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This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright

An empirical study of the determinants of the intention to participate in user-created contents (UCC) services

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Authors: Saokosal Oum(1) , DongWook Han (2) (1) [email protected] (S. Oum), Tel.: +855 12 252 752 National Polytechnic Institute of Cambodia (2) [email protected] (D. Han). Tel.: +82 63 220 2229; fax: +82 63 220 3071. School of Smart Media, Jeonju University Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011), page. 15110–15121 Abstract Up to now UCC services have been dominating the majority of the internet traffic, yet the answers to what motivates people to participate in the UCC services still remain vague and unclear. It is the motivation to find these answers that lead to this study. We adopted technology acceptance model (TAM) to our model and examined the effects of external variables—social identity, telepresence, altruism, perceived playfulness and social trust. Data was collected from undergraduate students in Jeonju University, South Korea, who had experience in UCC. The findings showed that social trust and perceived playfulness play a pivotal role in explaining the individual’s behavioral intention to participate in UCC services. Also, perceived encouragement was found to have significant influence on social trust instead of its direct effect on the intention to participate in UCC services. Additionally, social identity and telepresence were the most important factors of perceived encouragement. This implication can help both researchers and Web practitioners to better understand user behavior in UCC context.

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Page 1: An empirical study of the determinants of the intention to participate in user-created contents (UCC) services

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attachedcopy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial researchand education use, including for instruction at the authors institution

and sharing with colleagues.

Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling orlicensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party

websites are prohibited.

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of thearticle (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website orinstitutional repository. Authors requiring further information

regarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies areencouraged to visit:

http://www.elsevier.com/copyright

Page 2: An empirical study of the determinants of the intention to participate in user-created contents (UCC) services

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An empirical study of the determinants of the intention to participatein user-created contents (UCC) services

Saokosal Oum 1, DongWook Han ⇑School of Smart Media, Jeonju University, 1200 Hyoja-Dong, Wansan-Gu, Jeonju, Jeollabuk-Do 560-759, South Korea

a r t i c l e i n f o

Keywords:User-created contentsTechnology acceptance modelSocial trustPerceived playfulnessPerceived encouragementTelepresenceAltruismSocial identity

a b s t r a c t

Up to now UCC services have been dominating the majority of the internet traffic, yet the answers towhat motivates people to participate in the UCC services still remain vague and unclear. It is the motiva-tion to find these answers that lead to this study. We adopted technology acceptance model (TAM) to ourmodel and examined the effects of external variables—social identity, telepresence, altruism, perceivedplayfulness and social trust. Data was collected from undergraduate students in Jeonju University, SouthKorea, who had experience in UCC. The findings showed that social trust and perceived playfulness play apivotal role in explaining the individual’s behavioral intention to participate in UCC services. Also, per-ceived encouragement was found to have significant influence on social trust instead of its direct effecton the intention to participate in UCC services. Additionally, social identity and telepresence were themost important factors of perceived encouragement. This implication can help both researchers andWeb practitioners to better understand user behavior in UCC context.

� 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The Internet is a communication channel that is contained byneither time nor geography (Ahn, Ryu, & Han, 2007). The Internethas become a part of our daily life (Lee, Cheng, & Chen, 2005),while social network sites (SNS) are becoming a new wave forthe new era. Social network sites/services are a recent computer-mediated communication technology (Sledgianowski & Kulviwat,2009) and are also the latest technologies and trends in onlinecommunication (Pfeil, Arjan, & Zaphiris, 2009). SNS has become arecent buzzword for the personal media market and has emergedas a top web-based business (Kwon & Wen, 2010). Social networkand community websites haves changed the way people use theInternet, in creating personal profiles and content, sharing photo-graphs, video, blog and user-generated content (UGC)/user-createdcontent (UCC) in general (Karahasanovic et al., 2009). The increas-ing popularity of social networking and UCC has attracted theattention of researchers, see e.g., Lee, Cho, Gay, Davidson, andIngraffea (2003), IP and Wagner (2008), Chow and Chan (2008),Dwyer, Hiltz, and Passerini (2007), Hossain and Silva (2009),Gangadharbatla (2007), Fogel and Nehmad (2009), Kwon andWen (2010). According to Alexa2 (January, 2010), the top 20 mostpopular websites are either social network sites or websites that

have an embedded social network function, for example, Facebook,3

YouTube,4 Wikipedia,5 Blogger,6 Twitter,7 and MySpace.8 The largecompanies like Yahoo! and Google are attracted to SNS and UCC aswell (Sledgianowski & Kulviwat, 2009).

