Navigating the social media overload via control abilities: coping strategies and practices

Sinh Thi Thu Tran and Jengchung Victor Chen

Behaviour and Information Technology, 2024, vol. 43, issue 13, 3301-3320

Abstract: Based on the stress coping theory, the present paper aims to investigate the influence of users’ networking ability and profile control ability in mitigating the negativity of social media overload. This paper argues that in the social media context, instead of discontinuance, users tend to develop comprehensive strategies and practices to manage their social media usage. Via an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) study, five practices were identified, including continuous usage, reduced usage, setting adjustment, support seeking, and information avoidance. The results show that social media overload leads to both the perception of emotional exhaustion and disturbance handling while networking and profile control ability make users focus on disturbance handling. Besides, networking ability is found to weaken the relationship between social media overload and emotional exhaustion while profile control ability exaggerates that relationship. Finally, emotional exhaustion and disturbance handling both predict users’ different social media management practices.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0144929X.2023.2276807 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tbitxx:v:43:y:2024:i:13:p:3301-3320

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tbit20

DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2023.2276807

Access Statistics for this article

Behaviour and Information Technology is currently edited by Dr Panos P Markopoulos

More articles in Behaviour and Information Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().