The influence of customer familiarity and personal innovativeness toward information technologies on the sense of virtual community and participation

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate, on the one hand, the main effects of personal innovativeness and familiarity on perceived community support in the domain of the social network site Tuenti, and, on the other hand, the moderating effects of personal innovativeness on relationships between familiarity and perceived community support. A Structural Equation Modelling, specifically Partial Least Square, is proposed to assess the relationships between the constructs together with the predictive power of the model analysed. The results demonstrate that increasing PIIT and familiarity can be seen as important initiatives that promote perceived community support and avoid the consideration of competitive social network sites. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.