User-generated content (UGC) or user-created contents (UCC) isa general term for any content submitted by the ‘‘digital common’’rather than web publishers, where the contents are originally cre-ated by users or copied from other sources by users (Shim & Lee,2009) and then, more importantly, are publicly distributed. Todayusers no longer passively consume media contents; instead, theyactively demand their preferred contents and try to create contentby themselves, which enables UCC to become the heart of some ofthe most relevant and fastest-growing applications on the Web(Ryu, Kim, & Lee, 2009). A study of Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) sta-ted that more than 175 million active users had registered on Face-book and every minute, 10 h of content were uploaded to YouTubeas January of 2009.

Despite the fact that UCC is so popular, answers to a question‘‘What makes those people participate the UCC sites?’’ still remainunclear. This motivates us to explore the phenomena that makemillions of Internet users join in the UCC services and voluntarily

0957-4174/$ - see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2011.05.098

⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 63 220 2229; fax: +82 63 220 3071.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Oum), [email protected] (D. Han).

1 Tel.: +855 12 252 752.2 http://www.alexa.com.

3 http://www.facebook.com.4 http://www.youtube.com.5 http://www.wikipedia.com.6 http://www.blogger.com.7 http://www.twitter.com.8 http://www.myspace.com.

Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 15110–15121

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Expert Systems with Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate /eswa

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create a truly vast amount of content in the services. Similarstudies can be found in the research of Kim, Na, and Ryu (2007)and Ryu et al. (2009), where both of them studied ‘‘video’’ UCC,the former work focusing on users of all ages and the latter focus-ing on elder users.

However, this study is willing to explore factors that affect theuse of the ‘‘whole’’ types of UCC. The word ‘‘whole’’ indicates allkinds of video, photo, music/audio and text or any other forms thatare created by users. Therefore, a model for the whole type of UCCis proposed by extending the original TAM (Davis, 1989a; Davis,Bagozzi, & Warshaw, 1989b) and adding external variables – ‘socialidentity’, ‘altruism’, ‘telepresence’, ‘perceived encouragement’,‘perceived playfulness’ and ‘social trust.’

2. Research background

2.1. Overview of user-created content (UCC)

The original user-created content (UCC) is dates back to theInternet proliferation period around the early 1990s (Ryu et al.,2009), where the Internet started out as nothing more than a giantBulletin Board System (BBS), that allowed users to exchangesoftware, data, messages, and news with each other (Kaplan &Haenlein, 2010). User-created contents (UCC) is a general termfor any content submitted by ‘‘digital common’’ rather than webpublishers, where the contents are originally created by users orcopied from other sources by users (Shim & Lee, 2009) and then,most importantly, are publicly distributed. UCC content can be inany form of information including text (discussion boards, blogsetc), photos, videos, music, audios, wikis,9 customer review sites,video games, virtual objects or any other website that offers theopportunity for the user to share their knowledge and familiaritywith a product or experience.

In order to be called UCC, it needs to fulfill three basic criteria:firstly, it needs to be published either on a publicly accessiblewebsite or on a social networking site accessible to a selectedgroup of people; secondly, it needs to exhibit a certain amountof creative effort; and finally it needs to have been created out-side of professional routines and practices (Kaplan & Haenlein,2010). YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, and Yahoo!Answers are good examples of UCC. These websites, however,specialize in different types of UCC. MySpace and Facebook, forexample, allows users to upload their photos, keep contact withfriends and family, and now allows users to play game onlinewith their friends. YouTube, a major UCC site specialized in videocontent, allows users to upload video contents that are eithercreated as original video content by themselves or copied fromelsewhere. TIME magazine announced ‘‘You’’ as the Person ofthe year, and YouTube had become the best invention of 2006(Ryu et al., 2009). Another kind of UCC are weblogs, or for short,blogs, typically described a personal diary and kept on the Web,which can be edited by an end user with few web publicationskills (IP & Wagner, 2008). Blogger, owned by Google, and an-other recent major blog called Wordpress10 are the leading web-logs today (Alexa on January 2010). Yahoo! Answers is anotherkind of UCC service where you can ask questions on any topic,get answers from real people, and share your insights and experi-ence. By the end of 2007, Yahoo! Answers has 120 million users,accumulating 400 million answers to questions (Harper, Raban,Rafaeli, & Konstan, 2008). Shim and Lee (2009) also stated that

