IT Affordances in Online Social Commerce: Conceptualization Validation and Scale Development

IT affordances have gained much attention in theoretically interpreting social media-associated behavior in information systems literature and played a crucial role in conceptually realizing IT-implicated mechanisms of human-computer interaction. But these efforts have been practically impeded in empirical research due to the lack of a validated scale. Here we address a context-specific conceptualization and a fine-grained measurement for IT affordances in online social commerce (OSC). We used a mixed-method approach to conduct a rigorous and comprehensive instrumental-development and validation procedure. We found that IT affordances in OSC are a multidimensional and formative construct, which consists of visibility, metavoicing, triggered attending, guidance shopping, social connecting, and trading. Results of psychometric properties based on two datasets (n=255 and n=326) show the scale is reliable and valid. The findings provide a theoretical springboard for further research and implication for practice.