Carrying forward the uses and grats 2.0 agenda: an affordance-driven measure of social media uses and gratifications

The notion of social media affordances has not been adequately integrated into the uses and gratifications literature. Building on the MAIN model, an affordance-driven framework (Sundar, 2008; Sundar & Limperos, 2013), this study develops a social media uses and gratifications scale among a sample of 393 students. Results of the study support the conceptual accuracy of the MAIN model, as conceptualizing social media uses and gratifications as a second-order factor structure that classifies constructs into four different types of affordances displays similar goodness-of-fit to a single-order factor structure. A confirmatory factor analysis with a second sample of 313 American citizens further confirms the applicability of the scale among a more diverse population.