Modeling Online Social Network Use: Incorporating Espoused National Cultural Values into an Extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology

Prior research has developed a numbers of models for examining the acceptance and use of technology. This paper extends the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) beyond the established demographic and contextual variables. Building upon research from social psychology and technology adoption, our proposed model incorporates three constructs into UTAUT: information privacy concerns, hedonic motivation, and relationship expectancy. Motivated by research where individual differences were shown to moderate the relationships of the UTAUT model, this paper investigates the effect of espoused national culture values on social network adoption. Integrating these findings into UTAUT, we formulate a model to examine the individual use of social network sites. The findings from the proposed research are expected to generate both important theoretical and practical implications.