Re-engagement centered on "truth" seeking: A grounded psychological model of sustained attention to crime-news short videos.

Short-video feeds often introduce users to crime news incidentally, yet some unfolding cases become objects of repeated return. Existing research explains crime-content appeal, incidental exposure, platform continuance, and information seeking, but less clearly how an initially encountered case becomes a sustained, case-specific object of attention across sources and updates. This study develops an event-centered psychological account of that transition. Semi-structured group and individual interviews with 29 Chinese short-video users (21 adults and eight adolescents) were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory. The analysis identified an appraised case-truth gap-the discrepancy between what users currently understand and what they still seek to clarify about facts, legal accountability, moral meaning, or institutional response-as the core category organizing re-engagement. Users continued to return when the gap was consequential, appeared tractable, and promised enough cognitive, affective, or practical value to justify temporal, emotional, and ethical costs. Re-engagement involved searching, comparing, waiting, discussing, and updating credibility judgments; algorithmic recommendation and searchability lowered re-entry costs but did not determine persistence. As information value declined or contradiction, repetition, sensationalism, privacy concerns, or emotional overload accumulated, users redirected, suspended, or ended attention. The resulting Case-Truth Seeking Re-engagement (CTSR) model conceptualizes sustained attention as a recursive process of gap appraisal, credibility updating, re-entry, provisional closure, reopening, and withdrawal. It therefore explains how incidental exposure becomes active case following and why that following can cease before a case is objectively resolved.