Digital natives’ intention to interact with social media: Value systems and gender

• Published in: Telematics and informatics Vol. 35; no. 2; pp. 421 - 435
• Main Authors: Nikou, Shahrokh, Mezei, József, Brännback, Malin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.05.2018; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Attitudes; Comparative analysis; Configurations; Digital literacy; Digital media; Domain-specific values; Empirical analysis; fsQCA; Fuzzy sets; Gender; Global values; Information Systems; Online analytical processing; Qualitative analysis; Qualitative research; Social marketing; Social media; Social networks; Theory of Trying; Domain-specific values; fsQCA; Theory of Trying; Social media; Global values; Information Systems; Gender
• ISSN: 0736-5853; 1879-324X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.tele.2017.12.019

•Through the lens of Theory of Trying, we assess digital natives’ intention to interact with social media.•Gender of the subjects influences the fsQCA configurations.•Findings support to treat intention to interact with social media as a trying process.•FsQCA enables to identify causal configurations between various conditions and intention.•Findings show there is no single condition that is necessary to ensure the outcome. Social media research focuses predominantly on the link between attitude, behaviour and intention, and rarely takes value systems into account. Values are expected, through intervening variables, to affect intention directly or indirectly. Starting from the Theory of Trying, the aim of this study is to investigate how value systems affect digital natives’ intention to interact with social media. By using Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), an empirical analysis involving data from 116 social media users is carried out to examine how global and domain-specific values, attitude towards trying and gender affect the intention to interact. The results of a configurational analysis show that gender appears to affect many of the configurations leading to the outcome of interest. There are two configurations in which, regardless of gender, global values, domain-specific values and attitude towards trying cause the outcome. The findings indicate that there is no single condition necessary to ensure the outcome, but there are several different configurations of the conditions lead to outcome of interest.