Factors influencing online social interactions

Abstract

Popular discourse provides glimpses of the relationship between social motives and user experience. In this paper, factors influencing social interactions with seven popular social networking sites are studied in the Indian context. Relatively a novel method of focused unstructured interview technique with adaptation from triadic sorting is used to unearth the motivation and behavior of the user. It indicates subtle connections and motivations and started revealing some of the interesting dimensions - self orientation, social presence, mode of relationship and participation, temporal and socio-cultural context. This study successfully gathers information and proposes an approach to organize the user motivation into a dimensional scale for online social Interactions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.