To capture the breadth of digital engagement, participants were asked whether they used each application on a daily basis from a predefined list of twelve common categories: phone calls, email, camera, quick response code use, web browsing, video streaming, healthcare-related applications, pedometer, text messaging, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and other applications not on the list. The number of applications used daily was summed into a diversity score, and participants were split into a low application diversity group using fewer than five apps and a high application diversity group using five or more. The five-application threshold was grounded in prior United States survey data showing that usage clusters around five to six applications among roughly 40 percent of older smartphone users, and it matched the median app count in the present sample, lending the cutoff empirical credibility.

Occupational participation, the study’s central outcome, was measured with the Self-Completed Occupational Performance Index, a validated self-administered questionnaire rooted in the Canadian Model of Occupational Performance and Engagement. This framework conceptualizes health as emerging from dynamic interactions between the person, the environment, and occupation, and it treats technology as an environmental factor that can either enable or constrain daily performance. The SOPI assesses three domains: leisure, productivity, and self-care. Each domain captures perceived occupational control, meaning how much individuals feel able to decide when and how to engage in an activity; occupational balance, reflecting whether they can allocate sufficient time and energy; and satisfaction with performance, a subjective appraisal of how well activities are carried out. Each domain contains three items rated on five-point scales, yielding raw domain scores from 3 to 15 and a total score standardizable from 0 to 100.

The results were striking in their domain specificity. Overall SOPI scores were substantially higher in the high-diversity group, with a median of 75.0 compared with 55.6 in the low-diversity group, a statistically significant difference. When the researchers examined domains separately, leisure scores favored the high-diversity group, and the productivity gap was even more pronounced, with medians of 12.0 versus 6.0. Self-care showed no significant difference. Pattern analyses of application combinations revealed that low-diversity users clustered almost entirely around basic communication tools, namely phone calls, email, and text messaging, while high-diversity users combined those basics with web browsing, cameras, QR codes, healthcare applications, and video streaming, painting a picture of fundamentally different digital lives.

Crucially, the association survived rigorous statistical adjustment. Using generalized linear models, the team controlled for a comprehensive set of potential confounders: age, sex, education, living situation, medication use, employment status, years of smartphone use, daily usage time, gait speed measured by the 10-meter walk test, cognitive function via the mini-mental state examination, frailty status through the Kihon Checklist, and depressive symptoms on the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale. Even after this adjustment, using five or more applications was independently associated with higher productivity scores, yielding an adjusted regression coefficient of 2.17 with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.49 to 3.86. Leisure, by contrast, lost its association after adjustment, with a coefficient of 0.66 and a confidence interval spanning zero. Notably, the productivity effect persisted even though only 12 percent of participants held remunerative jobs and 74 percent were unemployed, suggesting the association reflects broader productive occupations such as household management, coordination, and supporting others rather than formal work alone.

Because the sample was modest, the researchers turned to bootstrap resampling with 2,000 iterations to test whether the finding was a statistical fluke. The bootstrap analysis produced a median regression coefficient of 2.24 with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.49 to 3.86, closely mirroring the original estimate and confirming the stability of the association. This robustness check matters in small-sample occupational therapy research, where fragile coefficients often dissolve under resampling. Here, the diversity-productivity link held firm across thousands of simulated replications of the dataset, strengthening confidence that the observed relationship is not an artifact of a few influential participants.

Why would app diversity connect specifically to productivity? The authors argue that productive occupations, which encompass planning, coordination, information management, and role fulfillment, are precisely the activities that multifunctional smartphone use supports. Email and messaging facilitate information exchange; cameras document tasks and events; web browsing opens access to online services and resources; healthcare applications help manage appointments and health information; and QR codes streamline transactions. Prior research supports this interpretation: studies show older adults increasingly use digital methods for managing finances, navigating communities, and organizing to-do lists, and qualitative work demonstrates that seniors can successfully adopt smartphone calendars and reminder systems to structure daily activities. Leisure and self-care, in contrast, may depend less on digital tools or may be sustained through long-established routines that technology has yet to penetrate, which is consistent with the model’s prediction that environmental resources matter differently across occupational domains.

The findings also illuminate the persistent digital divide within older populations. High-diversity users were significantly younger, used smartphones longer, and reported more daily screen time, while low-diversity participants showed higher frailty and depression scores. Previous longitudinal research has linked cognitive capacity and physical function to internet use and digital competence, suggesting that app diversity may partly reflect accumulated experience, skills, and functional resources rather than preference alone. The authors are careful about causality, however. Reverse causation is plausible, since people with greater productive demands may simply adopt more apps, and residual confounding by socioeconomic resources or informal support cannot be excluded. Limitations also include the small sample, the predominance of women, self-reported app use without a technical smartphone definition, and the cross-sectional design that precludes any causal claim.

Nevertheless, the study opens a practical frontier for occupational therapy in an aging, digitalizing world. Rather than counting device ownership or screen time, clinicians could assess which applications older clients actually use and how those patterns align with occupational goals, then design individualized interventions that expand purposeful app use for scheduling, information access, and role management. Prior work linking smartphone proficiency to higher-level everyday competence suggests skill-building belongs at the center of such programs. If confirmed by longitudinal studies with larger, more sex-balanced samples, the humble app grid on an older adult’s home screen may become a meaningful clinical signal, a small window into how deeply a person remains woven into the productive fabric of daily life, and a tangible target for interventions aimed at preserving independence, purpose, and participation in the digital age.

Subject of Research: The association between smartphone application diversity and occupational participation among community-dwelling older adults.

Article Title: Association Between Smartphone Application Diversity and Occupational Participation Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study

Article References: Shimokihara, S., Yokoyama, K., Ihira, H., Matsuzaki-Kihara, Y., Mizumoto, A., Tashiro, H., Saito, H., Makino, K., Katsuura, S., Kobayashi, M., Shimada, K., Yama, K., Miyajima, R., Sasaki, T., & Ikeda, N. (2026). Association Between Smartphone Application Diversity and Occupational Participation Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 33(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44474-026-00007-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44474-026-00007-1

Keywords: smartphone apps, older adults, occupational participation, digital engagement, productivity, occupational therapy, aging, digital inclusion, gerontechnology, community-dwelling, SOPI, cross-sectional study