Antecedents of an experienced sense of virtual community

Sense of virtual community (SOVC) reflects the feeling that individual members have of belonging to an online social group. Yet there is a lack of investigation focusing on its individual-level antecedents. We argue that in order to enhance understanding of how SOVC develops we first need to distinguish between the individual expectations, actions, and the resulting community-related feelings. Drawing upon the uses and gratifications approach, we explore the community members’ expected benefits, their linkages with different types of community participation and consequently with the experienced SOVC. We tested the hypotheses on a sample of 395 members of a virtual community hosted by a Finnish business newspaper. The findings suggest that both forms of participation – reading and posting messages – have a positive impact on SOVC, but the expected benefits differ. Participation by reading messages is mainly driven by the expectation of cognitive benefits, while posting messages seems to be largely driven by the anticipation of both social and personal integrative benefits. Our study contributes by providing a refined SOVC conceptualization and operationalization for virtual-community research, and by opening up the individual-level actions that build up a sense of virtual community.

► Reading and posting messages in virtual communities have a positive impact on sense of virtual community.
► The expected benefits of reading and posting messages are different.
► Reading messages is mainly driven by the expectation of cognitive benefits.
► Posting messages is driven by the anticipation of both social and personal integrative benefits.