A Member Of The Virtual Community Knowledge Sharing Behavior Profiling

Internet has promoted the vigorous development of virtual communities to grow rapidly. Hellerstein found that in 1985, people tried to contact their friends through computer mediated communication; they regarded online world as a community and also the base of urban social relations. Many people now log on virtual communities for finding information to solve problems in daily life. So if the content of information of a virtual community is insufficient, its value will be limited. Therefore, the biggest challenge for a virtual community is to encourage its members'knowledge sharing intention [1](Chiu et al.,2006). In this motivation, this research integrates different dimensions of social capital theory and social exchange theory, tring to search the factors of knowledge sharing of virtual communities.Previous studies have found that users established new relationships on Electronic Bulletin Boards (BBS). The object of this research is the "movie" board of Taiwan university electronic bulletin board "PTT" (telnet://ptt.cc), the research goal is to understand what factors affect community members to share knowledge and information on the board. This study uses "social interaction ties", "trust", "Identity" and "Common Vision" of social capital theory, and "compilation effort", "reciprocity" and "helpful" of social exchange theory as seven factors to influence the knowledge sharing intention of "movie" board members on PTT.The survey is conducted by empirical research with 122 valid questionnaires and SPSS and SmartPLS for data analysis, to verify the research hypothesis. The results show that "social interaction ties", "trust" and "identity" are not significant on knowledge sharing intention, while "common vision" is a significant factor. Besides, "compilation effort", "reciprocity" and "helpful" are all significantly affect knowledge sharing intention.