Distinguishing technologies for social interaction: The perceived social affordances of communication channels scale

ABSTRACT

The concept of affordances in communication technology research has proven to be heuristically provocative, yet perceived affordances are rarely measured. After extracting commonly cited social affordances from the literature, we developed a measure to assess participants’ perceptions of these affordances. The scale was tested across eight communication channels in two studies (face-to-face; texting; phone; email; posts on social networking sites, specifically Facebook; instant messaging; Skype videoconferencing; and mobile app Snapchat). A factor structure was developed in Study 1 and confirmed in Study 2. The resultant Perceived Social Affordances of Communication Channels Scale includes 41 items measuring 10 communicative affordances: accessibility, bandwidth, social presence, privacy, network association, personalization, persistence, editability, conversation control, and anonymity. Potential methodological and theoretical applications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordances
• channel selection
• computer-mediated communication
• social media
• texting
• face-to-face communication

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank participants of The Ohio State School of Communication's Communication Technology Symposium for their feedback during early conceptualizations of this project. We would also like to thank the Editor and three anonymous reviewers for their insights and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in part by The Ohio State University School of Communication Mattox Award granted to the first author.