Modeling the effect of social media on older adults' usage intention of public transport.

Although using public transport can effectively reduce carbon emissions, the percentage of people using it is still very small. Meanwhile, population aging has been a global problem and the number of older adults is still growing. Thus, encouraging more older adults to use public transport will significantly reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. This paper explores the effect of social media, one of the most popular ways to share information, on older adults' intention to use public transport. To comprehensively measure the effects of social media, this paper considers two different kinds of perceived benefits (information sharing and price saving) and perceived risks (financial and privacy risks) separately. This paper, first, conducted a research framework based on the theory of planned behavior and then collected 197 questionnaire data. After employing the validity and reliability tests, the hypotheses were tested. The results show that perceived benefits of social media have a positive effect on older adults' intention to use and recommend public transport. However, financial risks do not significantly affect older adults' intention to use and recommend public transport, while privacy risks can affect older adults' intention, but not negatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]