Abandoning ship? A study of registered and nonregistered library users’ intention to discontinue using Facebook

Abstract

The purpose of the current research was to investigate Facebook discontinuance intentions in the Library and Information Science environment. The research model, building on the Theory of Planned Behavior, incorporated overload, fatigue, and self-efficacy, to understand the drivers behind users’ intention to stop using Facebook (either permanently or intermittently) or replace it with another social medium. Overall, the results suggest that participants are unlikely to abandon Facebook either on a permanent or a temporary basis, at least in the near future. Furthermore, users’ discontinuance intentions are primarily associated with evaluations about the consequences of their choice to abandon the medium.

Keywords:

• Discontinuance intentions
• information overload
• communication overload
• social overload
• self-efficacy
• fatigue
• social media
• Facebook

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Covariances among the three exogenous variables (information-, communication-, and social overload) and error covariances of the three dependent variables (permanent discontinuance-, intermittent discontinuance-, and replacement intention) were omitted from Figure 2 for clarity purposes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund- ESF) under Grant 80784.