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Examining the antecedents of user gratification and its effects on individuals’ social network services usage: the moderating role of habit

  • Empirical Research
  • Published:
European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

User loyalty or continued use is critical to the survival and development of any website. Focusing on the social network services (SNSs) context, this study proposes a research model for investigating individuals’ use motivations and the moderating role of habit with regard to gratification and continuance intention. This research integrates two influential media communication theories, media system dependency (MSD) and uses and gratifications, to examine SNSs-related behaviors. To comprehend online users’ motivations in depth, three motivations derived from MSD (understanding, orientation and play dependency relations) are operationalized as reflective, second-order constructs. The three motivations are theorized to affect parasocial interaction positively, and parasocial interaction is hypothesized to positively affect the gratification that individuals derive from SNSs usage. Furthermore, this study hypothesizes that gratification positively affects individuals’ continuance intention. Finally, we theorize that habit moderates the impact of gratification on continuance intention. Data collected from 657 Facebook users provide strong support for all six hypotheses. The results indicate that individuals’ motivations (i.e., the understanding, orientation and play dependency relations) positively affect parasocial interaction, which in turn has a positive effect on gratification, and subsequently continuance intention. In addition, the results show that habit has a small but negative moderating effect on the relationship between gratification and continuance intention. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung City, R.O.C., Taiwan

    Chao-Min Chiu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Management, Soochow University, Taipei City, R.O.C., Taiwan

    Hsin-Yi Huang

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  1. Chao-Min Chiu
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Correspondence to Hsin-Yi Huang.

Appendix

Appendix

For the pre-test, a questionnaire was given to 20 experts (including faculty and doctoral students) with Facebook experience to verify its logical consistency, ease of understanding and wording, as well as the appropriateness of the instruments. In addition, this study collects data from Facebook users in Taiwan. All of the measurement items in this study were adapted from prior studies and translated into Chinese for our respondents, who read Chinese. To present the measurement items in this study, we invited 20 experts to help us back-translate all of the items into English. Then, a pilot test was conducted with 160 users of the target online SNSs to confirm the measurement properties of the final items. The survey instrument and measurement scales are presented in Table A1.

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Chiu, CM., Huang, HY. Examining the antecedents of user gratification and its effects on individuals’ social network services usage: the moderating role of habit. Eur J Inf Syst 24, 411–430 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2014.9

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