A Dynamic Examination of Motives for Using Social Media and Social Media Usage among Undergraduate Students: A Latent Class Analysis

Abstract

The goals of the study are to analyze underlying types motives for using social media, to identify underlying types of social media usage, and to investigate whether motives have effect on underlying social media usage types. For these, data were gathered from 840 Korean undergraduate students, latent class analysis (LCA) and multinominal logistic regression carried out using PROC LCA for SAS. The results are following. Firstly, the respondents were grouped into five latent classes: ‘the passive relationships’, ‘the learning network building’, ‘the building social connections’, ‘the daily information sharing’, and ‘the task solving’ based on motives to use social media. 41% of respondents are expected to belong to ‘the learning network building’ class. Secondly the respondents were grouped into four latent class based on the usage: ‘the community oriented consumer’, ‘the community oriented prosumer’, ‘the consumer of data’, and ‘the disinterested’, and half of students prefer to passively take pre- existing content rather than actively make their own. Thirdly, motives were strong predictors of latent class membership of social media usage (p<. 001).