A Study of the Factors Affecting the Adoption of Mobile Instant Messaging in China

Mobile instant messaging (MIM) has become one of the most popular communication applications for many users in China. Previous studies mainly focus on instant messaging (IM) usage for the Internet users, and do not investigate MIM usage for the mobile phone users. This study proposes a model to analyze the attitudinal, social and perceived behavior control factors that are associated with the adoption of MIM usage in China based on the decomposed theory of planned behavior. An online questionnaire was used to gather data and a total of 311 valid questionnaires were returned. A structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to test the research hypothesis. The results show that perceived presence awareness has the greatest positive impact on the attitude of the users in China towards MIM. In addition, relative advantage, social relationship influences and self-efficacy all had significant effect except perceive easy of use and facilitating conditions.