Full length articleEffects of using social networking sites in different languages: Does Spanish or English make a difference?
Section snippets
SNS usage and media system dependency
The effects of media have been researched for more than half a century. Historically, scholars believed that media have a direct and uniform effect on their users. In such viewpoints, media and media messages are considered as persuasion-centered concepts whereas users are merely passive information receivers. However, the development of new technologies and increasing options of media platforms give users an opportunity to actively select particular media platforms to use and also determine
Study participants
The study participants were recruited at a metropolitan area in the U.S. where Hispanic residents constitute approximately two thirds of the local population and Spanish is the unofficial language. The recruitment message was sent out via online flyers (e.g., Craigslist) and oral in-class announcements at a local university. A total of 113 participants agreed to take part in the study on a voluntary basis, including college students, working professionals, and housewives or unemployed. The
Manipulation check
As expected, the Hispanic restaurant website was rated significantly higher on the Hispanic cultural orientation (M = 5.19) than did the American restaurant website (M = 2.32), t(111) = 12.21, p < .001 (two-tailed), confirming the success of experimental stimulus manipulation.
Tests of hypotheses
To test the five hypotheses, a structural equation modeling analysis was performed with Mplus 7. The four latent variables in the model were social play dependency on SNS, American cultural orientation, Hispanic cultural
Discussion
As more people adopt SNS for communication, research on the effects of using such social media is quickly growing. Most prior studies are focused on who use SNS, for what purposes, and how (Wilson et al., 2012). The current research makes a unique contribution to the literature by testing a causal relationship between people's SNS usage and their cultural orientations and culture-related website evaluations in a laboratory experiment. Using MSD theory as the framework, the results of this study
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