Discussion and Conclusions

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Discussion of Findings

This research examined all the possible paths leading to participation in a virtual community with two independent variables and two mediating variables. The results show the three following findings.

First, participation could not be enhanced directly. It was revealed that there was no significant direct path from managing strategy to participation. However, the path from sense of community to participation was strongly supported by the results. This then implies that a community manager has to consolidate the sense of community, with membership in particular, in order to enhance participation.

Second, sense of community could be enhanced by an appropriate managing strategy. The path from managing strategy to sense of community has a higher estimate than the estimate of path from visit to sense of community. This implies that an appropriate managing strategy could enhance the sense of community without a high number of visits. If a community is managed in the way that the members want, they can feel a sense of community directly without visiting that community that many times. The detailed model shows that membership, a dominant factor of participation, is influenced by purpose and subgroups. However, the path from visit to sense of community should not be ignored.

Third, the number of visits could be increased by the information quality. More than any other factor, information quality had the highest influence on the number of visits. This implies that the visits of most members are determined by information quality. A community having high information quality would enjoy more visits than other communities. If a community manager wants to increase members' visits, he or she has to control information quality.

Implications

The study has both theoretical and practical implications. Regarding its theoretical worth, this study provides a research model about the performance variables in a virtual community by finding relationships between members' behaviors and their sense of community.

The study results also have practical implications. For example, there are potential implications for the expansion of virtual community. Members' visits and sense of community play a role as a mediating variable to members' participation. Managing strategies have no direct influence, but they do exert an indirect influence on participation. For enhancing participation, operators of communities should focus on ways of enhancing membership.

For enhancing participation, operators have to use different approaches according to the type of community. There are various paths for enhancing participation between nonprofit and profit-oriented communities. In profit-oriented communities, managing information quality is important because information quality is the most influential factor when it comes to visits. In nonprofit communities, operators should identify the needs of community members and focus membership to enhance member participation.

Limitations

The primary limitation of this research is that each relationship is observed at a certain point of time. This might ignore the possibility that one member's sense of community could evolve into participation during a certain period with interactions of a SYSOP or other members. In addition, a member's visit could be increased as a result of member participation. Thus, a longitudinal study that observes members' evolution from low involvement to high involvement may be required to overcome this limitation.

Another limitation is that the results cannot be generalized for all communities. It is true that there are many different types of communities on the Internet. Each community might have a different kind of path leading to participation, or a different managing strategy that is most appropriate. To resolve this question, research that shows the difference between a community's categories should be conducted.

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