Research On Influencing Factors Of Members' Life Span In Virtual Community

With the development of information technology,people are increasingly interested in online social activities.As an online information exchange platform,virtual community has developed rapidly in recent years.At present,the research of virtual community mostly focuses on the motivation and satisfaction of users,and lacks the tracking study of the whole participation cycle of users.As for the virtual community,a large number of stable users are the guarantee for its long-term development.Therefore,it is very important for the development of the virtual community to study the user's long-term participation behavior and explore the reasons for the loss of users.Survival analysis can study the occurrence and duration of events,and has certain applicability in the study of user churn.This paper uses the survival analysis method to trace and analyze the users of the virtual community,and study the survival time and the influencing factors of the users.This paper examined the impact of perceived social capital,community support and personal characteristics on members' life span in a knowledge virtual community.Firstly,we collected the survey data of 2008 and 2014,then we further tracked the participation behaviors till 2016.Based on the life table analysis method,Kaplan-Meier analysis and COX regression model in SPSS21 analysis software,the distribution status of user survival time and the influencing factors of user's survival time were analyzed at different stages of virtual community development.We draw the following conclusions:(1)In the developing stage of the virtual community,Protection factors for users survival time are user's level of participation,level of education,users freedom of expression,community's support for member communication,which means the higher of these covariate value,the lower the risk of churn.The risk factors for users' survival time are gender,which indicates that the loss of male users is lower than that of women.(2)In the mature stage of the virtual community,Protection factors for users survival time are level of education,status,cognitive social capital and freedom of expression,which means the higher of these covariate value,the lower the risk of churn.This study had significant theoretical and practical implications for sustainable development of virtual communities.