Q&A has become a must-have feature for portals. Another exampleof UCC site, Flickr, now owned by Yahoo, is a large-scale photosharing sites, where anyone from end users to professional photog-raphers can search for photos along with sharing their own. In2007, the number of registered users was about 5 million andthe number of photos was approximately 250 million (Ames &Naasman, 2007).

Evidently, UCC has changed the way we use the Internet. Thepower is largely in users’ hands. This leads to the question ‘‘Whatmotivates these people to participate in UCC sites?’’ Similar studieshave been done (Kim et al., 2007; Ryu et al., 2009), yet there is noresearch on the ‘‘whole’’ UCC format that has been intensively ex-plored so far, which provides a significant motivation for thisstudy.

2.2. Technology acceptance model (TAM)

TAM, which was originally proposed by Davis (1989a), 1989b),is one of the most prominent theories in Information Systemsusage (Ryu et al., 2009). TAM’s development was based on the so-cial psychology theory of reason action (TRA) from Fishbein and Aj-zen, 1975. In TAM, two determinants—’perceived usefulness’ and‘perceived ease of use’—are conceived to explain the individual’sIT acceptance behavior. Davis defined perceived usefulness as‘‘the degree to which a person believes that using a particular sys-tem would enhance his or her job performance’’ and perceived easeof use as ‘‘the degree of which a person believes that using a par-ticular system would be free from effort.’’ TAM is capable ofexplaining user behavior across a broad range of end-user comput-ing technology and user populations (Lee et al., 2005), and hasbeen widely used in Information System research (Hu, Chau,Sheng, & Tam, 1999; Venkatesh & Davis, 2000a; Venkatesh & Mor-ris, 2000b). Hence, TAM will be adapted as the basic structure forour framework to explain the participants’ behavior in UCC ser-vices as well.

However, since TAM was designed to specifically explain com-puter usage behavior, its two variables are not enough to explainWeb users’ motivation (Ahn et al., 2007). This is because TAM’sfundamental constructs do not fully reflect the variety of usertask environments (Moon & Kim, 2001). Many previous studieshave argued that the original TAM could not fully explain thetechnological acceptance and usage behavior. Even Davis himselfmodified the original TAM by proposing ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’motivation as the key driving forces of the user’s behavioralintention to accept new technology (Davis, Bagozzi, & Warshaw,1992). Extrinsic motivation refers to the performance of an activ-ity because it is perceived to be instrumental in achieving valuedoutcomes that are distinct from the activity itself, such as en-hanced job performance, pay, or promotion. Intrinsic motivationrefers to the performance of an activity for no apparent reasonother than the act of performing it (Deci, 1975). As shown inTable 1, rather than using the original TAM, those studies haveextended the TAM by adding new external variables in many dif-ferent areas according to the specific characteristics of the tech-nology or systems: individual, task, system or organizationalcharacteristics. In this paper, we also extend TAM by addingnew and wider external variables which are described in detailin Section 3.

3. Hypothesis and research model

The model of our study adapts the original TAM as the basicconcept for our framework. Plus, six external variables‘social iden-tity’, ‘altruism’, ‘telepresence’, and ‘perceived encouragement’,‘perceived playfulness’ and ‘social trust’ are added. The model isshown in Fig. 1.

9 A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number ofinterlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or aWYSIWYG text editor. (Wikipedia.org, January, 2010).

10 http://www.wordpress.com.

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Since TAM is used as the baseline model, the following TAMhypothesized relationships will be verified in the UCC services par-ticipation context.

Hypothesis 1. Perceived ease of use will have a positive effect onperceived usefulness in the UCC services participation context.

Hypothesis 2. Perceived ease of use will have a positive effect onbehavioral intention to participate the UCC services.

Hypothesis 3. Perceived usefulness will have a positive effect onbehavioral intentions to participate the UCC services.

