International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE) ISSN: 2278-3075, Volume-9 Issue-1, November, 2019 638 Published By: Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering & Sciences Publication Retrieval Number A4515119119/2019©BEIESP DOI: 10.35940/ijitee.A4515.119119 Religious Online Information Behaviour Among the Malays in the Digital Era Haslin Hasan, Hamdzun Haron Abstract - Seeking knowledge is among the most important virtuein Islam. The Internet era offers more sources and new ways in gaining and producing information including religious information. However, the perception that the religious information behaviour among the Malays is not yet being studied empirically. A framework has been developed based on theories, previous related studies and interviews with Internet users. Three main aspects of behaviour being studied: usage, information seeking and verification. Data is collected using printed and electronic questionnaires. There are 616 usable data successfully gathered and analyzed through SPSS. Related to usage, the result shows that the Malays have adapted well with the Internet medium for searching the religious information. The results also show that there are changes on the technical aspect of information acquisition and delivery via the new media. However from the procedural aspect, the information behaviour among Malays are still traditional in nature based on their seeking information methods. The results suggest that the religious offline behaviour continues online, demonstrating their conservative nature. Analyzing the beahviour against the users’ background suggests that there is a statically relationship between them. A high percentage of users claimed that the verify online religious information, even though they differ on this in practice. This paper ends with recommendations to improve the information behaviour among the masses. Keywords: Religious, Online Information, Malays, Digital Era. I. INTRODUCTION Internet offers many channels to the cyber population to access almost any type of knowledge including religious knowledge. Since Internet become popular, among the earliest content that fill up the cyberspace is the religious information. The online religious content is not just always keep increasing, but there are also variety of scopes and characters [2]. Search result from Google [28/7/2019] combining key words of ‘religion’ and ‘blog’ for example shows almost a billion listing! In the social history of Malaysia, the change of religious knowledge sources usually resulted in the social religious change. Internet presents many advantages as religious sources: a great medium for creating, storing, transferring, distributing, and acquiring religious information. Internet is therefore has a lot of potential to be an alternative religious sources for the contemporary Muslim. Not surprising that in the earlier research, 64% of religious online activity in the United States is information seeking [10].The same trend may also happening in Malaysia [9, 11, 12]. Revised Manuscript Received on November 02, 2019. * Correspondence Author Haslin Hasan, Infrastructure University Kuala Lumpur, Unipark Suria, Jalan Ikram-Uniten, 43000 Kajang, Selangor, Malaysia. Email: haslin@iukl.edu.my Hamdzun Haron*, Pusat Citra Universiti, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia. Email: hh@ukm.edu.my Study on the Muslim’s online information behavior may therefore help us in understanding the phenomena of the current Muslim society [14], especially the potential of societal change brought by this new behavior. Campbell [3] also thinks that the Internet study now should embark on the third phase, i.e. the study on specific online practices. By studying the online information seeking and behavior, we may observe the change of the current trend of this practice (if any) and predict the future change or outcome of this practice in the society. II. RELIGIOUS INFORMATION BEHAVIOR AMONG THE MALAYS This research is to study the online religious information behavior among the Malay Muslim in Malaysia in three aspects: usage, information seeking and information verification. Information here refers to online religious information. The framework for this research is as below. It is adapted from the Johnson’s information seeking model, Theory of Planned Behavior, Information Influence discourse [17], the new media discourse [1, 6, 7], Islamic sciences especially the ‘usul’ (i.e. principles or methodological theories in Hadith, Creed and Fiqh), Media System Dependency Theory (1976), previous studies [14, 15] and author’s own interview [9]. A questionnaire survey form is designed both in printing and online format based on the above framework (Figure 1) and distributed by hand and through Internet. For Likert scale questionnaires, 5-point agreement is being used to represent (from the score 1) Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Less Agree, Agree and Strongly Agree. The distribution of the questionnaire started from 15/1/2016 to 15/4/2016. There are all together 616 usable data has been collected from which 386 are from the online survey and 230 are from the printing form.