Supporting Social Interaction in Virtual Communities: Role of Social Presence

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1 Association for Information Systems AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) AMCIS 2006 Proceedings Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) December 2006 Supporting Social Interaction in Virtual Communities: Role of Social Presence Kathy Shen Mohamed Khalifa Angela Yu Follow this and additional works at: Recommended Citation Shen, Kathy; Khalifa, Mohamed; and Yu, Angela, "Supporting Social Interaction in Virtual Communities: Role of Social Presence" (2006). AMCIS 2006 Proceedings This material is brought to you by the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for inclusion in AMCIS 2006 Proceedings by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact

2 Supporting Social Interaction in Virtual Communities: Role of Social Presence Kathy Ning Shen Mohamed Khalifa Angela Yan Yu ABSTRACT To support social interactions characterizing most activities in virtual communities, system design needs to go beyond functional and user-friendliness requirements to incorporate the demands for supporting social environments and activities. Social presence, as a subjective nature of communication media, reflects the perception of social actors as well as social settings and has been regarded as one of the major design principles for virtual communities. Our study explores its potential in facilitating the social identification process and promoting community participation. Drawing upon the social identity theory, we develop a model explaining the effects of social presence on social identification and community participation. An empirical study involving 430 members from four different virtual communities of interest provide strong support for our model. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. Keywords Social presence; Social identity; Virtual communities; Participation. INTRODUCTION Virtual communities, sometimes called online communities, describe social aggregations with common values and interests on the Internet. With the proliferation of Internet, there is considerable interest about virtual communities, which is driven by their commercial or social values (Gupta and Kim 2004). Virtual communities have been widely used to facilitate online transaction, customer relationship management, distant education and social support. Currently 14 out of the top 20 most popular English/Chinese web sites are either virtual communities or consisting of virtual community functions (Alexa.com as of 19 February 2005). Similar to their physical counterparts, members participation is the pulse for generating content and building relationships (Lee et al. 2003). A recent study indicates that active on-going contribution is also ranked as one of the top factors for a successful virtual community (Leimeister et al. 2004). How to support social interaction and encourage members participation in virtual communities becomes a major challenge for practitioners and attracts much academic interest as well. Although virtual communities have attracted multi-disciplinary researchers, the existing knowledge shed little light on the interaction between technologies and social processes in affecting community participation. In IS field, the impacts of information technology (IT) on individual behavior have been intensively examined. However, the behavior examined in most prior studies is simplified as user-interface interaction, neglecting the social aspect that characterizes virtual communities, i.e., the community acts as an important reference group for its individual participants (Bagozzi and Dholakia 2002). Prior research on virtual communities, on the other hand, addresses the issue of community participation with a focus of community and directly applies the existing theories developed in the physical context to virtual communities, e.g., social influence theory (Bagozzi and Dholakia 2002), value and gratification paradigm (Dholakia et al. 2004), and social capital theory (Wasko and Faraj 2005). Consequently the impacts of IT have been understudied. For virtual communities, the technological capacity of communication media plays a critical role in determining individual behavior, as all the psychological experience of the represented places and people is computer-mediated (Jones et al. 2004). We still therefore lack a good understanding of how the system design and the social aspects of virtual communities jointly influence members behavior, i.e., participation. 4461

