The role of espoused national cultural values in facebook adoption: a replication with Arabic sample

With about 30% increase over three months, Facebook has become a major online venue among Arabic young generation. However the understanding of its adoption as well as the cultural influence remains in its infancy. In recent study, Srite and Karahanna (2006) examined the cultural impact at the individual level and, built upon Hofstede’s framework, conceptualize it as espoused national cultural values, which were proposed to moderating the effects of TAM variables, i.e., perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and subjective norms, on IT acceptance. Although insightful, the conceptualization of espoused national cultural values and its impacts requires further validation with subjects from different cultural backgrounds and IT artifacts which may be more subject to cultural influences, e.g., social networking sites. Therefore, this study is aimed to validate and extend the work by Srite and Karahanna (2006) by examining the role of espoused national cultural values in Facebook adoption among Arabic female college students. Considering the cultural differences, we extended the original cultural dimensions in (Srite and Karahanna 2006) to incorporate long-term orientation and also explicate the dimension of collectivism/individualism along two directions, e.g., horizontal vs. vertical. Different from the IT artifacts (PC and PDA) examined in (Srite & Karahanna, 2006), the IT artifact examined in this study is Facebook and its usage may be subject to more cultural influences than using PC and/or PDA, since Facebook involves a lot of social interaction and socialization. A survey study with 200 college female students in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of UAE was conducted to validate the research model. 127 students returned the valid responses. At the moment of data collection, all respondents were new users of Facebook. Data collection involved two stages. The first stage was to collect the response for TAM variables and espoused national cultural values; while the second one, after one week, was for Facebook adoption. Smart PLS was used for data analysis. We expect that the results not only provide further empirical validation of Srite & Karahanna’s theory (2006) with Arabic sample, but also extend the original research by demonstrating complete range of cultural dimensions. Currently, we are in the stage of finalizing data analysis results. By the time of the conference, we shall be able to provide the complete results.