Trust within virtual communities. Presentatie doctoraat tijdens de Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme 2013. Toronto, Canada

Within my thesis, I try to understand the way trust is build within virtual communities. More specifically I want to grasp how forum members form trust in each other's opinions and advice. The emphasis is on online discussion boards because these environments are generally not characterized by contacts between people who know each other well (e.g. in comparison to Facebook). Most often these environments lack reputation or recommendation systems that allow trust to be computed. Discussion board members will have to form an opinion on the trustworthiness of co-members based on other cues than for example a reputational score. Looking at traditional trust literature, one will find that authors see the construction of trust as a rather slow process. Trust emerges when people get to know each other and when they learn to assess each other's value - e.g. as an important information source. Moreover trust is strongly related to insecurity and vulnerability. It is not unlikely that people might experience uncertainty when they are looking for advice based on a large pool of online, user-generated information where different users probably contain different levels of expertise. Trust is an important precondition for sharing and exchanging information with other people. That is why it plays such a crucial role in starting up an online conversation and following up online advice. Based on which cues do people form an image of the accuracy of individual contributions of forum members? How does initial trust emerge and how does it differentiate from trust between frequently participating members? Based on a literature review online identity, reputation and expertise/experience have been identified as important antecedents of trust. I now find myself at the first empirical stage of my thesis: performing a content analysis on forum threads in order to grasp the way people reach consensus, how they display elements of identity and expertise and how other forum members (re)act upon these trust antecedents. During the second empirical stage I will perform interviews with - new versus frequently participating - forum members. A better understanding of trust within this specific context may further stimulate and help to construct research in the domain of computing with trust.