碩士 / 國立高雄師範大學 / 工業設計學系 / 105 / With the advances in the Internet, a particular kind of user has begun to emerge in the virtual community. They rarely or even never speak or comment on the internet, participating silently and observantly instead. Academically, we call them “lurkers.” Several foreign scholars unanimously agree that lurkers constitute the majority of the internet community and that lurking behavior is a common phenomenon in virtual communities. This phenomenon is similar to what users of a product consider as service gap when they find the product broken or dysfunctional while using it. Hence, internet lurking behavior needs to be understood and ameliorated. Thus, this study aimed to understand the reasons for these users to lurk. It employed the evaluation grid method (EGM) to explore the reasons for lurking, then integrated the EGM results with existing literature to devise an internet lurking behavior scale, and finally compared the different lurking levels and the variances between the involvements of lurkers.
Structured questionnaires were issued to university students, aged between 18 and 25, who have used Facebook’s virtual communities, and 492 valid questionnaires were returned. The findings are encapsulated as follows. (1) Result of EGM: 10 original reasons, 62 concrete matters, and 31 abstract reasons were collected, serving as the reference for developing the scale. (2) Scale development: though factor analysis, six factors were identified—emotional anxiety, familiarity to silence and observation, care about personal privacy, worries about use burden, self-preservation awareness, and expectation of rewards. (3) Difference in lurker involvement: the higher the level of lurker involvement, the fewer the friends they had; the lower the frequency of leaving messages the more conscientious, more neurotic, and less extrovert the personality. In terms of gender, females had a higher level of lurker involvement than males. (4) Differences between lurkers and posters: with respect to the frequency of writing posts, number of friends, and sense of belonging to the community, posters were obviously above lurkers; for personality, posters were evidently above lurkers in respect of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness; for the six identified factors (familiarity to silence and observation, care about personal privacy, worries about use burden, and self-preservation awareness), lurkers were apparently greater than posters; the sense of belonging of posters to the community was clearly greater than that of lurkers. (5) Regression analysis of lurking behavior scale: the extrovert personality of lurkers and posters had negative effect on the scores of lurking, while neurotic personality had positive effect on it; posters’ scores of sense of belonging had positive effect on the scores of lurking. (6) Regression analysis of belonging sense: lurkers’ frequency of clicking the like button and having an agreeable personality had positive effects on the scores of sense of belonging; posters’ scores of lurking and their conscientious and extrovert personality had positive effects on the scores of sense of belonging.
The research results from face-book can enable enterprises providing virtual communities to better understand the requirements of most lurkers so that they can put forward strategies to improve lurking behavior, rendering the use of virtual communities more in line with everybody’s requirements. At the same time, these results can serve as a reference guide for further research on internet lurking behavior.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TW/105NKNU0038004 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | CHEN, KUAN-HUA, 陳冠樺 |
| Contributors | WANG, MING -TANG, 王明堂 |
| Source Sets | National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan |
| Language | zh-TW |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Format | 145 |
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