Constructing the Internet behavior ontology: Projection from psychological phenomena with qualitative and quantitative methods

Abstract

The Internet has intrigued new research paradigm for traditional psychology. Over the past decades, researchers have found that there exists strong correlation between Internet behavior and individual psychological characteristics. In this paper, we propose to build the ontology of Internet behavior by projecting from psychological phenomena. The psychological phenomenon index was developed with top-down literature study. We conduct focus group study and build an online open-ended questionnaire to collect the comprehensive Internet behaviors as much as possible according to the psychological index. This study combines the qualitative and quantitative methods and sets the foundation for further study via the Web. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.