3 Characterized by the relational interaction or the social ties that draw people together (Heller 1989), virtual communities require IT artifacts facilitating the emergence of a social space, the human network of social relationships and the dynamic social interaction (Kreijns et al. 2004). Social presence captures the sense of being together with another including primitive responses to social cues, simulations of other s minds and automatically generated models of the intentionality of others (Biocca et al. 2003), reflecting the social aspect of system design. It emerges as a major design principle in telecommunication systems as well as a core construct in studying computer-mediated communication (Biocca et al. 1995). Recently, some studies have investigated effects of social presence on the IT usage (Venkatesh and Johnson 2002), information sharing (Miranda and Saunders 2003), trust and satisfaction (Kumar and Benbasat 2002). But these studies focus on single user-computer interaction, providing little evidence for the role of social presence in supporting social processes and relational interaction in virtual communities. This paper is aimed to examine such a potential of social presence. By integrating the social identity theory and the social presence theory, we develop a model explaining the effects of social presence on social identification process and community participation. We test the research model through an online survey administered to several live virtual communities. A rigorous mediation test is used to elucidate the relationship between social presence and social identity in affecting community participation. This paper is structured as follows. We first present the conceptualization of social presence, which is followed by a theoretical development section. Then we describe the empirical study and discuss the results. Finally, we summarize the study, discuss the theoretical and practical implications and make suggestions for future research. CONCEPTUALIZATION OF SOCIAL PRESENCE What distinguishes a virtual community from its physical counterpart is that technological mediation filters and colors the psychological experience of the represented places and people in virtual environment. Short et al. (1976) characterize communication media in terms of their potential to communicate socio-emotional cues in such a way that the other person in the communication is perceived as physically present. Social presence is usually described as the feeling associated with being together with others (Biocca et al. 2003). After reviewing the wide variety of definitions of social presence, Biocca et al. (2003) identify three main approaches in conceptualizing social presence, i.e., sensorimotor, psychological and behavioral engagement. The sensorimotor approach views social presence (also termed co-presence) as the sensory awareness of others often achieved through self-presentation features such as signatures, avatars and personal profiles. It was later extended to include mutual awareness, i.e., the awareness of the existence of the other is accompanied by the other s reaction to the self. The sensorimotor approach overlooks the psychological aspects that are essential for social interaction, e.g., interpersonal relationships and mutual understanding. Therefore, the psychological approach developed the conceptualization of social presence beyond sensory awareness to include the important element of psychological involvement. In this stream, social presence is conceptualized within a wide range, from sense of access to intelligence, salience of the interpersonal relationship, intimacy and immediacy, to mutual understanding. Within this stream, the most widely used conceptualization is the one proposed by Short et al. (1976), where social presence is defined as the degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships. This definition implies a close relationship between social presence and the constructs of intimacy and immediacy. The third approach extended social presence to include behavioral engagement, e.g., eye contact, nonverbal mirroring and turn taking. This approach, however, is not extensively used and its applicability is limited to high-bandwidth media applications such as immersive virtual realities and computer games (Biocca et al. 2003). In this study, we adopt the definition of social presence proposed by Short et al. (1976), as it captures the important psychological aspects of social interaction characterizing the virtual community context. According to such a conceptualization, social presence refers to the degree to which communication exchanges are sociable, warm, personal and sensitive. THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT Virtual communities are characterized with computer-mediated interpersonal communication. Much evidence has demonstrated that the capacity of communication is contingent upon the self-categorization process and associated perceptions of shared social category membership (Turner 1991). Especially in the context of virtual communities where membership, frequency and extent of participation is driven by volitional choice and may be terminated by the members relatively effortlessly (Bagozzi and Dholakia 2002), perceptions of shared social identity provide members with multiple motivations for communicating and also with a shared cognitive framework that allows this communication to be mutually beneficial and productive (Postmes 2003). According to social identity theory, social identification leads individuals to perceive themselves in terms of the characteristics they share with other members rather than their distinctive characteristics (Turner 1982). It turns the group, psychologically, into a part of the self, blurring the distinction between self and group (Smith and Henry 1996). It has been acknowledged that social identification is multidimensional, encompassing knowledge of.membership in a social group 4462

