Net gain: expanding markets through virtual communities
Net gain: expanding markets through virtual communities
Extending the TAM for a World-Wide-Web context
Information and Management
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
The experienced "sense" of a virtual community: characteristics and processes
ACM SIGMIS Database
Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behavior
Electronic Commerce Research
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Sense of Virtual Community: A Conceptual Framework and Empirical Validation
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
The development of a sense of virtual community
International Journal of Web Based Communities
Testing a model of sense of virtual community
Computers in Human Behavior
Computers in Human Behavior
Falling in love with online games: The uses and gratifications perspective
Computers in Human Behavior
Computers in Human Behavior
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Sense of virtual community (SOVC) reflects the feeling that individual members have of belonging to an online social group. Yet there is a lack of investigation focusing on its individual-level antecedents. We argue that in order to enhance understanding of how SOVC develops we first need to distinguish between the individual expectations, actions, and the resulting community-related feelings. Drawing upon the uses and gratifications approach, we explore the community members' expected benefits, their linkages with different types of community participation and consequently with the experienced SOVC. We tested the hypotheses on a sample of 395 members of a virtual community hosted by a Finnish business newspaper. The findings suggest that both forms of participation - reading and posting messages - have a positive impact on SOVC, but the expected benefits differ. Participation by reading messages is mainly driven by the expectation of cognitive benefits, while posting messages seems to be largely driven by the anticipation of both social and personal integrative benefits. Our study contributes by providing a refined SOVC conceptualization and operationalization for virtual-community research, and by opening up the individual-level actions that build up a sense of virtual community.