5. Direct Effect and Mediating Effect of Individual Retweeting Behavior on SNS

In order to systematically explain individual information dissemination behavior on SNS, Chap. 3 proposes an overarching theoretical model to examine an individual’s retweeting decision making process, which is illustrated in Fig. 3.​1. This conceptual model mainly consists of two parts: determinants of individual retweeting behavior (\(H1 \sim H8\)) and moderators of individual retweeting behavior (\(H9 \sim H11\)). This chapter focuses on validating the first part presented in Fig. 5.1 and next chapter will examine the moderating factors. Regression results in this chapter show that both the central route and the peripheral route have significant impacts on individual retweeting decisions. Among them, topical relevance, social tie strength and value homophily are the most important ones, followed by information richness(#URL, #hashtag), #mention and informational social influence. Author-related factors such as source trustworthiness have trivial impacts. Existing studies about the impacts of the relationships between the source and the receiver on the receiver’s information retweeting behavior are still controversial. In this chapter, we propose and validate that social tie strength partially mediates the effect of value homophily on individual retweeting behavior, which offers at least one explanation for the contradictory findings about the effect of homophily on individual sharing behavior in previous research.