Willingness of members to participate in professional virtual communities

Abstract

Many professional virtual communities (PVCs) have been unsuccessful due to the low willingness of members to participate in the communities. Thus, there is a need to understand what persuades individuals to participate in PVC activities. This paper develops an explorative model using the TAM as a foundation to examine the important determinants affecting the use of PVCs with the participation of one hundred and forty professionals from ResearchGate. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling are used to evaluate the research model and analyze the data. The results show that the research model fits the data well and the structural model affirms that attitude significantly affects the intentional behavior of users. Perceived ease of use has a positive effect on attitude and perceived usefulness of users. Although perceived usefulness has a significant impact on the participants' attitude, it does not directly influence the intentional behavior of PVC users. Perceived security as a formative construct, complexity, and Internet self-efficacy are proven to be important drivers of perceived ease of use in PVCs. Moreover, the study results indicate that knowledge growth and collaboration have a positive and strong effect on the perceived usefulness of participants.

ResearchGate and Academia.edu as networked socio-technical systems for scholarly communication: a literature review

“…Very few studies made explicit mention of a theoretical framework or conceptual background. Some studies were strongly rooted in bibliometric and scientometric approaches but elsewhere reference to theory was limited to the following: social cognitive theory (Corvello and Felicetti 2014), uses and gratifications theory (Meishar-Tal and Pieterse 2017), Whitley's theory of degrees of mutual dependence and task uncertainty (Megwalu 2015), the Technology Acceptance Model (Tamjidyamcholo et al 2016), networked learning (Manca and Ranieri 2017) and conceptual frameworks based on Boyer's model of scholarship (Nicholas, Herman, and Clark 2016b).…”

Evaluation Method of Information Dissemination Efficiency within Professional Virtual Community: Based on Chinese College and University Students

“…For college and university students, appropriate marketing campaigns help spread the message among users (Assimakopoulos et al, 2017). In addition, the fragmented information in PVC is often improved or optimized after the initial dissemination due to its simple and easy-to-express content (Tamjidyamcholo et al, 2016). The velocity of such similar new viewpoint derivation can also be used as an important indicator to measure the efficiency of users in disseminating information.…”