The Prominence of Institutional Trust and Social Gratifications in the Disclosure of Multifarious Information on Social Media

The presence of social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook is ubiquitous, and their platforms enable their users to disclose information in various forms. However, these platforms – especially Facebook – have received backlash for allegations in several occasions of privacy breaches. Studies in the field of privacy and information disclosure commonly encase the information into a singular and one-dimensional type of information, and specific focus on the social gratifications in the disclosure on SNSs is notably absent. It indicates a lack of a more granular look into the type of information disclosed and the aspect of social gratifications in driving the disclosure.

This study aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the constructs that drive the disclosure of three specific types of information. To achieve this aim, this study adopts uses and gratifications theory in the framework of privacy calculus. A discussion of cultural impact on the relationships within the structural model of this study was also carried out to further explain privacy attitudes and information disclosure by using dimensions from GLOBE study.

A cross-sectional survey design was chosen to collect the data, which later generated 259 valid responses. The dataset of this study consists of British and Indonesian participants who have been using Facebook to produce a cultural comparative study. This study analysed the data using partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), which does not require distributional assumptions and can generate high levels of statistical power even with small to moderate sample size. These two rationales work well with the selected analysis method of this study.