摘要:Objective: The experts believe that in addition to many advantages in the development as well as
extensive and rapid sharing of information, foreign messengers have brought consequences and
problems for the other countries due to the infrastructure problems, privacy issues, and the nonnative nature. Therefore, it highlights the need to use native messengers if available. On the other
hand, local messengers, including Soroush messenger, as their competitors in order to compensate
for these problems and difficulties, are not as popular within the country. The question is “what
factors are involved in the Iranian users’ adherence to to Telegram messenger even after
restrictions on the access to this foreign messengers” and “why did not the Iranian users complete
a shift toward the domestic messengers. Understanding the key factors affecting the attraction of
Iranian users to the samples of domestic messengers is one of the most important issues for the
owners of these local messengers. Therefore, this study aimed to discover and identify the factors
affecting the immigration behaviors of the users of Soroush messengers. Utilizing these factors
can help the managers of Soroush messenger to plan effectively in orde to be able to attract and
retain the users in these messengers.
Methodology: The present study is applied in terms of purpose and used a qualitative method of
content analysis through semi-structured interviews. The participants in this study were selected
based on purposeful sampling. The researchers collected the research data through interviewing
17 experts and managers of the local media including Soroush messengers, as well as media
professors. Content analysis was used to analyze the interviews. Initially, 562 comments and
meaningful sentences were reviewed which led to the extraction of 392 primary codes after
removing the duplicated sentences. In the second stage, a total of 80 axial codes were obtained
after removing the duplicated codes. Ultimately in the third stage of coding, 14 categories were
extracted from the available data. It is noteworthy that data collection started in March 2016 and
lasted until June 2017.
Findings: According to the research model, any changes and shifts are affected by three groups of
pressure factors including distrust, dissatisfaction, privacy risk, data security risk, user fatigue,
and the messengers’ dependence on the institutions and organizations; the attractive factors
include peer influence, perceived quality, anonymity, changes in the laws and policies, and some
intervening factors including switching costs, habit, mental norms, and resistance to change.
Therefore, the research findings were classified into three groups with different behavioral and
social characteristics affecting the users’ shift from the local messengers.
Conclusion: Although there are several local messengers competing with foreign messengers,
they have not been popular in public. The respective reasons were examined in this study where
people’s distrust and bad feelings towards the local messengers are among the most important
factors. Security of the data is one of the most important factors in Iran and also in the world,
violation of which can lead to dissatisfaction and distrust of the service. Ambiguity in legal issues
can also be considered as one of the factors that cause users to distrust local messengers while
maintaining the law and the security of their information. Therefore, changes in the laws and
regulations in this area and the need to establish monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to
protect user privacy can help support and attract the users toward local messengers. Moreover,
technical issues, poor system quality, low Internet speed, as well as severe filtering are among the
effective factors which lead to dissatisfaction and fatigue among the users.