3.1. Perceived playfulness

Playfulness has been conceptualized as an individual disposi-tion that is manifested by the qualities or attributes thatindividuals bring to their environment (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi,1975; Lieberman, 1965; Lieberman, 1966; Barnett, 1990, 1991;

Table 1Applications of TAM.

Research and authors Constructs Summary

Social network service Perceived encouragement Individual characteristics affect user acceptance of SNS(Kwon & Wen, 2010) Social identity Perceived encouragement and perceived orientation are significant

AltruismTelepresence

Elderly users in video UCC Perceived user resource The factors affecting elderly users’ acceptance of video UCC(Ryu et al., 2009) Prior similar experience Elderly users can change to adopt video UCC. Elderly-specific Computer anxiety variables are

good antecedents, while having direct effects on the Perceived physical condition intentionconstruct for some cases

Life course eventCompatibilityPerceived enjoyment

Social network sites Normative pressure Factors influencing user adoption of social network sites(Sledgianowski & Kulviwat,

2009)Playfulness All the hypothesized determinants have a significant direct Critical mass effect on intent to

use. Intent to use and perceived playfulness have a significant direct effect on actual usage

Online retailing System quality The effect of playfulness in online retailing and the relationship between Web quality factorand use acceptance behavior(Ahn et al., 2007) Information quality

Service quality Playfulness is significant, and Web quality, categorized into system, information, and servicequality had a significant impact on the perceived ease of use, playfulness, and usefulnessPlayfulness

E-learning Perceived cognitive absorption TAM in an e-learning service(Roca, Chiu, & Martinez, 2007) Perceived Internet self-efficacy Users’ continuance intention is determined by satisfaction, Perceived computer self-efficacy

which in turn is jointly determined by perceived usefulness, Interpersonal influenceinformation quality, confirmation, service quality, system quality, External influenceperceived ease of use and cognitive absorption

Information qualityService qualitySystem qualityConfirmationSatisfaction

Hospital info systems Perceived financial cost TAM and examinees nurses’ acceptance of the e-logistics(Tung, Chang, & Chou, 2007) Compatibility Information system in the medical industry

Trust Compatibility, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and trust have positive influenceon intention to use, while perceived financial cost has negative influence on intention to use

Web acceptance model Internet experience TAM and the users’ experience in Web(Castaneda, Munozleiva,

& Luque, 2007)Website experience The novelty of the study consisted in applying TAM to a free-content website while

considering the moderating effects of Internet and website experience

Internet-based learning Perceived enjoyment Students’ acceptance of an Internet based learning medium(Lee et al., 2005) Attitude Both perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment have impact on intention to use, while

perceived ease of use has impact on student attitude or intention to use

Online banking(Pikkarainen, Pikkarainen,Karjaluoto, & Pahnila,2004)

Perceived enjoyment Online banking acceptance among private banking customers in Information on onlinebanking Finland

Security and privacy Perceived usefulness and information on online banking on Quality of Internet Connection theWeb site were the main factors influencing online-banking acceptance

Online consumer behavior Product involvement TAM, marketing, and psychology in online consumer behavior(Koufaris, 2002) Web skills Both shopping enjoyment and perceived usefulness strongly Challenges predicts intention to

return. Product involvement, Web skills, Value-added search mechanisms challenges, and useof value-added search mechanisms all have a Perceived control significant impact on the Webconsumer

Shopping enjoymentConcentration

World Wide Web(Moon & Kim, 2001)

Perceived playfulness Playfulness as a new factor that reflects the user’s intrinsic belief in WWW acceptance.Playfulness is important in an individual’s acceptance of the WWW

Cognitive Absorption Cognitive Absorption A construct labeled cognitive absorption and defined as a state of deep involvement with software(Agarwal & Karahana, 2000) Personal innovation

Playfulness The cognitive absorption has influence on TAM, and playfulness and personal innovativenessare important determinants of cognitive absorptionSelf-efficacy

