Sense of virtual community: A follow up on its measurement

Understanding the dynamics of virtual communities has become an important issue for research. One concept that explains the participation in online communities is a sense of virtual community (SOVC), which is based on the offline equivalent sense of community (SOC) and describes a “spirit of belonging together”. Although these two concepts are similar, their measurement is problematic. Inspired by earlier studies, which investigated whether traditional SOC measures are appropriate for measuring SOVC, we adopted the SOC index 2 (SCI2) recently developed by Chavis et al. in a virtual setting. Our aim was to determine whether the refined SOC measurement is more suitable for virtual communities than their forerunners. We tested the SCI2 in a popular German community on 312 respondents. Our results showed that a thorough measure of SOVC still needs further refinement. We also discuss possibilities for improvement.

► Sense of community (SOC) helps understand attitudes and behavior in communities. ► We adopt the Sense of community index 2 (SCI2) by Chavis et al. in a virtual context. ► Although appropriate, SCI2 only partially meets the exigencies of a virtual context. ► We suggest improvements on the measure of sense of virtual community (SOVC).