Sociological factors affecting trust development in virtual communities

This study explores how people trust each other in Virtual Communities (VCs). The online presence is certainly different from the physical world.; the broad question in this research is whether trust is developed differently or not. The main sociological factors that influence trust in physical communities have been hypothesized for their contribution to the development of trust in VCs. A quantitative online survey instrument was developed based on existing literature on Sociology detailing the sociological perspective of trust, as well as on the fields eCommunities, eCommerce and Information Systems (IS). Introduction: Virtual Community (VC) is a phenomenon that some describe as “new social life forms” [11 pp.1] and due to the ease in which communities can be established online e.g. via a forums and bulletin boards, they are spreading at a rate greater than physical societies. However, it is widely believed that VCs are in fact an online manifestation of physical communities, despite its strong reliance on technology and physical distance between its participants. This prompts further investigations for better understanding of the ways various factors associated with physical communities operate in VCs [17]. One key factor in physical communities is ‘Trust’. In the context of social phenomena, it is “...other people and their actions [that] make up the most important environment of our lives and those are the crucial targets of our own actions” [28, pp21]. For this reason we place trust in people and services every day. “If we did not place our trust so routinely, life would be practically unliveable” [25, pp.2]. Trusting decisions are made everyday; we trust the food we eat and the train to take us to work. Trust is certainly a pre-condition for the existence of any society [17]. This research presents a fresh sociological view of trust development in online environments. Many of today's Virtual Communities (VCs) utilize bulletin board style setups where people can create their own virtual identity by registering and participating in online discussions. For this reason it is very important to explore how people trust each other in a VC environment. The online presence is certainly different from the physical world. The broad question in this research is whether trust is developed differently or not. Despite strong emphasis in the literature on importance of trust in e-commerce transactions little attention has