Examining the Impact of Psychological, Social, and Quality Factors on the Continuous Intention to Use Virtual Meeting Platforms During and beyond COVID-19 Pandemic: A Hybrid SEM-ANN Approach

Abstract

Virtual meeting platforms have been identified as the golden bullet to deliver the learning materials to students during the COVID-19 pandemic. While this is evident across thousands of universities across the globe, the literature is scarce on what impacts the continued use of these platforms during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this research develops a theoretical model to examine the impact of psychological, social, and quality factors on the continuous intention to use these platforms. Unlike the previous adoption studies, which mainly relied on structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis, the developed model was validated through a hybrid approach using SEM and artificial neural network (ANN) based on data collected from 470 students. The hypotheses testing results indicated that psychological, social, and quality factors have significant positive impacts on the continuous intention to use virtual meeting platforms. The sensitivity analysis results revealed that psychological factors have the most considerable effect on the continuous intention to use virtual meeting platforms with 100% normalized importance, followed by quality factors (72%), and social factors (31%). The contribution of this study lies behind the development of an integrated model that considers the psychological, social, and quality factors in understanding the continuous intention to use virtual meeting platforms during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.