Influence of sociability factors on social cohesion in web forums

Petrič, Gregor (author), Petrovčič, Andraž (author)

Social cohesion of online communities is considered a social glue that holds together a group of people, communicating and interacting on the internet and which allows this group to efficiently confront with pressures, coming from within or outside the online community. In this paper a particular definition of social cohesion of online community is presented, which introduces its three core dimensions: participation, sense of community and interpersonal trust - concepts that are considered in the literature on online communities as vital for their sustainability. The purpose of the paper is to empirically verify how decisions of community managers on sociability factors that model social interaction in a community influence the three dimensions of social cohesion. On a sample of 48 Slovenian web forums data were collected for the presence of various sociability factors and with a web survey of 1962 members from these forums the core dimensions of social cohesion were measured. The results of hierarchical linear modeling indicate that community managers can influence the social cohesion only to small extent and that their decisions might also give rise to undesired latent consequences.

• Language: English
• Work type: Not categorized
• Typology: 1.08 - Published Scientific Conference Contribution
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Year: 2010
• Number of pages: 12 str.
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-45045
• UDC: 316.4
• COBISS.SI-ID: 29244765
• Publication date in RUL: 10.07.2015