Last few weeks we’ve been preparing for and then doing our quantitative research on the motivations to participate in online communities. Right now we have all the data collected and we’ll move on to analyzing it with SAS (or SPSS). That’ll be interesting since that’s quite new for both of us — if you don’t count the two courses on which we quickly tried the softwares.
Anyway, I thought I’ll quickly tell the basics of the study here. Later, we’ll post the results of the analysis here too. But right now, let’s take a look at the design of the study.
Research question
What motivates internet users to participate in online communities and content creation within them? We also wanted to see what, if any, are the moderating effects of the user’s internet usage and his/her commitment to the community.
Sample description
We chose teenagers (14-17 years old) as our target group. This for two reasons: 1) the teens of today have grown up with the net — especially web 2.0 — and it has a central role in their life. They have been dubbed the Gen C — as in Content or sometimes Community — because creating content and sharing it with their friends thru online communities is a typical form of self expression for them. 2) They represent an interesting and important segment for marketers, because not only do they have a relatively substantial amount of disposable income, but they also have a great impact on the decision making of their families considering more expensive purchases – and thru web 2.0’s ratings and recommendations also on the the internet public as a whole.
Data collection
For the sample to be as representative of the youth as possible we decided to collect the data from schools — of course it would have been easier to collect the data directly from some online community, but then we would’ve missed a whole lot of people, for example those who don’t frequently visit that site or those who only lurk there. We conducted the study in both of ours old middle schools, Matinkylä and Pohjois-Tapiola. 388 questionnaires were filled — of which about 1/3 did not qualify for the analysis for various reasons.
Questionnaire design and test
We based the questions on both brand community and motivation literature. (I’ll post the questionnaire here later.) Before the actual data collection we conducted a qualitative research on the questionnaire in Lauttasaari middle school, just to make sure that the teens understood what we were asking. And they did.
Right now we have almost all of the data coded from the papers into Excel (man, I tell you that was fun! 
Well, actually it sounds worse than it is — you can listen to music and just unwind while filling those rows). So soon we’ll start toying aroung with the statistical methods and all. Hope we’ll get something good out of the bunch!
I’ll get back to you with some highlights soon!
Tags: communities, content creation, data collection, empirical study, gen c, participation, quantitative research, questionnaire design, SAS, SPSS, teens, thesis
