Exploring The Predictive Power Of College Students' Privacy Management On Their Weibo Usage Behavior

Social networking site is widely attracted by netizens due to its timeliness,interaction and convenience.Among them,WeChat and Weibo are the typical examples in China.Born in 2009,Weibo has become the number one micro-blog application in China and has beat other congeneric products.Over the past ten years,Weibo users has been increasing dramatically.However,some privacy-related issues have emerged with the development of Weibo at the same time,and have affected Weibo users' usage behavior.So far,researches about Weibo-behavior at home and abroad are conducted more from the perspective of Uses and Gratification Theory,Social Capital Theory and so on.Less research was carried from the communication privacy management.Taking the college students as the subject,this paper explored the relationship between their privacy management and their Weibo usage behavior by employing an online questionnaire.In order to test the predictive power of privacy management variables on Weibo usage behavior,this paper developed its dependent variables,Boundary Permeability,Boundary Ownership and Boundary Linkage,from Communication Privacy Management(CPM),and employed a new usage scale which divided Weibo behavior into two kinds,the Functional Use and the Ritual Use.Regression analysis found that Boundary Permeability is positively related to the Ritual Use,Boundary Ownership and Boundary Linkage are significant predictor of Functunal Use.Findings of this study support the theoretical framework of CPM on Weibo,provide suggestions to Weibo company and test the general application of the new usage scale.