Perceived Sociability of Use and Individual Use of Social Networking Sites - A Field Study of Facebook Use in the Arctic

This paper investigates determinants of individual use of social network sites (SNSs). It introduces a new construct, Perceived Sociability of Use (PSOU), to explain the use of such computer mediated communication applications. Based on a field study of 113 Facebook users it shows that PSOU in the sense of maintaining social contacts is a significant predictor of Perceived Benefits (PB), Perceived Enjoyment (PE), attitude toward use and intention to use. Inspired by Benbasat and Barki, this paper also attempts to answer questions "what makes the system useful", "what makes the system enjoyable to use" and "what makes the system sociable to use". As a consequence it pays special focus on systems characteristics of IT applications as potential predictors of PSOU, PB and PE, introducing seven such designable qualities (user-to-user interactivity, user identifiability, system quality, information quality, usability, user-to-system interactivity, and aesthetics). The results indicate that especially satisfaction with user-to-user interactivity is a significant determinant of PSOU, and that satisfactions with six of these seven designable qualities have significant paths in the proposed nomological network

Social Media In-Feed Advertising: the Impacts of Consistency And Sociability On Ad Avoidance

This study examines the success of in-feed advertisements on social media. As social media is growing in popularity, advertisers have increased their spending on these media. Out of various forms of advertising in-feed advertising has been especially successful in generating click-through rates and comments as compared to other forms of advertising, such as banner ads, pop-up ads. This study attempts to focus on two types of in-feed ad features, namely, consistency and sociability and to evaluate their effects on consumers’ perceptions of goal impediment, ad clutter and ad avoidance. We find that consistency helps to minimize both perceived goal impediment and perceived ad clutter. However, this influence is insignificant among telic users. Perceived sociability is found to mitigate users’ perceptions of in-feed ads as interruptions(ad clutter and goal impediment) as well as avoidance of these ads. Implication for research and theory are presented

Inductive Empiricism, Theory Specialization and Scientific Idealization in IS Theory Building

This paper distinguishes and discusses three strategies for theory building in Information Systems (IS) - inductive empiricism, theory specialization and scientific idealization - and contrasts them in terms of three desiderata of theories - realism, generality and precision - and tradeoffs between them. Inductive empiricism, emphasizing realism and generality, represents the received view with the classic Grounded Theory Methodology as a prime example. The paper argues for openness to theory specialization in practical disciplines such as IS. Theory specialization implies sacrificing generality of theories for their realism and precision. The distinctive attention of the paper lies in scientific idealization, sacrificing realism of theories for their precision and generality. It has been almost completely omitted in in the literature on IS theory building. The special focus of the paper lies in IT applications as a category of IT artifacts and in design-oriented theories which provide knowledge of how to design “better” IT applications. The paper illustrates its points using TAM/UTAUT research as an example

Conducting Information Systems Research the Old-Fashioned Way

This research career retrospective summarizes the intellectual contributions of the author’s academic career, covering 35 years from the early 1980’s onwards. It also attends to various incidents and conditions that shaped his research career, as well as his research strategy choices that allowed him to overcome some of the challenges imposed by these conditions. These strategic choices comprised to do small research rather than big research and to privilege international collaboration over local collaboration

Risks and motivation in the use of social network sites: an empirical study of university students

DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF COMMERCE IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS TO THE FACULTY OF COMMERCE, LAW AND MANAGEMENT UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND, JOHANNESBURG FEBRUARY 2015Social Network Sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Piniterest and Google+ have made it easy for youth to communicate, produce and share information. Using SNS has become a daily activity for many youth and young adults around the world, including South Africa. The use of SNS by youth may be motivated by needs for safety, belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization, and others such as enjoyment. Yet, the use of SNS by youth may also carry a number of risks. They include risks to violations of privacy, social and psychological risks that may harm the user’s self-image, as well as time and financial risks resulting from excessive SNS usage. The purpose of this study is to understand the tension between risks and motivation in the use of SNS by university students. To do so, this study developed an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Multi-dimensional risk and motivation constructs were examined for their interactions with TAM constructs of perceived ease of use and perceive usefulness and their effects on SNS usage intentions and actual usage were examined. To test the model, a non-probability convenience sampling method was adopted using students from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Five hundred and fifteen students participated in the study. The ages ranged between 18 and 34 years, 26% males and 74% females took part in the study, and included students from 1st year through to 4th year undergraduate or Honours level. Facebook was found to be the most used SNS. Approximately 80% of respondents reported accessing SNS on their mobile phones and 66% reported being always connected. More than 25% of respondents were actively using SNS for more than 3 hours a day, with 35% using less than one hour per day. Interestingly, only 35% reported having public profiles although 10% did not know whether their profiles were public or private, and nearly 40% of respondents knew less than half the “friends” they were connected to on SNS Partial least squares approach to structured equation modelling was used to test the hypothesised research model. Results showed that motivation influences perceived usefulness (β=0.239, p<0.001) and perceived ease of use (β=0.319, p<0.001) positively. The results suggest that when motivations such as enjoyment and need to belong are high, SNS will be perceived as useful and easy to use. Risk was found to have a negative influence on perceived usefulness (β=-0.0764, p<0.05) and perceived ease of use (β=-0.3265, p<0.001). The results show that when risks are considered high, users are likely to increase their vigilance and consequently will report SNS as less easy to use. Moreover, as a result of risk users may find the SNS less useful. Perceived usefulness (β=0.295, p<0.001) influences intention to use SNS positively. This suggests that when SNS is useful to users, they will have intentions to use it. Intention to use SNS is also influenced by perceived ease of use (β=0.0396, p<0.01). An easy to use SNS will make users want to use it, as opposed to one considered more complex and requiring more effort. Motivation (β=0.281, p<0.001) was found to have more of an effect than risk (β=-0.071, p<0.05) on intentions to use. Respondents thus appear to recognize some risks associated with SNS use, but they appear to be driven more by motivations and less by risk avoidance when deciding on SNS usage. The study will have implications for researchers, SNS providers and users. The results of the study have implications for how researchers conceptualize risk and motivation. The study shows how different dimensions of risk and dimensions of motivation affect the overall risk and overall motivation construct respectively. Currently SNS providers may not have deep understanding of the risks which hinder the use of SNS and motivations which drive the use of SNS. Providers will be better informed to design SNS that are less risky and where possible mitigate the risks. Results also show that SNS providers should not only mitigate risks but also provide online social networks that better fulfil motivational needs of youth. Users will be aware of different risks they are exposing themselves to by using SNS. Since users will be aware of the different types of risks, they can be vigilante when using SNS.MT201

The Influences Of Atmospheric Cues On Consumer Behavioral Intentions: An Affordance Perspective

Online social shopping emerges from the idea of using social networking features to benefit traditional e-commerce activities. Technology-driven shopping environments not only support shopping task completion and self-entertainment, more importantly, these new shopping environments become alternate outlets for consumers to interact with others. This dissertation aims to understand the effects of atmospheric cues on consumers\u27 behavioral intentions in online social shopping environments. This dissertation study proposes and validates a research model that predicts consumers\u27 diverse behavioral intentions (approach and avoidance) toward using online shopping environments due to website atmospheric cues. This research model is constructed based on theoretical perspectives including stimulus-organism-response framework, the technology acceptance model, the theory of affordances, and activity theory. The empirical study used a three-factorial between-subject field experiment approach to validate the research model and hypotheses. A total of 360 valid responses were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each of the subjects was randomly assigned to one of the eight experimental conditions. Data was analyzed using three-way MANOVA and PLS-SEM techniques. Analysis results largely supported the research model. Three path coefficients surprisingly had different signs from their correlation coefficients, and further mediation analysis indicated that: perceived usefulness fully mediated the effects of perceived utilitarian affordances, perceived sociability of use fully mediated the effects of perceived social affordances, and that perceived usefulness and perceived fun fully mediated the effects of perceived sociability of use on behavioral intentions. This dissertation theoretically contributes to online social shopping research by building a well-grounded research model that integrates several theories from different disciplines. The instrument for measuring perceived affordances provides an operationalized solution to understand interaction mechanism between technology-driven environments and users. Practically, investigating the effects of atmospheric cues and decomposing process-based and outcome-based evaluations suggest different aspects that online merchants can work on to improve consumer experiences