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Bozionelos & Bozionelos, 1999). Webster and Martocchio (1992)defined ‘Micro-computer playfulness’ as a situation-specific indi-vidual characteristic that represents intellectual or cognitive play-fulness: an individual’s tendency to interact spontaneously,inventively, and imaginatively with computers (Ahn et al., 2007).Playfulness has been employed in many recent Information Sys-tems studies, e.g. Cognitive Absorption (Agarwal & Karahana,2000). Moon and Kim (2001) then adopted playfulness to explainbehavioral intention to use the World Wide Web and named it‘perceived playfulness’. They defined perceived playfulness as‘‘The extent to which the individual perceives that his or her atten-tion is focused on the interaction with the World Wide Web; iscurious during the interaction; and finds the interaction intrinsi-cally enjoyable or interesting.’’ They also defined three dimensionsof perceived playfulness: concentration (the extent to which a userperceived that his or her attention was focused), curiosity (the ex-tent to which the user was inquisitive about the interaction), andenjoyment (the extent to which the user found the interactionfun or interesting). They showed that perceived playfulness is animportant factor in encouraging more people to use WWW. Lin,Wu, and Tsai (2005) then employed perceived playfulness to ex-plain the individuals’ intentions to revisit the web portal; as a re-sult, perceived playfulness was found to be a critical variable forinvestigating the continued use in the web portal context. There-fore, the following hypotheses are proposed in the UCC servicesparticipation context:

Hypothesis 4. Perceived ease of use will have a positive effect onperceived playfulness in the UCC services participation context.

Hypothesis 5. Perceived playfulness will have a positive effect onbehavioral intention to participate the UCC services.

3.2. Social trust

Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) defined trust as ‘‘thewillingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of anotherparty based on the expectation that the other will perform aparticular action important to the trustee, irrespective of theability to monitor or control that other party.’’ A wide range ofstudies on trust can be found in numerous fields such as philos-ophy, sociology, psychology, management, marketing, ergonom-ics, human–computer interaction (HCI), industrial psychology,and electronic commerce.

Social trust, on the other hand, was defined as ‘‘the individual-level internalization of norms of reciprocity, which facilitatescollective action by allowing people to take risks and to trust thatfellow citizens will not take advantage of them’’ (Brehm & Rahn,1997; Putnam, 1993; Putnam, 2000). Social trust has shown itsimportance in a wide range of economic and political phenomena(Güth, Levati, & Ploner, 2008). Many researchers (Beugelsdijk, deGroot, & van Schaik, 2004; Knack & Keefer, 1997; Zak & Knack,2001) also agreed that social trust generally plays an importantrole in economic growth. Also, Oxendine, Borgida, Sullivan, andJackson (2003) found that social trust is a factor in helping toinstigate the development and character of a ‘community elec-tronic network’. Since a UCC service also forms as a community,the latter study leads us to assume that social trust would be asimportant in helping to improve the UCC service. Recently,Papagapitos and Riley (2009) have demonstrated that there is apositive and significant relationship that runs from trust tosecondary education enrollment. From UCC perspective, this canimply that a UCC service that provides greater trust to its membersmay have more potential for gaining more prospective user’senrollments as well. Recently, a similar work (Kim et al., 2007)

has shown that there are two relationships related to perceivedtrust: one from perceived ease of use to perceived trust andanother from perceived trust to intention to participate in a videoUCC service, where both of the influences were decidedly signifi-cant. In this study, rather than perceived trust, social trust isexpected to have the same relationships. The following hypothesesare hence proposed:

Hypothesis 6. Perceived ease of use will have a positive effect onsocial trust in the UCC services participation context.

Hypothesis 7. Social trust will have a positive effect on behavioralintention to participate the UCC services.

3.3. Social identity

Social Identity was originally developed by Tajfel and John(1979) to better understand the psychological basis of intergroupdiscrimination. Tajfel and Turner (1979) defined social identity as‘‘that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from hismembership of a social group (or groups), together with the valueand emotional significance attached to this.’’ Hogg and Vaughan(2002) also defined social identity as the individual’s self-conceptderived from perceived membership of social groups. Another sim-ilar social identity theory proposes that the membership of socialgroups and categories form an important part of their self-percep-tion. Therefore, when an individual is interacting with another per-son, they will not act as a single individual but as a representativeof a whole group or category of people. Clement, Noels, and Doe-neault (2001) also stated that people who have a higher socialidentity tend to perceive their ‘‘in-groups’’ in ways that distinguishthemselves positively from ‘‘out-groups’’ and prefer a group whichprovides them with a positive self-image.

