Exploring elderly users’ MSNS intermittent discontinuance: A dual-mechanism model

Abstract Intermittent discontinuance behavior has become one of the significant obstacle factors to hinder the rapid development of elderly user MSNS market. However, most previous studies of intermittent discontinuance ignored the elderly group. Meanwhile, the prior studies rarely explored the inhibitors and disclosed the whole cognitive and emotion forming phase of intermittent discontinuance. To fill these gaps, the present study targets the elderly group and develops a dual mechanism model from both “enabling-inhibiting” and “appraisal-emotional reaction-coping response” perspectives. The empirical study based on the survey of 307 Chinese elderly MSNS users demonstrates that, in enabling mechanism, excluding the social overload, information and system feature overload can increase the elderly users’ fatigue, which will further trigger intermittent discontinuance. In inhibiting mechanism, excepting the autonomy need satisfaction, relatedness and competence need satisfaction from the MSNS have positive association with the elderly users’ emotional attachment towards MSNS, which will further decrease the intermittent discontinuance. The findings imply that, for the coexistence of enabling and inhibiting mechanism, the service providers should not only decrease the overload-fatigue based enablers but also increase the need satisfaction-attachment based inhibitors to control the intermittent discontinuance.