Social media dependency in relation to impulse buying of fashion products

Alison Jo DePhillips

The purpose of this study was to examine the factors that lead consumers to become dependent on social media and how that dependency could result in more frequent impulse buying behavior of fashion products. The current study adopted the theories of media system dependency (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976), social media dependency (Wang, Lee, & Hua, 2015), and the theory of rational addiction (Becker & Murphy, 1988) to develop the theoretical framework. Next, an online survey instrument was developed based on the existing social media dependency scale to gather primary data on both latent constructs and consumers demographic information. A total of 502 U.S. consumers completed an online survey distributed through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The sample was appropriate for the study to examine diverse U.S consumers and their social media usage. The sample was closely split between male (51%) and females (49%) participants who have at least one social media platform. The results of exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation confirmed one factor for variables, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, social interaction, boredom, fear of missing and impulse buying behaviors, and three factors of social media dependency were confirmed with a second-order factor structure by confirmatory factor analysis. Validity and Reliability was supported for all variables based on Cronbach's alpha values (>.70), average extracted value (>.50) and composite reliability (>.70). The results confirmed that perceived enjoyment, social interaction, boredom and fear of missing out had positive impacts on consumers developing social media dependency. The results also confirmed consumers that have a dependency to social media have higher engagement in impulse buying of fashion products. These findings imply that consumers are at risk of becoming more dependent to social media over time with continued habitual usage. Future studies can be done on other international consumer markets, including ones that have different social media platform available to the consumer market (e.g. China with WeChat). Another study should be done using qualitative methods to provide a comprehensive view of the development of social media dependency and how it leads to impulse buying behaviors.

Social media dependency in relation to impulse buying of fashion products

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