Why people keep coming back to Facebook: Explaining and predicting continuance participation from an extended theory of planned behaviour perspective

TLDR: Findings suggest that continuance intentions and behaviour of users of Facebook are likely to be greater when they perceive the behaviour to be associated with significant added-value (i.e. benefits outperform sacrifices).

Abstract: This study examines the continuance participation intentions and behaviour on Facebook, as a representative of Social Networking Sites (SNSs), from a social and behavioural perspective. The study extends the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) through the inclusion of perceived value construct and utilizes the extended theory to explain users' continuance participation intentions and behaviour on Facebook. Despite the recent massive uptake of Facebook, our review of the related-literature revealed that very few studies tackled such technologies from the context of post-adoption as in this research. Using data from surveys of undergraduate and postgraduate students in Jordan (n=403), the extended theory was tested using statistical analysis methods. The results show that attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, and perceived value have significant effect on the continuance participation intention of post-adopters. Further, the results show that continuance participation intention and perceived value have significant effect on continuance participation behaviour. However, the results show that perceived behavioural control has no significant effect on continuance participation behaviour of post-adopters. When comparing the extended theory developed in this study with the standard TPB, it was found that the inclusion of the perceived value construct in the extended theory is fruitful; as such an extension explained an additional 11.6% of the variance in continuance participation intention and 4.5% of the variance in continuance participation behaviour over the standard TPB constructs. Consistent with the research on value-driven post-adoption behaviour, these findings suggest that continuance intentions and behaviour of users of Facebook are likely to be greater when they perceive the behaviour to be associated with significant added-value (i.e. benefits outperform sacrifices).