Para-social Presence: A Re-conceptualization of 'Social Presence' to Capture the Relationship between a Web Site and Her Visitors

The primary purpose of this paper is to describe the theoretical underpinnings of the construct Para-social Presence (PSP). Para-social presence refers to the extent to which a medium facilitates a sense of understanding, connection, involvement and interaction among participating social entities. PSP treats web site as a valid social actor and attempts to capture the emerging interaction between a web site and her visitors. We then borrow extensively from communication literature to develop an instrument to measure this construct. We will use confirmatory factor analysis to develop the salient features of this multi-dimensional construct. Even though, we focus on PSP in a specific context – ecommerce, we believe that PSP is a construct that is more general and powerful that can be used in many different contexts, including distributed group support systems environments.