EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL INFLUENCE AND ADDICTION IN FACEBOOK USE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Today, the social networking websites are widespread among university students. The most prominent example is Facebook that had a considerable penetration rate in the last decade, especially among young people. In the era of social learning, educators have to understand the motives that are driving the daily use as well as the positive and negative effects on the university work Social influence has been recognized as an important factor driving the intention to use. On another hand, adoption may lead to addiction. Recent work shows that Romanian university students have large Facebook networks and spend too much time daily. This research has two main objectives. The first is to measure the social influence and the Facebook dependence on two samples of university students, one from Romania and the other from Lithuania. The second is to comparatively discuss the measures, by carrying on an invariance analysis. A model with two latent variables has been specified and tested. The results show that the model exhibits configural and metric invariance which means that the variables are perceived in the same way in both countries. The comparison of the observed scores reveals higher mean values for the Romanian sample.