Social Media, Hijrah Interest, and Hijrah Behavior among Muslim Communities in Bengkulu City

Social media has become one of the settings in which Indonesian Muslims encounter and engage with discussions of hijrah. Yet frequent contact with religious material online need not be accompanied by corresponding changes in religious practice. This study investigates this issue among Muslim communities in Bengkulu City by focusing on hijrah interest as a possible link between social media use and hijrah behavior. The proposed relationship was examined from the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) perspective. A survey was conducted with 259 participants recruited purposively from communities associated with nine grand mosques. The data were processed with PLS-SEM using SmartPLS 3. The measurement assessment produced acceptable reliability and convergent validity for the three constructs. The strongest relationship involving social media use was found for hijrah interest (? = 0.640, t = 16.689, p < 0.001). Hijrah interest, in turn, showed a positive relationship with hijrah behavior (? = 0.484, t = 7.125, p < 0.001). By contrast, the coefficient linking social media use directly to hijrah behavior was negative and statistically nonsignificant (? = -0.131, t = 1.841, p = 0.066). When hijrah interest was positioned between these variables, the indirect coefficient was positive and significant (? = 0.310, t = 6.355, p < 0.001). These results suggest that social media engagement in this sample is related more strongly to the emergence of hijrah interest than directly to reported hijrah behavior. The findings are limited to the observed sample and period of data collection; consequently, they should not be interpreted as demonstrating a causal process.