Research On The Parasocial Interaction Of Tourists In Virtual Communities

As the development of the internet, consumers increasingly tend to use the electronic media to search the information, that is to say, people begin to use the network resources to achieve his social and economic purpose."Virtual community" has dramatically changed the human communication manner, and makes the chaotic network world to clusterization and has produced a new interactive mode, which is called network interaction. Unlike the face-to-face interaction, network interaction is formed by the information technology and computer. Virtual community provides a gather space for the internet users to discuss their interest. Especially for those communities composed by the consumers, its greatest function for the consumers is to help eliminate uncertainty before buying a new product.In the virtual community, the information communication always begins with the posting behavior. But there is a member group which is called "Tourists".They seldom communicate with the posters and obtain the information only. At the same time a Prominent problem arises:among all the posters different from the information content, the degree of the Poster etc., how does a consumer make decisions. That is the main purpose of this research.The relationship between the tourist and the poster in virtual communities belongs to parasocial interaction relationship. The aim of this research is to probe the mechanism of the parasocial interaction relationship between the tourist and the poster in virtual communities on the basis of parasocial interaction theory and discuss that whether the different product type (the search type and the experienced type) will has a moderating effect in the model. Based on the framework, this paper has the following contributions:1) In the current study, almost no scholar dedicated the study of tourists behavior in virtual community. And this research put the parasocial interaction theory into the study of virtual community members behavior is really a big characteristic. On the one hand, most scholars didn’t realize the relationship between tourists and posters can be defined as parasocial interaction; On the other hand, parasocial interaction theory in the existing research mainly used in traditional environment such as television, radio, and almost never had a research under the internet environment, this study also extend the use range of the parasocial interaction theory.2) The study has classified the product into two different types, to explore the moderating effect in the model.We tested the research model through survey method. The results indicated that except the reality of information, all the antecedent factors have a positive influence on the parasocial interaction relationship and then influence the consumer purchase intension. The moderating effect between the antecedent variables and mediating variable is prominent, but not prominent between the mediating variable and outcome variable.At last, based on the data analysis, the paper gives the conclusion and managerial implication to online companies. Meanwhile the shortage and future investigation points are provided which give suggestions and implication for future study.