4 (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership (Tajfel 1978, p63). Past research has suggested that these three components of social identification, i.e., cognitive, evaluative and emotional, are empirically distinct and related differently to key outcome variables (Ellemers et al. 1999; Bergami and Bagozzi 2000). Of these three components, the emotional component has been shown to most clearly supply the motivational force leading to action or the readiness to engage in or disengage from interaction (Bergami and Bagozzi 2000, p563). Since we are interested in collective identification as a motivational force that can enable community participation, we focus on the emotional component of social identification in this study and define the identification with a virtual community as the emotional significance that members of a virtual community attach to their membership in that community (Van Der Vegt and Bunderson 2005). As members identify themselves as part of the social fabric of the virtual community, identification renders a person to maintain a positive self-defining relationship with other virtual community members, he or she will be motivated to engage in behaviors as the other members expected (Hogg and Abrams 1988). For a virtual community, a large part of such behaviors is to actively participate in the social interaction and contribute to the community. Therefore, we hypothesize that: H 1 : Social identity will positively influence virtual community participation. Social Presence and Social Identity According to the social identity theory, identification with a social group is mainly derived from the group s ability to fulfill its members needs (Hogg and Abrams 1988). Similarly, Dholakia et al. (2004) suggest that identifying with a virtual community that one has chosen volitionally derives from an understanding that membership entails significant benefits. Social presence, describing the level of social affordance of a computer-mediated communication channel, is expected to facilitate the formation of social identity through fulfilling these benefits. For instance, high social presence makes it more likely to build social relationships among members due to its capability to reduce discomfort, increase predictability and raise the level of affection toward others (cf. Walther et al. 2001), increasing in this way the possibility to develop attachment to the virtual community members. Additionally, Erickson et al. (2002) demonstrate that the enhanced mutual awareness makes it easier for members to imitate each others actions, to engage in peer pressure and to create, notice and conform to social conventions, reinforcing in this way social identification. Accordingly, we hypothesize that: H 2 : The sense of social presence will positively influence the social identity of community members. Social Presence and Community Participation Although social identity plays an important role in influencing community members behavior, we also postulate a direct link between social presence and communication participation for two reasons. Firstly, some individual factors may also mediate the effects of social presence on community participation, e.g., extrinsic and intrinsic motivation (Venkatesh and Johnson 2002), satisfaction and trust (Kumar and Benbasat 2002). Secondly, social presence may exert a direct influence on community participation. Social psychological research has demonstrated that social stimuli can trigger the automatic, nonconscious perceptual interpretation that serves as the basis for further responses to the situation (e.g., Bargh and Peitromonaco 1982; Baumeister 2002; Strack and Deutsch 2004). As the strong sense of social presence makes a virtual community more approximate to a real one, the salient social stimuli presented in the virtual community may activate the direct access processing of existing goals or trigger an automatic perceptual interpretation, both of which do not necessarily involve the conscious mediation of situational effects (Bargh 1997). Consequently, we hypothesize that: METHOD H 3 : The sense of social presence will positively influence virtual community participation. Sample and Data Collection The research model was tested with four different virtual communities of interest. The selected communities had been operational for two to three years as online forums with a registered membership ranging from 21,000 to 310,000. For each forum, the membership is heterogeneous in demographics and interests, distributed among 40 to 80 interest boards. The content of communities is mainly contributed and only accessed by registered members. The basic functions are similar across these four communities, e.g., browsing, searching, synchronous and asynchronous discussion, multi-media exchanging and voting. Members can attach animated icons (e.g., facial expressions) to better express their feelings, as well as audio and video to enrich their exchanges. We obtained the permission of the management of the virtual communities to post a link to our online questionnaire for three days, promising to share the results of the survey with them. We also obtained the permission of the administrators to access the community databases for participation data. A total of 430 registered members completed the survey. The demographics of these respondents and activity information are shown in Table 1 & 2. For each of the respondents, we retrieved from the database his/her participation data for two weeks starting from the date that he/she 4463

5 submitted the survey. Variables Items % Level Member 96.0 Manager 4.0 Gender Male 83.3 Female 16.7 Age < ~ > Familiarity with VC Not at all 0.7 Moderate 32.6 Fair 44.7 Very much 22.1 Education Primary School 0.7 High School 36.3 Certificate 40.5 Undergraduate 21.4 Graduate 1.2 Frequency of Using Internet < 1 year 1.6 1~2 years 7.0 2~3 years 17.9 >4 years 73.5 Frequency of Login Less than once a month 1.2 Once a week 5.1 Several times a week 16.7 Once a day 23.5 Several times a day 53.5 Table 1: Demographic Information Min Max Mean Std. Number of postings Number of threads initiated Number of threads participated Tenure of the membership (Day) Table 2: Information of Membership Activity The possibility of non-response bias was examined by comparing our sample with a random sample of the total population in terms of tenure of membership, gender and age; and with the total members with tenure of two weeks or above in terms of the number of postings. Such information is public for any registered member. There is no significant difference, indicating the representativeness of our sample. The gender and community membership (four different communities) effects were tested by comparing the demographic and activity information. No significant differences were found, which allows us to pool together the data from different communities. Operationalization of Variables Given the importance of participation to the sustainability of virtual communities, members are usually classified based on their level of activity, distinguishing between leaders, active participants and lurkers. Two different measures of participation can be identified in the literature. Some studies used time variables such as login time (Dholakia et al. 2004), while others employed participation indicators such as number of postings or/and number of created threads (Miranda and Saunders 2003). We favor the latter one, as those indicators are consistent with practices and more directly related to social and economic capital. An additional advantage of using the objective measure is to reduce the common method variance that may threaten the internal validity. For each individual, we collected: 1) the total number of postings, 2) the number of different threads where the postings were made, and 3) the number of new threads created. The participation measures were gathered for a period of two weeks and were scaled by the averages of the associated communities. The other variables were measured with an online survey using validated scales. For social presence, we used a reflective 4464

