A Proposal of a Scale to Evaluate Attitudes of People Towards a Social Metaverse

Big players in information and communication technologies are investing in the metaverse for their businesses. Meta, as the main player in social media worldwide, is massively developing its “social” metaverse as a new paradigm by depicting it with nice and endless features and by expecting current social media to become engrained within it. What is the attitude of users towards this future scenario? Very few studies specifically focusing on this question were found. In this work, a scale for assessing the attitude of people towards the social metaverse was developed. A questionnaire composed of 38 Likert items, inspired by features of the social metaverse, was generated and administered to 184 Italian subjects. The results were analyzed with exploratory factor analysis, and the final scale is composed of 15 items covering four factors that were interpreted. Aspects consistent with both the preliminary work of the authors and with some previous works were found. Considerations are also made in relation to the analysis of the contents of Meta.