Social Presence in Multi-User Virtual Environments: A Review and Measurement Framework for Organizational Research

As computer-mediated work continues to evolve, and online interactions between individuals become more immersive and socially nuanced, the experiences of individuals within virtual environments will no doubt be a recurrent topic of organizational research. Presence, or the subjective experience of “being” in an environment, has been suggested by researchers in multiple disciplines to be an important factor in the effective utilization of virtual worlds. This paper reviews the relevant literature on social presence and presents a framework through which this construct can reliably and validly be measured. The goal of this paper is to propose a conceptuallyand statistically-sound strategy for how to define and measure presence for purposes of testing hypotheses in organizational behavior research. Quite naturally, as computers have become more sophisticated, so have the virtual environments within which individuals are able to interact. For instance, many of the earliest socially-oriented virtual environments were text-based, referred to as multi-user dungeons (MUDs; Leslie, 1993). Over time, such environments have evolved to include not only textbased information, but visual and auditory stimuli as well as avatar embodiment. Exemplars of current-day virtual environments are the multi-player online games World of Warcraft (Mortensen, 2006) and Second Life (Atkinson, 2008; Berente, Hansen, Pike, & Bateman, 2008). A growing organizational trend in the use of technology as a communicative medium is the mounting popularity of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) such as Second Life, which can