Creating a Social Presence Measure: Self-Rated Behaviors that Indicate Mediated Presence

Abstract

This study involved the creation and validation of a self-rated social presence measure. Study 1 utilized focus groups to create items. The focus group participants were presented with a set of items based upon past literature; through discussion of these items, a preliminary measure was created. Study 2 involved an exploratory factor analysis on the preliminary measure to eliminate items that did not work well with each other. This reduced the measure from 54 to 23 items. Study 3 validated a 21-item self-rated measure of creating a social presence (PSP), which can be used to determine if people have difficulty projecting themselves as real individuals willing to interact with other online communicators.

The Importance of Instructor Affirming Messages in Business Communication Students’ Writing Apprehension

“…To extend Kelly et al’s work, H2 sought to explain the relationship between perceptions of instructor immediacy and burnout within the social presence framework. Before testing the models, we found that the items associated with cohesive and interactive presence (Christen et al, 2022) did not load sufficiently on their factors so we were only able to examine the role of affective, or emotional, presence.…”

“…Social Presence. The 17-item Projecting a Social Presence Scale (Christen et al, 2022) measures three components of instructor presence: affective (the instructor's ability to express emotions and share information), cohesive (the instructor's ability to create connections with students by using names and engaging in small talk), and interactive (the instructor's ability to make oneself accessible by providing non-university contact information and encouraging students to initiate contact) using a seven-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. For these data, the cohesive and interactive items failed to load on their respective factors at .60 or above.…”

“…Social presence theory (SPT), which began as presence theory in psychology, has become popular as people have moved into more technologically mediated communication environments, especially computers (Biocca et al, 2003). Over time, social presence has been conceptualized and measured in a myriad of ways (Christen et al, 2022; Mazid, 2022; Yang et al, 2022). Social presence has been defined as one’s impression of the other person’s salience, perceptions of realness, and, most recently, ability to project one’s personality in a technologically mediated interpersonal interaction (Mazid, 2022).…”

“…As the definitions move toward cognition, measurement involves scales assessing the subject’s perceptions of the other person. Most recently, measures have examined how people can improve the ways in which they project their own personalities to achieve presence (Christen et al, 2022).…”