SOCIAL INFLUENCE AND DEPENDENCE IN THE FACEBOOK USE BY ROMANIAN AND LITHUANIAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The time spent on Facebook by university students is continuously increasing. This fact is raising many questions as regards the relation between the social networking websites and the university. The educators are challenged to understand the factors that are driving the adoption of social networking websites, the characteristics of the daily use as well as the positive and negative effects on the university work. The social influence has been recognized as one of the factors that are driving the adoption of information systems. On another hand, the excessive use may lead to addiction. The first objective of this research is to explore the correlation between the social influence and the Facebook dependence. A model with these latent variables has been specified and tested on two samples of university students, the first from Romania and the second from Lithuania. The second objective of the research is to comparatively discuss the measures in each country. A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis has been carried on to test the configural and metric invariance. The comparison of means shows that university students reporting higher social influence have a higher risk of Facebook dependence. The comparative analysis revealed that for both variables, the mean values are higher for the Romanian sample.