Do you regret using social media? Understanding the role of dark side of social media in regret and discontinuance behavior

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Ziyue Huang (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Prashant Palvia

Abstract: Social media is designed to support interpersonal communication and collaboration via Internet-based platforms. Despite the popularity of social media technologies, people spent less time on social media sites and their usage patterns changed dramatically in the past several years. This dissertation aims to provide an exploration and explanation of social media users’ change of usage patterns. Regret, which is widely investigated in theoretical economics and marketing research to predict behavioral intention, is introduced to predict social media users’ discontinuance intention. Regret is hypothesized to be influenced by negative aspects of social media use, including cyberbullying & arguing, misinformation, information overload, misuse, and online social stress. Regret can further influence dissatisfaction and discontinuance intention. In addition, the relationship between negative aspects of social media and regret is moderated by privacy control and tie strength. The dissertation is composed of three parts which all address the unified theme of understanding the role of dark side of social media in regret and discontinuance behavior. The first part aims to propose and refine the regret model. It includes an interpretive exploration to understand the discontinuance behavior, define regret in social media context, and elicit factors that can influence users’ social media regret and discontinuance intention. The results of the first study provide rich insight to social media users’ regret experience and discontinuance intention, and they can also provide a guidance of refining the research model. The second part is a positivist survey examining how dark side of social media influences regret in the presence of different tie strength and privacy control factors, and how regret in turn influences dissatisfaction and discontinuance intention. The third part is a positivist study using secondary data from social network site (i.e., Twitter) to examine the relationship between the dark side of social media (i.e., information overload, cyberbullying) and users’ regret experience. The results from this study further validate our research model.

Additional Information

Publication
Dissertation
Language: English
Date: 2019
Keywords
Dark side of social media, Discontinuance intention, Privacy control, Regret
Subjects
Social media
Online social networks
Cyberbullying
Regret

Email this document to