6 measurement developed by Short et al. (1976) and validated by several studies (e.g., Venkatesh and Johnson 2002; Biocca et al. 2003). It consists of 7-point bipolar items such as social - unsocial, sensitive - insensitive and warm - cold. As for social identity, we adapted the organizational identity instrument developed by Mael and Ashforth (1992) and validated by van Knippenberg (2000). It consists of reflective items rated on a 7-point Likert scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. A sample item is when someone criticizes this forum, it feels like a personal insult. Two control variables were also included in the model testing. Tenure was measured with the length of membership. Information need fulfillment was measured with the items adapted from Dholakia et al. (2004). Data Analysis The analysis of moment structures (AMOS 5.0) was used for data analysis. The present analysis followed a two-step procedure based in part on an approach recommended by Anderson and Gerbing (1988). We first developed the measurement model and then, with this held, a structural model was developed and tested. As all independent variables were measured with valid scales, only confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to assess the validity of the measurement model. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Before testing the measurement and structural models, we rely on Harman s single-factor, a widely used method, to check for common method variance that may threaten the internal validity (Podsakoff 1986). According to this approach, common method variance is present if a single factor accounts for the majority of the covariance in the dependent and independent variables. In this study, there is no dominant factor emerging from the factor analysis, implying that common method variance is not a serious problem. Measurement Properties of Constructs To empirically assess the constructs theorized above, we conducted the confirmatory factor analysis with AMOS 5.0. We checked construct reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. The measurement properties are reported in Table 3. The goodness-of-fit index (GFI), adjusted goodness-of-fit index (AGFI), normed-fit index (NFI), incremental-fit index (IFI), Tucher-Lewis Index (TLI) and comparative-fit index (CFI) are above the threshold value of 0.90, thereby indicating that the measurement mode has good fit with the data (Hair et al. 1998). A root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) takes into account the error of approximation in the population and complexity of the model. Values less than 0.05 indicate good fit (Browne and Cudeck 1993) and our value of RMSEA is 0.000, supporting the acceptability of the model. The Coefficient Alpha values range from to 0.880, proving strong evidence of measure reliability (Nunnally and Bernstein 1994). We also calculated composite reliability (Fornell and Larcker 1981) as indicated in Table 3 which ranged from to 0.916, all above the cutoff value of 0.7 (Hatcher 1994). Convergent validity assesses the consistency across multiple operationalizations. In Table 3, estimated standard loadings are ranging from to and above the acceptable value of 0.50 commonly used as the cut-off value (Teo and King 1996). Furthermore, all loadings are significant at p<=0.001 level, suggesting good convergent validity. Constructs Standard Loading Sig. Reliability Participation b Item ** Item ** Item ** Social Presence b Item ** Item ** Item ** Social Identity b Item ** Item ** Item ** Information Fulfillment b Item ** Item ** Composite reliability Table 3: Reliability Measures and Goodness of Fit Statistics 4465

7 As indicated in Table 4, the square roots of the AVE scores (diagonal elements) are all higher than the correlations among the constructs, demonstrating discriminant validity (Fornell and Larcker 1981). Noticing the high correlation between social identity and participation, we conducted chi-square difference test for each pair of variables. The chi-square difference between the unconstrained and constrained model was all significant at 99.9% level, demonstrating that these two variables are much better to be treated as distinct (Bagozzi and Phillips 1982; Anderson and Gerbing 1988). Participation Social Identity Social Presence Information fulfillment Participation Social Identity Social Presence Information fulfillment Table 4: Correlations between Latent Constructs Structural Model This model fits well overall: chi-square=43.2 (DF=37), CMIN/DF=1.167<2, GFI=0.982, AGFI=0.969, CFI=0.997, TLI=0.995 and RMSEA=0.02. As indicated in the Figure 1, a high level of explained variance results for communication participation (44.4%) with all hypothesized path coefficients significant at 99% level, which provides a strong support for our research model. Tenure was not found significant in affecting both social identity and participation, neither was information fulfillment. But a significant correlation between information fulfillment and social presence was observed. These results suggest that identification with the online community provides a stronger motivation than maximizing the members information interest and distinguishes active participants from lurking. Figure 1: Structural Model Social presence was found to exert a strong effect on social identity ( =0.596; p<0.01), explaining 37.2% of the variance of social identify. This result strongly supports our hypothesis that social presence contributes to the formation of social identity in virtual communities. The main effects of both social presence ( =0.318; p<0.01) and social identity ( =0.373; p<0.01) on community participation are significant, which is consistent with the prior findings. Their similar magnitude of influence on community participation implies that social presence, characterizing the technological aspect of virtual communities, plays an important role in affecting community member behavior. However as the link between social presence and community participation includes both direct and mediated effects, further investigation is required to identify the other possible mediators. Finally, we tested the mediated effect of social identity with a formal test suggested in Baron and Kenney (1986), i.e., the Aroian version of the Sobel test of mediation. The test result is and significant at 99% level, confirming the mediating effect of social identity and providing further support for the validity of the model. Together with the significant direct effect of social presence, our results indicate that the effects of social presence on individual participation to a virtual community are partially realized through facilitating the formation of social identity. CONCLUSION To support social interactions characterizing most activities in virtual communities, system design needs to go beyond functional and user-friendliness requirements to incorporate the demands for supporting sociable environments. Social presence reflects the capacity of communication media in convey social communication cues and has been regarded as one of main design principles for computer-mediated communication in general and virtual communities in particular. Our study 4466

