A Study On The Psychological Mechanism Of Participating Behavior Of Virtual Community Members

Over the past few years, there have witnessed a significant growth in the number of virtual communities. Therefore, how to maintain and motivate the users’sustained participation in virtual communities has became the focus of many researchers and practitioners. Maintaining participants’sustained participation means a lot to the long-term development of firms, thus becoming the target of firms’online marketing plans.On the basis of prior research, our paper explored the psychological mechanism through which the inner needs and motivations of virtual community participants affect their sustained participation through virtual community identification from the perspective of social identification theory. Moreover, we analyzed the moderation effect of the participants’self-construal on this psychological mechanism and checked whether there exists different effects for participants with independent self-construal or interdependent self-construal.Aiming at two types of virtual communities, including Douban (virtual community of interest) and SinaWeibo (virtual community of relationship), we disseminated our questionnaires and collected data. Since we aimed at sustained participation, we screened out respondents with over one year’s experience in virtual communities. After screening, we retained432questionnaires in Douban and191in SinaWeibo, and then we checked the validity and reliability of our constructs. Through SEM, we checked whether the actual data fit for our theoretical model, and made the significance test of the path parameters between the communities’IT artifacts, users’inner needs satisfaction, virtual community identification and sustained participation. Finally, we analyzed the moderation effect of the users’self-construal.Our findings reveal that, virtual co-presence, self-presentation and deep profiling could promote the uses’inner needs satisfaction. Moreover, there exists a positive relationship between users’inner needs satisfaction and virtual community identification. And there also exists a positive relationship between virtual community identification and sustained participation, confirming our hypothesis. However, the moderation effect of participants’self-construal on our theoretical model is not significant.