Motivations to participate in online communities

Citation: Cliff Lampe, Rick Wash, Alcides Velasquez, Elif Ozkaya (2010) Motivations to participate in online communities. Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1145/1753326.1753616
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1145/1753326.1753616
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1145/1753326.1753616
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Motivations to participate in online communities
Download: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753326.1753616
Tagged: Computer Science (RSS) wikipedia (RSS), motivation (RSS), online communities (RSS)

Summary

Arguing that existing theories of online collective action (e.g., tragedy of the commons and social loafing theory) fall short, Lampe et al. try to provide a set of tests of theories from uses and gratifications theory (U&G) and organizational commitment (OC) to help explain why users are motivated to participate in online communities.

U&G seeks to explain involvement by suggesting that users seek out certain media because with the goal of satisfying a particular need. OC suggests that social identity is developed as part of involvement and focus on issues of attachment to a group. The central concept in this study is "sense of belonging." The goal of the project is to compare the two models to see how they apply in a real online community.

They suggest the four research questions:

• RQ1: How do U&G and Organizational Commitment relate to different perceptions of site use?
• RQ2: How do U&G and Organizational Commitment relate to the probability that a user is anonymous or registered?
• RQ3: For anonymous users, how do U&G and Organizational Commitment relate to the probability the user is a first time visitor to the site?
• RQ4: For registered users, how do U&G and Organizational Commitment relate to their levels of participation in the site?

These research questions guide the design of a survey administered to Everything2 users. This was combined with information on users interactions with and participation on the site.

In part because the research questions are rather broad and the number of measures is large, there are a wide variety of different basic results. Perhaps more fundamentally, the survey showed that users of E2 participate in the site for a wide variety of reasons. Indeed, the authors find evidence that as users use the site, their reasons for participation change.

The authors find surprisingly similar results for anonymous users and contributing users including on measures of likelihood to contribute in the future. They find that users who receive value from providing are more likely to have an account (unsurprisingly). They also find very little difference between first time anonymous visitors to E2 and anonymous repeat viewers. The authors find that none of the OC measures are strongly associated with the number of write-ups from registered users.