8 explored its potential in facilitating the social identification process and promoting community participation. Drawing upon the social identity theory, we developed a model explaining the relationships between social presence and participation, which is partially mediated through social identity. The research model was tested with 430 members across four different virtual communities. The empirical results provided a strong support for the research model. Before the discussion of implications, certain limitations to this research should be recognized when interpreting the study s results. Firstly, the context of our study, i.e., communities of interest in the form of online forum, may limit the generalizability of the results. The characteristics of the virtual community such as nature (community of practice vs. community of interest), origin (network vs. small-group-based communities), size, and life-cycle stage (forming, norming, storming, performing, adjourning) may indeed affect the results. In this study, we controlled for these factors. Future research should test the model in a variety of contexts. Furthermore, as with the survey design, the data do not allow us to necessarily predict causality between social presence and social identity. Longitudinal studies, however, may be able to shed light on whether social presence design will affect the formation of social identity or they are correlates for each other. In spite of the limitations, this study presents important theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, as most if not all individual and social influences are reshaped by technological features, the knowledge on system design effects is necessary to understand both social and individual processes in virtual communities. We demonstrate the importance of social presence in supporting social identification process and promoting community participation, suggesting an active role played by IT in virtual communities. Since designers have more control over IT artifacts than over emergent social processes, our results suggest that it is important to explicitly include design factors in the research of virtual communities. Our results also provide some preliminary insight on the relative importance of different relationships between members and an online community in predicting participation behavior. Specifically, the relationship strengthened by identifying with the online community seems provide strong motivation for members to actively contribute rather than lurking or seeking information. In terms of practical implications, our results provide valuable insight about how to manipulate social identification process and enhance community participation through system design, i.e., enhancing social presence of virtual communities. The importance of social presence in supporting online social interactions also implies that designers can play a more active role in the social identification process. The existing literature on social presence suggests many ways to enhance social presence, such as the usage of various self-presentation and interaction features. Moreover, as social presence is related to members actual usage and exposure of design features, both designers and managers need to increase the exposure of design features and encourage members to use them in online communication. REFERENCES 1. Anderson, J.C., and Gerbing, D.W. (1988) Structural equation modeling in practice: a review and recommended two-step approach, Psychological Bulletin, 103, 3, Bagozzi, R.B., and Dholakia, U.M. (2002) Intentional social action in virtual communities, Journal of Interactive Marketing, 16, 2, Bagozzi, R.P., and Phillips, L.W. (1982) Representing and testing organizational theories: A holistic construal, Administrative Science Quarterly, 27, 3, Bargh, J.A. (1997) The automaticity of everyday life, in Robert S. Wyer (Eds.) Advances in Social Cognition,,Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey, Bargh, J.A., and Peitromonaco, P. (1982) Automatic information processing and social perception: the influence of trait information presented outside of conscious awareness on impression formation, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, Baron, R.M., and Kenny, D.A. (1986) The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: conceptual, strategic, and statistical consideration, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 6, Baumeister, R.F. (2002) Yielding to temptation: self-control failure, impulsive purchasing, and consumer behavior, Journal of Consumer Research, 28, 4, Bergami, M., and Bagozzi, R.P. (2000) Self-categorization, affective commitment and group self-esteem as distinct aspects of social identity in the organization, British Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 4, Biocca, F., Harms, C., and Burgoon, J.K. (2003) Toward a more robust theory and measure of social presence: review and suggested criteria, Presence, 12, 5,

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