Page 128 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Luchuan LIU & Kai SUN / Analysis of the relationship between microblogging users’ affections and users’ satisfaction 127

use of information system (Beaudry & Pinsonneault, 2010). Therefore, the affection-based IT/IS
use model is needed to compensate for the cognitive model (Beaudry & Pinsonneault, 2010; Van
der Heijden, 2004).
Researchers have begun to pay more attention on the impact of affections on IS user’s use
behavior. Khalifa believes that satisfaction is a kind of response of IS end-user to the system’s
properties and quality of service (Khalifa & V. Liu, 2002, 2003, 2004). The study of Y. B.
Lu and H. M. Xu (2006) shows that, in the course of using instant messaging service, the
perception of interesting is an important factor affecting user’s use behavior. Van der Heijden’s
empirical research demonstrates that in the context of using entertainment information system,
the perception of pleasantness has a stronger impact on use intention than the perception
of usefulness (Van der Heijden, 2004). Beaudry and Pinsonneault (2010) establish an
affection classification model to classify user’s affections into four categories, and study the
relationship between typical affections (anger, anxiety, happiness and excitement) and IT use
in each category. Agrifoglio et al. (2012) introduce affective variables like joy to the classic
TAM model, and find that for user’s continued use, a pleasant affection has a stronger impact
than the perception of usefulness.
However, current researches on the impact of users’ affections on their behaviors in the field of
information system still have two defects. The first defect is that the choice of affective variables
is concentrated only on a few variables. Currently, the mostly used affective variables in the study
of users’ affections are anxiety (Beaudry & Pinsonneaul, 2010; Jiang et al., 2010; Venkatesh,
2000), happiness (Beaudry & Pinsonneault, 2010; Noteborn, Bohle Carbonell, Dailey-Hebert, &
Gijselaers, 2012), excitement (Jiang et al., 2010; Khalifa & V. Liu, 2003), anger (Khalifa & V.
Liu, 2003) and boredom (Noteborn et al., 2012) etc. But affection is a complex and rich concept
(Ping, 2013); whether only these types of affections affect user behavior of information system still
needs to be further discussed. Moreover, when researchers apply the concept of these affections,
they often take the above-mentioned variables as the frequently experienced affections during
user’s use of information system without consideration, and they do not give an explanation and
the basis of their judgment (Agrifoglio et al., 2012; Y. B. Lu & H. M. Xu, 2006; Van der Heijden,
2004; Venkatesh, 2000). The second defect is that in the ECM-ISC, satisfaction is the core
variable (Bhattacherjee, 2001; Bhattacherjee et al., 2008). Most of the current researches are on
satisfaction’s impact on the use behavior and use intention (Jiang et al., 2010; Khalifa & V. Liu,
2003; Noteborn et al., 2012; Venkatesh, 2000); no researchers have yet explored what affections
IS users, especially micro-blog users, are experiencing when using the system and the relationship
between affections and satisfaction.
Therefore, this paper intends to answer the following two questions:
1) What affections are a user mainly experiencing in the process of using micro-blogs?
2) Do these affections have an impact on user satisfaction? What kind of impact is it?
By answering the first question, we can get the specific affections users experience when