An Empirical Explanation On Discontinuous Usage Behavior In Social Network Services

With the development of SNSs, some SNSs have become enormous platforms with excessive features, information, and complex relationship, users begin to feel boring of SNSs and come about social network fatigue, and ultimately emerge discontinuous usage intention. This study build a research model based on a stressor-strain-outcome framework from the perspective of perceived overload to interpret discontinuous usage behavior. This thesis classifies SNSs stressors into system feature overload, information overload and social overload, and hypothesizes SNSs stressors(perceived overload) lead to users' SNSs strain(social network fatigue and dissatisfaction), and finally drive behavior outcome(discontinuous usage intention). In addition, this research analyzes the mediating effect of social network fatigue on the relationships between perceived overload factors and dissatisfaction, and the moderating effects of demographic factors(gender, age, and occupation). The emprical results indicat that three types of overload on SNSs exert positive influences on social network fatigue and had greater impact on social network fatigue than dissatisfaction. Moreover, social network fatigue partially mediates the relationships between perceived overload and dissatisfaction. Additionally, gender, age and occupation have significant moderating effects. Previous studies mainly focus on continuous usage behavior, and little research mentions discontinuous usage behavior, this research gives an empirical study of social network fatigue, and analyzes discontinuous usage behavior from the perspective of perceived overload. This study provides a new perspective and significant theoretical contributions for future SNSs behavior research, and also gives some important practical implications to SNSs improvement.