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Top1. Introduction
The addictive potential of technology has long been an area of scholarly inquiry, including television viewing (Finn, 1992; Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002; McIlwraith, 1998), video game playing (Fisher, 1994; Tejeiro Salguero & Morán, 2002), and the Internet (Brenner, 1997; Stern, 1999). Under the umbrella of the later, scholars studied different subsets, including online auction (Turel et al., 2011), online gaming (Mancini et al., 2019); SNSs (Tarafdar et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2018), amongst others. Several theories have been used to investigate the technology addiction phenomenon, including theory of reasoned action (Turel et al., 2011), cognitive dissonance theory (Vaghefi & Qahri-Saremi, 2017), and dual-system theory (Gong et al., 2019). This work departs from the work of Turel et al. (2011) who explained the theoretical mechanisms by which users’ perceptions and usage intentions concerning certain technology (i.e., online auction in their study) are distorted by one’s level of addiction to that technology. While several studies extended the work of Turel et al. (2011) by examining other technologies of addictive potential, for example SNS (Maier et al., 2013; Thadani & Cheung, 2011), scant research has been conducted to expand the list of beliefs within the confines of their original model. Given the effect of context in theoretical contribution and advancement (Johns, 2006), it is believed in this work that the usage context of SNS would trigger additional belief set that enables a deeper understanding of the addiction phenomenon in such a context. Indeed, Turel et al. indicated that “it is likely that addiction distorts many other system-referenced perceptions (e.g., trust, satisfaction, etc.) beyond TAM [Technology Acceptance Model] perceptions” (Turel et al., 2011) (p. 1057).
The above discussion suggest suggests that there are open avenues for context-based theoretical factors to be examined using the Turel et al.’s model (2011). Thus, the objectives of this paper are:
- 1.
To conceptualize a parsimonious version of the Turel et al.’s model (2011) by including only two constructs, namely trust and social influence that, to the best of the author’s knowledge, have not been incorporated into the nomological network of this model in prior research.
- 2.
To empirically validate the model using data collected from SNS users in Saudi Arabia, in which scarce research is available.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The theoretical background of the study is discussed in the next section, followed by a description of the research methodology in section three. The results are then presented in section four. Section five and six present the implications and limitations of the study’s findings.