The Impact of Belonging on the Acceptance of Online Interactions

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study of web site user response to interactions that might be considered invasive of privacy. The aim was to investigate how 'belonging' might mediate such responses in the context of a small, social web site. Whilst providing user assistance on the web has been investigated in a number of prior studies, many of these have concentrated on commercial environments and where levels of participant anonymity may be considered high. Thus, a second goal of this paper was to identify any significant difference on a smaller site. The paper presents an overview of the literature, with details of a specific prior study undertaken in a commercial scenario. From this background, an experimental model is constructed. The paper then describes how, through production of a software tool and collecting user feedback, this model was tested in the field. The results of analyzing data captured during the investigation period against the proposed model showed that the small social site differed significantly from the commercial scenario. However, it was not possible to draw conclusions about the cause of the difference, leaving the opportunity open for further research in this area.