ABSTRACT

In a recent issue of Journal of Communication, Rice et al. (2017 Rice, R. E. , S. K.Evans, K. E.Pearce, A.Sivunen, J.Vitak, and J. W.Treem . 2017. “Organizational Media Affordances: Operationalization and Associations with Media use.” Journal of Communication 67 (1): 106–130. doi:10.1111/jcom.12273.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) offered a measure of social media affordances that has been of decided value to its corpus. Specifically, using a grounded-theory approach, these authors predicted the existence of 11 unique affordances that are manifest within organisational contexts. However, based on exploratory factor analysis, these authors contend that only 6 unique affordances were emergent in their data. Using alternate statistical methods (i.e. confirmatory factor analysis) and newly collected data from two different samples, we show that Rice et al.'s initial 11-factor measurement model provides a good fit to the data. In addition, subsequent analyses show that the measured affordances are largely measuring the same construct (i.e. they are empirically indistinguishable). Additional analyses were also performed to show that both first- and second-order portions of the model remained invariant between different social-media platforms. In the main, these findings suggest a more parsimonious theoretical conceptualisation of the affordances construct as is used in social media contexts, i.e. the possibility of connecting to others online in a social and strategic manner. Moreover, this conceptualisation remains equivalent across different social media platforms.

摘要

在最近一期的《通讯杂志》上，莱斯等人。（2017年 水稻，RE ，SK埃文斯，KE皮尔斯，A. Sivunen，J. Vitak，和JW Treem。2017。“组织媒体负担：与媒体使用的运营化和关联。” 通信学报67（1）：106 – 130。doi：10.1111 / jcom.12273。[Crossref]，[Web of Science®]， [Google Scholar]）提供了一种衡量社交媒体能力的方法，该方法对其价值具有决定性的价值。具体而言，这些作者使用扎根理论的方法预测了在组织环境中表现出来的11种独特津贴的存在。但是，基于探索性因素分析，这些作者认为，他们的数据中仅出现了6种独特的承受能力。使用替代的统计方法（即验证性因子分析）和从两个不同样本中新收集的数据，我们表明Rice等人的初始11因子测量模型非常适合这些数据。此外，随后的分析表明，测得的能力在很大程度上测量了相同的结构（即，它们在经验上是无法区分的）。还进行了其他分析，以显示该模型的第一和第二部分在不同的社交媒体平台之间均保持不变。总体而言，这些发现表明，社交媒体环境中使用的“可负担性”结构的理论更为简化，即以社交和战略方式与他人在线连接的可能性。而且，这种概念化在不同的社交媒体平台上仍然是等效的。