Most recently, social identity has been implanted in online so-cial network environments. Song and Kim (2006) first proposedthat social identity is a crucial determinant that affects intentionto use a specific technology or system in virtual community servicesettings. Kwon and Wen (2010) consequently utilized the con-struct to explain users’ perception to use social network service.Unlike Song and Kim’s study where social identity affects directlythe intention to use, Kwon and Wen (2010) instead suggested thatsocial identity is a factor that affects perceived ease of use, per-ceived usefulness and perceived encouragement. Since social net-work and UCC share the same characteristics, these constructsmay be still relevant and so can be employed in UCC servicesusage. Therefore, following hypotheses are proposed:

Hypothesis 8. Social Identity will have a positive effect onperceived encouragement in the UCC services participation context.

Hypothesis 9. Social identity will have a positive effect onperceived usefulness in the UCC services participation context.

Hypothesis 10. Social identity will have a positive effect onperceived ease of use in the UCC services participation context.

3.4. Altruism

Altruism refers to voluntary beneficial actions where one at-tempts to improve the welfare of others at one expense (Fang &Chiu, 2010). There are two important forms of altruism whichare recognized by ethologists and behavioral ecologists: kin altru-ism and reciprocal altruism (Krebs and Davies, 1987; McFarland,

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1993; Ashton, Paunonena, Helmesa, & Jacksona, 1998; Kwon &Wen, 2010). Kin altruism involves behaving in such a way as tobenefit a genetic relative’s chances of survival or reproduction atsome cost to one’s own chances, while reciprocal altruism, in con-trast to kin altruism, involves acting in such a way that anotherindividual is benefited at some expense to oneself, with the expec-tation that the recipient—who may be completely unrelated to thealtruist—will return similar assistance in the future (Ashton et al.,1998).

Even though the concept is most commonly used in philo-sophical and ethical studies, altruism has been recently employedas a very good variable in many studies related to human behav-ior toward technology in regarding to sharing knowledge (Ba,Stallaert, & Whinston, 2001; Davenport & Prusak, 1998). Altruis-tic behavior is also a motivation that induces members in a peer-to-peer community to more willingly contribute knowledge forthe sake of others (Kwok & Gao, 2004). In a study of socialnetwork service (Kwon & Wen, 2010), instead of using altruismas the direct antecedent to explain the user behavior, altruismis used as an antecedent of perceived ease of use, perceived use-fulness, and perceived encouragement. Their interesting workleads to our hypotheses:

Hypothesis 11. Altruism will have a positive effect on perceivedease of use in the UCC services participation context.

Hypothesis 12. Altruism will have a positive effect on perceivedusefulness in the UCC services participation context.

Hypothesis 13. Altruism will have a positive effect on perceivedencouragement in the UCC services participation context.

Kwon & Wen’s (2010) mentioned that in other to illustrate thealtruism’s action within a TAM framework, altruism should besupported by an additional perceived construct which turnedout to be perceived encouragement since they consider reciprocalaltruism. However, they failed to mention another importantform of altruism, that being the concept of kin altruism. Ashtonet al. (1998) stated kin altruism is related to personality charac-teristics. It could be assumed that people are doing something be-cause they themselves may enjoy doing it. This behavior appearsto be largely altruistic based on kin altruism. Wasko and Faraj(2000) agreed that people participates in electronic communityand help others because participation is fun and helping others

is enjoyable and brings satisfaction. Another study from Waskoand Faraj (2005) also found the mean level of enjoyment creatingby helping was very high. Therefore, the following hypothesis isproposed:

Hypothesis 14. Altruism will have a positive effect on perceivedplayfulness in the UCC services participation context.

