TY - GEN
T1 - An exploratory study of users' purposes for social virtual worlds
AU - Jung, Yoonhyuk
AU - Kang, Hyunmee
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - This study aims at investigating users' purposes for social virtual worlds which are thriving and emerging social cyberspaces; and introducing an alternative method (i.e., a means-end approach) to analyze users' purposes. The data from a web-based questionnaire were analyzed by a means-end approach (Olson and Reynolds, 1983) which produces users' purpose structure consisting of individual purposes and their hierarchical relations. The results showed that people come to social virtual worlds for satisfying their social and hedonic needs and for escaping from real world constraints as do virtual community members and gaming virtual world players; they also pursue unique activities, such as creating virtual objects and selling them. On the other hand, by clarifying relations among purposes, the mean-ends approach provided a richer explanation about users' purposes than prior research which just offers separate purposes of social cyberspace users.
AB - This study aims at investigating users' purposes for social virtual worlds which are thriving and emerging social cyberspaces; and introducing an alternative method (i.e., a means-end approach) to analyze users' purposes. The data from a web-based questionnaire were analyzed by a means-end approach (Olson and Reynolds, 1983) which produces users' purpose structure consisting of individual purposes and their hierarchical relations. The results showed that people come to social virtual worlds for satisfying their social and hedonic needs and for escaping from real world constraints as do virtual community members and gaming virtual world players; they also pursue unique activities, such as creating virtual objects and selling them. On the other hand, by clarifying relations among purposes, the mean-ends approach provided a richer explanation about users' purposes than prior research which just offers separate purposes of social cyberspace users.
KW - Means-end analysis
KW - Social virtual worlds
KW - Users' purpose
KW - Virtual worlds
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84870769496&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84870769496
SN - 9781615675814
T3 - 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems 2009, AMCIS 2009
SP - 1809
EP - 1817
BT - 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems 2009, AMCIS 2009
T2 - 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems 2009, AMCIS 2009
Y2 - 6 August 2009 through 9 August 2009
ER -