Abstract
Mobile social communication app WeChat has reached 549 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally, a jump from the 500 million users-mark achieved in April 2015. In Malaysia, 'People-nearby applications' (PNAs) such as WeChat has boasts a 95% smartphone penetration rate. A research released by GlobalWebIndex (GWI) in November 2014 showed the active user base in Malaysia has grown by 1,187% from Q1 2013 to Q3 2014, with young demographic aged between 16 to 34 years old, dominating more than 80% of the WeChat user base. This study intends to explore the gratification factors among its 1 million users in the country contributing to continuance usage of the PNA. By employing six uses and gratifications: social inclusion, sex, friendship, entertainment, romantic relationships, and location-based search variables and items, adopted from Van De Wiele, C., & Tong, S. T. (2014, September); Pearson-Correlation Analysis will be used to test whether there is significant relationships between variables and usage continuance intention. Using Google Docs, data will be collected from 400 WeChat users in Malaysia using stratified sampling (p=.5, >100,000) by referring to table by Israel, Glenn. D (n.d). Many scholars have recently adopted Google Docs as a means of completing online surveys as it keeps data safe in the most basic format of spreadsheets. Findings from this study will be able to identify factors that have majorly contributed to WeChat usages among Malaysians and intermittently contributing to the ever-increasing modernization and expansion of the Internet platform for various purposes.
Author Information
Mohd Syuhaidi Abu Bakar, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia
Paper Information
Conference: IICSSDubai2016
Stream: Cultural and Media Studies
This paper is part of the IICSSDubai2016 Conference Proceedings (View)
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