A Comparative Study of Self-congruency Models for Self-disclosure on Social Networking Sites

Self-congruency is the level of match or mismatch between the self-concept of an individual and the image of a product, brand, or service that an individual consumes or has the intention of consuming. The four most widely used types of self-concepts in the literature are: actual, ideal, social, and ideal social self-concepts. Self-congruency with social networking sites has been shown to affect the attitudinal, intentional, and behavioral aspects of self-disclosure. Previous research in the field has not examined such effects of self-congruencies based on different self-concepts. Based on theory of planned behavior and self-congruency theory, we developed and analyzed four self-congruency models for self-disclosure on social networking sites. All the models showed good fit and all the hypothesized relationships among the constructs of the models were significant. Social self-congruency model outperformed the other models based on Akaike Information Criterion.