Does multidimensional service quality generate sustainable use intention for facebook?

Abstract

While social networking services (SNS) have led to major economic and social transformations worldwide, it is becoming increasingly important to understand what constitutes the sustainable use of SNS. The current study focuses on Facebook and examines the impact of multidimensional and hierarchical service quality on sustainable use intention. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the data that has been collected through online surveys. The results show that all four dimensions of service quality (outcome quality, environment quality, interaction quality, and social quality) have significant positive effects on satisfaction. Satisfaction is found to be a reasonable predictor of sustainable use intention and word-of-mouth (WOM) communication, and the influence of WOM on sustainable use intention is also confirmed. Among all the dimensions, outcome quality and interaction quality influence WOM most strongly. The findings from this study bridge a literature gap in the context of SNS by demonstrating how SNS managers can improve service quality, leading to increases in satisfaction, WOM, and sustainable use intention.