Research On The Relationship Between Offline Interaction And Users' Participation From The Perspective Of Virtual Sports Group

With the development of smartphone related technologies,various sports apps appear in people's vision,including many data recording functions such as step counting and heart rate measurement,which can help people build good exercise habits.However,the developers of sports APPs found that the function of data recording was not enough to maintain the user's frequency of use.At the same time,the users also had a fatigue sense for this function,and could not keep a positive state of motion continuously.Therefore,more and more sports APPs start to consider using "social + sports" to improve users' usage frequency.Individual sports homepage,sports community,sports groups,offline activities and other forms of social activities are increasingly appearing in front of users.It is not clear whether these social functions can truly promote users' activity level and their influence mechanism on users'participation behaviorIn the past,more attention was paid to the field of online health from the perspective of community to explore the factors that influence the health behavior of community users.However,few scholars paid attention to the field of online health from the perspective of virtual group,compared to the perspective of community,where the relationship of users is more closer.In addition,in the field of virtual groups,scholars pay more attention to the online behavior of group members,but lack of relevant research on the offline behavior of members.As for social factors,the influence of offline interaction is a key factor that cannot be ignored.Based on the theoretical framework of the combination of social identity theory and social impact theory,this paper divides the social elements in the group into two aspects,within groups influence factors and between groups influence factors,and explores the impact of these two factors on the activity level of the group.At the same time,the offline interaction of the group members was added as a moderating variable to explore whether such intra-group and inter-group factors would have a stronger influence on the activity of the group when the frequency of offline interaction of the group members was higher.This paper adopted the second-hand data in the empirical research,define related variables,collected the research data from the motion platform of Codoon sports APP,filtered the samples,and collected data of 152 sports groups for 38 weeks.Then,STATA data analysis software was used for descriptive statistical analysis,correlation analysis,establishment of measurement model,and verification of research model and hypothesis.In addition,different regression models were used to test the robustness of the results,which indicated that the overall results were robust.In summary,the results showed that peer influence could improve the activity of the group,and the behavior of members could influence each other,thus promoting the activity of the whole group.Within the group,the leader's ability will improve the activity of the group.The team members will regard the leader as a representative of the group's sports ability and pay attention to his behavior,so as to participate in physical exercise more actively.Social comparison between groups would improve the activity of the group,and the group members would pay attention to their performance and participate in the exercise more actively.In addition,the offline interaction of team members(including the number of pictures and the number of offline activities)will adjust the influence of social comparison between groups on the activity level of the group.When the frequency of offline interaction of team members is higher,team members will pay more attention to the group's overall external performance,so as to improve the activity level of the group.The theoretical contribution of this study are:1)add the offline interaction of team members into the research of virtual sports group.2)reveal the influence mechanism of social interaction on user engagement from the perspective of group rather than individual level.The practical contribution of this study are:1)These factors within and between groups provides APP developers with the direction of APP function design and development and enables users to participate more in group activities through some encouragement ways.2)For users,to develop the habit of sports,they need to participate in group activities and communicate with others users more actively,which can help them build better exercise habits.