Original Article
The Motivation for Facebook Use – Is it a Matter of Bonding or Control Over Others? Evidence From a Cross-Cultural Study Rayna Sariyska,1 Bernd Lachmann,1 Cecilia Cheng,2 Augusto Gnisci,3 Ida Sergi,3 Antonio Pace,3 Katarzyna Kaliszewska-Czeremska,4 Stéphanie Laconi,5 Songfa Zhong,6 Demet Toraman,7 Mattis Geiger,1 and Christian Montag1,8 1
Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany
2
Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Department of Psychology, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Italy
3 4
Institute of Psychology, The Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow, Poland Department of Psychology, University of Toulouse II – Le Mirail, Toulouse, France Department of Economics, University of Singapore, Singapore
5 6 7
Department of Psychology, University of Bonn, Germany
8
The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for Neuroinformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
Abstract: In the present study, we investigated individual differences in the motivation for Facebook use. In total N = 736 participants from Europe and Asia took part in the study. They filled in the Facebook questionnaire (FQ), including the two factors Attitude toward Facebook and Online Sociability, and the Unified Motive Scale (UMS-3), measuring the motives Achievement, Affiliation, Intimacy, Power, and Fear. The results showed that the Attitude toward Facebook was more positive in the subsample from Asia, but no differences could be found between the Asian and European sample with respect to the frequency of use of different activities on Facebook. The motives Fear, Power, Affiliation, and Intimacy significantly predicted the FQ factor Attitudes. Furthermore, the Attitude toward Facebook mediated the associations between the motives Power/Affiliation and Online Sociability. However, these results were only found for the European sample. The associations found suggest the important role of different motives such as Power/Affiliation for the study of Facebook use. The present work shows the possibility of motivational factors for Facebook use to differ depending on the culture. The study adds to the literature by investigating a classic motivation theory in the context of Facebook use. Keywords: motives, Facebook, personality, cross-cultural
The increasing popularity of the Internet and one of its most prominent social network platforms – Facebook – raises numerous questions about its impact on society. As a consequence, research in Internet and in particular Facebook usage is rapidly growing in the last years. The present study aims to examine potential motivational factors underlying Facebook use. Therefore, this work tries to carve out factors explaining why humans spend much of their everyday lives on this digital platform. Facebook is to date one of the most popular online social networking sites (SNS; see Sigerson & Cheng, 2018 for a review). It was launched in the year 2004 as a platform for Harvard University students and later expanded
Journal of Individual Differences (2019), 40(1), 26–35 https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-0001/a000273
dramatically (Facebook, 2016), after allowing access to the general population. Facebook originated in the US, but approximately 83.6% of daily active users are outside the US and Canada (Facebook, 2016), with Facebook available in over 70 languages (Schonfeld, 2010). Because of its growing importance as a tool for communication among others, a growing body of research concentrates on exploring different factors behind the (problematic) use of Facebook like personality and psychopathological tendencies (Ross et al., 2009; Ryan & Xenos, 2011). Of particular importance are studies trying to disentangle the motivation behind Facebook use and addictive tendencies in social network use.
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