How motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust affect college students' self-disclosure on SNSs: An investigation in China

Zhang Weiwei and Huang Peiyi

8th ITS Asia-Pacific Regional Conference, Taipei 2011: Convergence in the Digital Age from International Telecommunications Society (ITS)

Abstract: Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have been proliferating and growing in popularity worldwide throughout the past few years, which have received significant interest from researchers. Previous literatures on Internet suggest that offline social trust influences online perceptions and behaviors, and there is linkage between trust and self-disclosure in face-to-face context. Adopting the Uses and Gratifications perspective as the theoretical foundation, this exploratory study aimed to address the roles that motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust play in predicting levels of self-disclosure on SNSs. Taking 640 snowballing sampling on Renren.com, the study found that there was an instrumental orientation of SNSs use among China's college students. Social interaction, self-image building and information seeking were three major motivations when college students use SNSs. As expected, the results also indicated that motivations of SNS use and offline social trust play a more important role in predicting self-disclosure on SNSs than demographics. This exploratory study gives an empirical insight in the influence of motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust on self-disclosure online.

Keywords: Social Networking Sites; Motivations; Self-disclosure; Offline Social Trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-soc
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