A dynamic longitudinal examination of social media use, needs, and gratifications among college students
Highlights
► Dynamic uses and gratifications of social media in the everyday lives over time. ► Reciprocal influences between needs, social media use, and gratifications. ► Ungratified needs accumulate over time and drive subsequent social media use. ► Solitude and interpersonal support increase social media use. ► They also moderate the effects of needs on social media use.
Introduction
Social media (SM) have become increasingly pervasive in American society. As of 2011, two thirds (65%) of adult internet users engage in activities on social networking sites, compared to less than one third (29%) 3 years ago, and less than one tenth (8%) 6 years ago (Madden & Zickuhr, 2011). For young adults between 18 and 29 years old, social media use is even more common—as of 2010, it was at 72% (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). Media campaigns, including health and political campaigns, try to identify effective ways to reach, engage, and influence SM users (e.g., Abroms and Lefebvre, 2009, Cooke and Buckley, 2008). Some basic questions to be answered include: What needs drive individuals’ SM use? Are they fulfilled? How are the fluctuations in the needs and their fulfillment—or lack thereof—changing users’ behavior over time? Uses and gratifications (U&G) research has started to examine what motivates SM use (e.g., Dunne et al., 2010, Leung, 2009).
The current study aims to extend the U&G theoretical perspective to account for the situated, adaptive, and dynamic nature of cognition and behavior (Wang et al., 2006, Wang et al., 2011, Ward, 2002). By this theoretical extension, SM use can be better understood in two important ways. First, dynamic reciprocal causal effects between SM use, needs, and gratifications over time can be tested and quantified. Second, SM use is situated in the context of daily life. The conceptual model and the dynamic analysis in this study test the influences on SM use not only from preceding media use (i.e., in the context of time), but also from individuals’ interpersonal social environments.
SM are websites and software that serve a primary function of allowing users to “connect, communicate, and interact with each other” (Correa, Hinsley, & Gil de Zúñiga, 2010, p. 248), often by posting, sharing, or co-producing information (Kushin & Yamamoto, 2010). Our conceptualization of SM therefore includes several overlapping domains: social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn), tools for communication with others (e.g., email, instant messaging), and sites for the sharing of information, which generally can be commented on or altered by others (e.g., blogs, YouTube). To identify the characteristics of SM use, this study compares SM, wherein social interaction is a fundamental component, to all other media (OM), such as television and radio, which are not typically perceived as inherently and primarily social.
Section snippets
Use, needs, and gratifications of social media
Over the past few decades, when new forms of media have emerged, the classic theoretical perspective of U&G has often been used to examine “new” media use behavioral patterns and their underlying motivation (Katz et al., 1973, Rubin, 2009). Historically, as an alternative to the earlier view of media effects that focuses on what media can do to passive audiences, the U&G perspective has led to a new understanding of audiences as active media users who choose media based upon a variety of needs.
The dynamic reciprocal effects of media uses, needs, and gratifications
Dynamic relationships of mutual influence abound in the world around us. The Dynamic Motivational Activation model (DMA, Wang et al., 2006, Wang et al., 2011, Wang and Tchernev, 2012) proposes that motivated media choices and use can change a user’s motivation in real time, which further influences subsequent media choices and use. This reciprocal causality, or mutual influence, between motivation (e.g., needs) and media use differs from typical conceptualizations of media effects which often
Participants and procedures
Undergraduate students (N = 28) at a large Midwestern university participated in the study for monetary compensation. On average, they were 21.43 (SD = 1.37) years old. Seventeen participants (60.7%) were female, and the majority (71.43%) were Caucasian. Using the experience sampling method (Kubey, Larson, & Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), participants submitted reports at regular time intervals throughout the day: around lunchtime, in the early evening, and right before they went to bed. Each interval
The dynamics of SM and OM use
To test the hypotheses and questions on SM use, a set of competing models were compared. The full model predicts the SM use of an individual i at a time point t (i.e., SMi,t) using: (1) the autoregressive lag 1, lag 2, and lag 3 feedback effects of SM use (i.e., SMi,t−1, SMi,t−2, and SMi,t−3), (2) the autoregressive lag 1, lag 2, and lag 3 feedback effects of OM use (i.e., OMi,t−1, OMi,t−2, and OMi,t−3), (3) the four categories of needs at time t, (4) their interactions with solitude at time t,
Discussion
This study extends U&G theory to account for the dynamic changes of media uses and gratifications in the theoretical framework of dynamic motivational activation. It specifies dynamic uses and gratifications of SM and OM in the everyday lives of college students. First, the study tests and quantifies reciprocal causal relationships between needs, SM and OM use, and gratifications, as well as their self-sustaining feedback effects. Specifying these effects helps more accurately estimate the
Acknowledgement
This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. SES 0818277 to the first author).
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