3.5. Telepresence

Telepresence is defined as ‘‘the experience of presence in anenvironment by means of a communication medium’’ (Steuer,1992). Another similar telepresence definition from Walker andSheppard (1997) stated ‘‘Telepresence is enabling human interac-tion at a distance, creating a sense of being present at remote loca-tion.’’ Telepresence has been long used as a typical construct invirtual environment, e.g. (Held & Durlach, 1992; Sheridan, 1992;Steuer, 1995). Mahfouz, Philaretou, and Theocharous (2008) men-tioned that while browsing the Internet, there are also sensationsof time distortion, enjoyment, and heightened telepresence. Re-cently, telepresence has been thought to be a variable which alsocontributes to social network service users to provide a consistentand natural interface, and it can be as a functionality which leadsa user to perceive that she/he is getting in touch simultaneouslywith a multiple space, which may decrease the efforts involved inpsychological transportation (Kwon & Wen, 2010). Suh and Chang(2006) also pointed that telepresence lead to consumers perceivingthat they are informed about a product, therefore, feel morepositively about it. From this point of view, telepresence could beemployed to explain users’ behavior toward UCC services. Mollenand Wilson (2009) stated that the experience of telepresence is,however, not in itself enough to generate a relationship with a brandsufficient to induce usage intention. Also, Suh and Chang (2006)found no direct correlation between telepresence and purchaseintention. Lastly, Kwon and Wen (2010) discovered that the in-crease of telepresence through a social network service positivelyaffects perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and perceivedencouragement. The following hypotheses are hence proposed:

Hypothesis 15. Telepresence will have a positive effect onperceived ease of use in the UCC services participation context.

Hypothesis 16. Telepresence will have a positive effect onperceived usefulness in the UCC services participation context.

Social Identity

Altruism

Telepresence

Perceived Encouragement

Perceived Usefulness

Perceived Ease of Use

Perceived Playfulness

Social Trust

Intention to Use

Fig. 1. The research model of UCC service use.

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Hypothesis 17. Telepresence will have a positive effect on per-ceived encouragement in the UCC services participation context.

However, one fascinating and important aspect of telepresencethat was not mentioned in Kwon & Wen’s model is the relationshipbetween telepresence and perceived playfulness. Pace’s (2004)study showed that when a user feels telepresence whilst browsinga 3D virtual world, they forget previous plans, and has a height-ened sense of curiosity. In a computer-mediated environment,telepresence is an essential factor for enabling a person to maintainconcentration on the computer-based task (Finneran & Zhang,2003). According to Moon and Kim (2001), concentration, curiosity,and enjoyment are the three dimensions of perceived playfulness.Hence, telepresence may be related to increase the perceived play-fulness in the context of UCC use. These lead to a furtherhypothesis:

Hypothesis 18. Telepresence will have a positive effect on per-ceived playfulness in the UCC services participation context.

3.6. Perceived encouragement

One of the most powerful forces in our lives is encouragement.Moffatt, Chitwood, and Bigger (1994) pointed out that a personwho gets encouragement tends to make fewer mistakes than thosewho do not get any encouragement. In a study of counseling psy-chology, failed students who get high motivation are found to getsignificant improvement on their GPA score and have fewer ‘‘F’’grade than those who get low motivation (McGuire & Noble,1973). The significant impact of the use of encouragement wasfrom Campos’s (1929) experiment on training dogs where he foundthat verbal encouragement improved their performance.

While encouragement is usually employed in psychology(Daniel, 1956; Howard, 1966), it is not commonly used in the con-text of information technology. However, Kwon and Wen (2010)have recently found that encouragement (literal encouragementrather than verbal encouragement), which they named ‘perceivedencouragement’, is also a variable involved in a user’s behavior insocial network use. It is so named because it shows how a personperceives another’s encouraging expression rather than how theperson express her/his willingness to encourage different people.In their study, perceived encouragement was curiously found tobe a factor that had significant impacts directly on perceived use-fulness as well as the actual use of social network service. Thisdeterminant may explain users’ behavior in the context of UCCuse as well. As is evident, unlike other technologies where usageintention can usually occur because users see the necessity andbenefits of the technologies, a user who participates in a UCC ser-vice does not only receive benefits from others, but she/he usuallygives feedbacks and/or share the benefits with others as well;therefore they need a lot of encouragement in order to make themkeep sharing. In Kwon & Wen’s (2010) study, perceived encourage-ment had influence on perceived usefulness and on intention touse. Based on their work, the hypotheses were proposed in thecontext of UCC use as followed:

Hypothesis 19. Perceived encouragement will have a positiveeffect on perceived usefulness in the UCC services participationcontext.

Hypothesis 20. Perceived encouragement will have a positiveeffect on behavioral intention to participate the UCC services.

