Research Method

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Selected Communities

To aid in generalizability, eight different communities were selected instead of one. Four were nonprofit communities which were selected from community-service sites such as GeoCities, and the other four were selected from among independent and profit-oriented sites such as iVillage. The most popular community-service sites in Korea are Daum (http://café.daum.net) and Freechal (http://www.freechal.com). We selected four very successful nonprofit communities from these sites. Four profit-oriented communities were chosen from 100hot (http://www.100hot.co.kr), which lists the 100 hottest sites for every category.

To control the effect by size and operation period, the number of members was constrained to be more than 2,000 for the nonprofit community and more than 200,000 for the profit-oriented community. To provide sufficient time to establish a community, both types of communities had to have been established for at least six months.

Procedure

The questionnaire was designed to be completed online by each respondent. Since all questions were measured on a Likert 7 scale, JavaScript programming was added to the online survey to check for missing responses and to prompt the user to answer them. A pretest of the questionnaire was conducted two weeks prior to the administration of the main survey, resulting in some sentences being reworded to avoid ambiguity.

Before the survey, we contacted SYSOPs of each community and asked them to support our research by notifying their members about our research through e-mail, a message board, and an advertisement banner. To promote participation, one hundred people determined by lottery would receive gift certificates.

Measures

Managing Strategy

After categorizing the factors that had been referred to in previous research (Kim, 2000; Williams & Cothrel, 2000), six factors of the construct managing strategy were developed. These are purpose, rule, role, event, ritual, and subgroup of the virtual community. In detail, we measured the clarity of purpose, the rationality of rule and role, the frequency and quality of event and ritual, and the diversity of the subgroup. To improve the validity and reliability of this measurement, four experts in this area verified each sentence of measure and conducted the pretest for one community.

Information and System Quality

Information system quality is composed of system quality and information quality. After considering a community's features, the five measures of speed, reliability, ease of use, functionality, and recovery were developed to measure system quality from Kim and Ahn's (1998) measures. In similar fashion, the five measures of timeliness, accuracy, abundance, customized information presentation, and useful information presentation were developed to measure information quality.

Visit

Since the concept of visit in this research is similar to system use in IS research, the means of measuring system use were applied to measure visits in a virtual community. As previously stated, visits to a community may serve as a proxy for the construct of system use. Park et al. (2000) used the frequency of visits and the average visit duration to quantitatively measure the value visit to a virtual community. Thus, member visit was measured by the frequency and time of each member's visit.

Sense of Community

SCI (Chavis et al., 1986) was used to measure sense of community. Since this index was developed for off-line communities, some rewording was necessary to modify it for an online environment. After the modification, a pilot test was conducted to increase the validity of the questionnaire and to ensure it was clear to respondents.

Membership was measured by how many members were recognized in that community, how comfortable they were in that community, and how strongly they believed themselves to be members of that community. Influence was measured by how much members cared about what others thought of their actions, how much influence the community had on them, and how much influence they had on the community. Integration and fulfillment of needs was measured by how worthwhile the community was in terms of their time, how well their needs were fulfilled, and how integrated their needs were with the needs of others. Emotional connection was measured by how important this community was to them, how well all members got along within that community, and how long they wanted to stay in that community.

Participation

While "visit" implies a low level of involvement, participation implies a high level of involvement in a community. Park et al. (1999) used two types of participation to measure member loyalty - participation in community operation and participation in communication with other members. Building on these two participation types, it is proposed that there are four aspects of participation: participation in community operation, participation in subgroup or event, participation in regular message boards, and participation in chatting or e-mail with other members. The frequency of each type of participation was used to measure participation.

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