What would you sacrifice for the ‘gram? Developing and testing the Social Media Sacrifice Scale (SMSS)

ABSTRACT

As people seek to manicure their online presence within the current “technomeritocracy,” there is a need to understand what sacrifices people will make to curate social media worthy travel experiences. Hence, the Social Media Sacrifice Scale was developed from the literature on identity theory and compensatory purchasing behavior to conceptualize and measure these sacrifices. The scale was purified using EFA (n = 252) and validated using CFA (n = 251). Results demonstrate validity across four sacrifice dimensions (spending money, sacrifices at home, discomfort, and rule breaking) providing managers with marketing strategies to attract markets with the right mix of sacrificial expectations for the destination.

KEYWORDS:

• Travel photography
• sacrifice
• social media
• scale development
• narcissism
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Tiktok
• status
• conspicuous consumption

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Nick Pitas (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign), and Dr. Kyle Woosnam (University of Georgia) for their helpful comments and edits to the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Those who did not identify with a gender or preferred not to answer were excluded from the comparison due to low representation within the sample.

Additional information

Funding

No external sponsors funded this study.