모바일 커뮤니케이션 서비스 이용자의 지속적 사용의도에 관한 한·중 비교 연구

Recently, advancement of wireless technologies have extended the reach of social networkservices and e-business to mobile environments. Since the late 2000s, mobile services invirtually every area of business and communications - e-business, social networking, businesscommunication,news, education and training, and more - have continued their rapid spread,gaining increasing importance in the lives of wide range of the population. Especially mobilecommunication has become the growth engines for new data services including from voice-centeredservices to communication-centered services. Mobile communication services, however, havelow entry barriers by its nature, then many alternative mobile communication services follow them. It may be easy or cheap for customers to switch providers, and many mobile communicationservices have appeared and disappeared. Therefore, mobile communication service providersare eager to identify the conditions and factors that lead to long-running mobile communicationservices. Continuance intention to use has been an important subject of study on technology adoptionin information systems research over the past 10 years. One of the renowned model of individualinformation technology acceptance is the Expectancy-Confirmation Model (ECM). ECM is amodification of Expectancy-Confirmation Theory (ECT) which has been used extensively as oneof the primary theories in marketing. ECM is broadly applied to examine the continuanceintention of information systemusers rather than just to explain user satisfaction. Other researchersextended ECM by incorporating the perceived enjoyment, social influence, and cognitive factors. Drawing upon an extended ECM, we develop a research model including exogenous variables- service characteristics (recency and localization), user characteristics (innovativeness anduser experience), and social characteristics (relationship and other's availability) - that arerelated to mobile communication services. The proposed model investigates the relationshipsbetween exogenous variables and belief factors (i.e., perceived usefulness and perceivedenjoyment), and between belief factors and users' continuance intention to use for the mobilecommunication service. Perceived enjoyment was included in the research model since it isbelieved to explain the use of leisure and hedonic information technologies such as mobilecommunication services. This study also investigates users' acceptance of mobile communicationsservices in Korea and China. Korea is well known to have achieved rapid IT growth and Chinahas the biggest market on earth for mobile communications. This study was conducted a survey targeting the mobile communication users in Korea andChina, and collected 191 questionnaires in Korea and 186 questionnaires in China respectively. We tested the research model using structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis. Our findings show that (1) recency has a significant positive effect on the perceived usefulnessand enjoyment in Korea and China while localization has significant effects on perceivedenjoyment in Korea and a positive effect on perceived usefulness in China; (2) innovativenesshas positive effects on the perceived usefulness and enjoyment in China whereas no relationshipwas found among them in Korea and user experience has significant effects on the perceivedusefulness and enjoyment in both countries; (3) relationship has significant effects on perceivedenjoyment in Korea whereas significant effects on perceived usefulness in China; (4) other'savailability has significant effects on both perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment inKorea while it has no positive effect on perceived enjoyment in China; and (5) all othervariables have significant positive relationships among perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment,satisfaction, and continuance intention to use. To sum up, recency and user experience have positive effects on perceived enjoyment andperceived usefulness in both Korea and China. Localization, relationship and other's availablityhave mixed effects on perceived enjoyment and perceived usefulness in Korea and China. Thereare positive associations between perceived usefulness and satisfaction, between perceivedenjoyment and satisfaction in both countries. A multi group analysis was conducted to compare the path coefficients between Korea andChina. The findings of this analysis revealed that there are significant differences between thetwo countries in the usage of mobile communication service. Specifically, perceived usefulness has stronger positive effect on satisfaction in Korea than in China whereas perceived enjoymenthas stronger positive effect on satisfaction in China than in Korea. The association betweensatisfaction and continuance intention for Chinese users is stronger than for Korean users. The previous findings allow us to summarize a series of implications for both academiciansand practitioners. From the academic point of view, this study may provide an importanttheoretical basis for future research on mobile application and mobile communication service inparticular. Another contribution is to draw growing interest in integrating the ECM and mobilecommunication approach in studying continuance intention of IS. From the managerialperspective, this study shows differences between Korean users and Chinese users in usingmobile communications. Therefore, this study can provide useful information for mobile applicationand communication developers in Korea and China. We found that both perceived usefulnessand perceived enjoyment should be well managed since they both positively related to usersatisfaction, which in turn, results in sustainable usage.