Trust within virtual communities: Research context and methodology.

HOW DO PEOPLE ASSIGN TRUST TO THE OPINIONS AND ADVICE OF STRANGERS WHEN LOOKING FOR HOW-TO AND PRE-BUY INFORMATION ON ONLINE FORUMS?

This PhD research starts from the idea that an online group of people can play a significant role when it comes to making important individual decisions. When looking for factual, non-news reference information (such as how-to or pre-buy counsel) people can turn to online content from regular users or User Generated Content (UGC). This way the information search process is becoming a social event where Internet users can be considered valuable information sources. UGC is often seen as an important support tool for the articulate, self-reliant and informed Internet user; it provides people the opportunity to create and share information. However, Internet users are being confronted with information that has not been verified by traditional gatekeepers; anyone with the right skills and hardware can add content online.

Before people will share or pick up information, they must experience a certain level of trust (McKnight & Chervany, 2001; Ridings, Gefen & Arinze, 2002:287; Ljung & Wahlforss, 2008:2-5; Blanchard, Welbourne & Boughton, 2011:79). Heimer (in Barber, 1983:8) states that trust allows people to cope with the uncertainty and vulnerability that exists within social relationships. It is not unlikely that people might experience uncertainty when they are looking for advice based on a large pool of information where different users contain different levels of expertise (Mondal & Kitsuregawa, 2006:683). Making a real life decision based on the advice of online strangers contains a certain risk. Literature shows that in a traditional, offline environment trust is build slowly during the process where people get to know each other (Bijlsma-Frankema & Klein Woolthuis, 2005:10). People who often participate in conversations with forum members - or even read the discussions of others - develop a common interaction history on which they can rely. But how do new users assign trust? Important trust antecedents such as identity, reputation and experience are not always that easy to infer online. Computer mediated communication does not always offer sufficient knowledge on skills and capacities of online information contributors. Online worlds are often more muted than offline social spaces.
People do have some cues, but these are more difficult to find online (Fisher, 2003:3); especially when one is not familiar with the community. This insecurity about the identity of others and the lack of a joint interaction history makes trust development less evident. Users need a certain level of skills, not only to deduce useful information sources but also to receive and comprehend cues concerning the trustworthiness of forum members. When users succeed in understanding the identity of others they can anticipate on forum conversations, which creates the opportunity for trust and trusting behaviour.

Despite the clear necessity of trust in virtual communities, current online trust research often focuses on commercial or organizational settings. More recently trust also gains a lot of attention within the domain of online security and privacy. Little attention however is being paid to the role of trust and trustworthiness during the search for reference information, except with respect to health. Furthermore the focus of attention is often on more modern social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. Within this doctoral research the emphasis is on discussion boards or forums. Although one of the oldest UGC platforms, these surroundings are in some cases still very lively environments where people seize upon conversations when looking for specific advice. Online textual platforms are interesting because in these contexts the problematic nature of online trust is being magnified. A text-only forum lacks certain traditional trust cues. Research has also shown that text-based conversations create a greater sense of social distance and feelings of trust would build up slower (Bos, Olson, Gergle, Olson & Wright, 2002:1&3). In addition, forums are still considered the most important online space for the exchange of information (Fisher, 2003:9; Sproull & Arriaga, 2007:3). During his PhD we take a look at the construction of trust within a mainly textual online environment when searching for both explicit knowledge and implicit know-how - or knowledge based on everyday personal experiences. Important to state is that we do not look for a solution for this difficult relationship between trust and text-only platforms - this already exists in the form of trust and reputation systems. This study merely wants to understand how people cope with attributing trust in an online context where such systems are absent and how this trust in online information is being translated into real life actions.

During the first stage of the PhD 'Bouwinfo.be' was chosen as our first case study. Within this forum people come together to share advice, opinions and experiences related to home-improvement, building or renovating houses. Choices and decisions on home-improvement are often accompanied by a number of financial and social risks, which we believe ensure that people will focus on rather comprehensive problem-solving behaviour. This forum will be studied based on two major empirical parts: What can be interfered from forum conversations and what comes up during conversations with forum members? During the first empirical phase a content analysis will be performed 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 the focus will be on interviews and online observations. Based on the literature review, the decision was made to make a comparison between people experiencing initial trust and people who already have a common interaction history with forum members. The first group of respondents - people unfamiliar with the forum and busy with renovating or building a house - would be selected for an interview and an experiment in which people would be introduced to the forum based on a search assignment. The second group of respondents - regular forum users selected through an announcement on 'Bouwinfo.be' - will be asked to participate in an offline interview and in an online group conversation.

By participating in the Digital Ethnography Week, I wish to expand this first draft with interesting theoretical and methodological insights, information on research ethics and hands-on advice.


REFERENCE LIST

BARBER, B. (1983). The logic and limits of trust. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, VS

BIJLSMA-FRANKEMA, K. & KLEIN WOOLTHUIS, R. (2005). Trust under pressure. Empirical investigations of trust and trust building in uncertain circumstances. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, Cheltenham, UK

BLANCHARD, A.L., WELBOURNE, J.L. & BOUGHTON, M.D. (2011). A model of online trust. The mediating role of norms and sense of virtual community. Information, Communication and Society, vol.14, nr.1, p.76-106

BOS, N.D., OLSON, J.S., GERGLE, D., OLSON, G.M., WRIGHT, Z. (2002). Effects of four computer mediated channels on trust development. Proceedings of CHI 2002. ACM Press, New York, VS

FISHER, D. (2003). Studying social information spaces. In LUEG, C. & FISHER, D. (Eds.). From Usenet to CoWebs. Interacting with social information spaces. Springer, London

LJUNG, A. & WAHLFORSS, E. (2008). People, profiles & trust: On interpersonal trust in web-mediated social spaces. Viewed January 2011. http://trustmojo.com/book/

MCKNIGHT, D.H. & CHERVANY, N.L. (2001). Conceptualizing trust: A typology and e-commerce customer relationships model. Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Viewed July 2011. csdl2.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2001/0981/07/09817022.pdf

MONDAL, A. & KITSUREGAWA, M. (2006). Privacy, Security and Trust in P2P environments: A Perspective. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, p. 682-686

RIDINGS, C. M., GEFEN, D. & ARINZE, B. (2002). Some antecedents and effects of trust in virtual communities. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, vol.11, nr.3, p.271-295

SPROULL, L. & ARRIAGA, M. (2007). Online Communities. In: BIDGOLI, H. (ed.). The handbook of computer networks; volume 3. Wiley Online Library. Viewed January 2012. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118256107. ch58/summary