Perceived Sociability of Use and Individual Use of Social Networking Sites - A Field Study of Facebook Use in the Arctic

This paper investigates determinants of individual use of social network sites (SNSs). It introduces a new construct, Perceived Sociability of Use (PSOU), to explain the use of such computer mediated communication applications. Based on a field study of 113 Facebook users it shows that PSOU in the sense of maintaining social contacts is a significant predictor of Perceived Benefits (PB), Perceived Enjoyment (PE), attitude toward use and intention to use. Inspired by Benbasat and Barki, this paper also attempts to answer questions “what makes the system useful”, “what makes the system enjoyable to use” and “what makes the system sociable to use”. As a consequence it pays special focus on systems characteristics of IT applications as potential predictors of PSOU, PB and PE, introducing seven such designable qualities (user-to-user interactivity, user identifiability, system quality, information quality, usability, user-to-system interactivity, and aesthetics). The results indicate that especially satisfaction with user-to-user interactivity is a significant determinant of PSOU, and that satisfactions with six of these seven designable qualities have significant paths in the proposed nomological network. TYPE OF PAPER AND