Study of the Behavioral Intention to Use Social Media for Connection with Government Within Adults Using the UTAUT2 with Trust

This study sought to determine the behavioral intention of consumers to accept and use social media technologies to connect with government programs. Despite the wealth of research about how and why governments are beginning to use social media to interact with constituents, the issue of whether citizens will readily accept and use social media to interact with governments remains unclear. The research questions to answer this lack of clarity included an overall question of the behavioral intention to accept and use social media in this fashion. What is the relationship of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, hedonic motivation, price value, and trust as potential determinants of behavioral intention to accept the use of social media to connect with the government? Additional research questions for each independent and dependent variable combination were asked and investigated. The unified theory of adoption and use of technology for consumers (UTAUT2) theoretical model with the addition of the variable of trust formed the theoretical foundation of the study. It was used to investigate and answer the research questions as part of a nonexperimental, correlational research design to analyze relationships between technology acceptance factors and users’ behavioral intentions to use social media technology to connect with government. A previously validated instrument which combined the UTAUT2 with a new variable for trust was used. The population was a simple random sample of U. S. residents with self-reported experience with social media conducted by the survey company QuestionPro. The sample derived was 158 responses, with 55% male and 45% female participants, with more than 85% of the age groups accounted for participants between 18 and 45 years of age. Analysis of the data included descriptive statistics, testing of assumptions, and testing of hypotheses through step-wise and hierarchal regression analyses. Behavioral intention to accept and use social media to connect with government indicated relatively strong support in favor of acceptance and use as represented by 5.65 as the mean of a 7-point Likert scale. To study the omnibus research question, multiple linear regression was used resulting in 71% of the variance in behavioral intention explained by the model (r2 = .71, ΔR2 = .71, F = 59.725, p < .001). The factors with greater influence were trust, price value, and effort expectancy. The remaining factors, performance expectancy, social influence, and hedonic motivation, showed statistical significance when analyzed as independent to dependent variable pairs but were not statistically significant as part of the full UTAUT2 with trust model. Future research is recommended to consider the influence of age as a moderating factor since social media tends to be more readily accepted and used by younger age groups