News Sharing Behavior In WeChat:Based On An Integration Of Social Cognitive Theory And Social Capital Theory

Nowadays,social media has been an important news channel.The dissemination of news has rapidly expanded and news sources have also been broadened in social media.Much news originates in social media,and led to the participation of professional media follow-up.News sharing behavior is becoming an important part of news dissemination and an increasingly significant activity in social media.As the largest social media in China,WeChat is worthy of attention in terms of news sharing.This study investigates the news sharing behavior in social media considering the interaction features of social media and the particularity of news.The study established a conceptual model of influencing factors,integrating the Social Capital Theory into the theoretical model with personal cognition,environment and behavior factors proposed in Social Cognitive Theory.The online social capital,which characterizes the social media users' interaction and interpersonal relationships,is adopted as the influencing factor of social environment in WeChat.This study divides the concept of news sharing into two dimensions:general news sharing and news recontextualizing,and puts forward the concept news-related outcome expectation considering the publicity of news and sharers' expectation of active participation in agenda setting.The study conducted Structural Equation Modeling fitting and path analysis of 301 questionnaire data.The study analyzed how sense of influence,personal outcome expectation,news-related outcome expectation and interaction ties,trust and reciprocity,shared language in online social capital influence news sharing behavior.The results show that at the cognitive level,sense of influence plays a positive role in news recontextualizing behavior.The personal outcome expectation and the news-related outcome expectation are the most important determinants that have important influence on the general news sharing and news recontextualizing.As for online social capital,interaction ties,trust and reciprocity have a weak positive effect on general news sharing.The shared language is the main positive impact factor of general news sharing and news recontextualizing.Therefore,the study suggests that the individuals' confidence of self influence,expectation to socialize,motivation to promote news publicity,and close interpersonal communication in social media will promote WeChat users' active participation in general news sharing or news recontextualizing in varying degrees,thus revealing news value and shaping the active role of the news users in social media.This study provides a perspective combining personal cognitive and social environment factors to understand news sharing,news recontextualizing and active news users in social media.Through measuring the individuals' sense of influence and public expectations,the study tries to make a small contribution to news sharing in social media in terms of personal cognitive aspects.