A further and arguably important point that was not mentionedin the above study is the impact of perceived encouragement onsocial trust. In a recent study about trust in virtual teams

(Greenberg, Greenberg, & Antonucci, 2007), encouragement wasrevealed to be a determinant of trust as well. He mentioned thatencouragement from team members, even just an encouragingemail or short ‘thank you’ memo to express their appreciation toa member’s performance can promote trust within their teams. Asimilar example of encouragement can also be found in most ofUCC sites and many other websites: the ‘‘first welcome e-mail’’.A user receives it right after completing a new sign up. Anothercase is evident, for example, in YouTube, which allows their mem-bers to post comments on a video, rate the video, and even rateother members’ comments. Facebook quickly suggests a bunch ofknown/unknown friends and friends of friends once you becomea member. Through this encouraging functionality, a user can per-ceive that her/his existence is being considered by other membersand starts to exhibit feelings as a member of the community. In asimilar study about trust in virtual community, Ridings, Gefen,and Arinze (2002) stated that decisions to trust others are based

Table 2Respondent’s demographic information.

Measure Items (n = 186) Frequency Percent

Gender Male 71 38.17Female 115 61.83

Age 18–20 115 61.8321–23 55 29.5724–26 15 8.0627–29 1 0.54

Internet use experience <1 year 6 3.231–2 years 0 0.002–3 years 3 1.61>3 years 117 95.16

Internet use (Hours per day) <1 h 37 19.891–3 h 110 59.143–6 h 36 19.35>6 h 3 1.61

Internet use (days per week) 1–2 days 32 17.203–4 days 30 16.135–6 days 35 18.82Everyday 89 47.85

Places of Internet use (multichoices)

Home 156 83.87University 38 20.43Internet Cafe 17 9.14Others 7 3.76

Purpose of Internet use (multichoices)

Entertaining 80 43.01Study 123 66.13Int’ shopping 89 47.85Others 25 13.44

Web browser (multi choices) Internetexplorer

183 74.19

Firefox 1 0.54Safari 2 1.08Others 3 1.61

UCC knowledge Quite well 15 8.06So so 53 28.49Little 115 61.83Don’t know 3 1.61

Type of UCC use Video 65 34.95Music 75 40.32Photos 31 16.67SNS/friends 13 6.99Blogs 72 38.71

UCC use experience <3 months 22 11.833–6 months 27 14.526–12 months 34 18.28>1 year 103 55.38

UCC use (hours each time) <1 h 167 89.781–3 h 19 10.22

UCC use (hours per week) <10 h 181 97.3110–19 h 5 2.69

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Table 3Model fit summary.

Construct Members Model fits (before) Model fits (modified) Cronbach’s alpha if item deleted

Perceived usefulness PU1 CMIN/DF(2): 2.253 CMIN/DF(2): 2.253 0.840PU2 RMR: 0.008 RMR: 0.008 0.777PU3 GFI: 0.988 GFI: 0.988 0.809PU4 AGFI: 0.939 AGFI: 0.939 0.827

NFI: 0.987 NFI: 0.987IFI: 0.993 IFI: 0.993CFI: 0.992 CFI: 0.992

Perceived ease of use PEU1 CMIN/DF (0): CMIN/DF (0): 0.676PEU2 RMR: 0.000 RMR: 0.000 0.720PEU3 GFI: 1.000 GFI: 1.000 0.678

AGFI: AGFI:NFI: 1.000 NFI: 1.000IFI: 1.000 IFI: 1.000CFI: 1.000 CFI: 1.000RMSEA: 0.508 RMSEA: 0.508

Social identity SI1 CMIN/DF (0): CMIN/DF (0): 0.669SI2 RMR: 0.000 RMR: 0.000 0.561SI3 GFI: 1.000 GFI: 1.000 0.720

AGFI: AGFI:NFI: 1.000 NFI: 1.000IFI: 1.000 IFI: 1.000CFI: 1.000 CFI: 1.000RMSEA: 0.476 RMSEA: 0.476

Telepresence TE1 CMIN/DF (0): CMIN/DF (0): 0.555TE2 RMR: 0.000 RMR: 0.000 0.528TE3 GFI: 1.000 GFI: 1.000 0.645

AGFI: AGFI:NFI: 1.000 NFI: 1.000IFI: 1.000 IFI: 1.000CFI: 1.000 CFI: 1.000RMSEA: 0.387 RMSEA: 0.387

Altruism AL1 (x) CMIN/DF (0): (No data since this construct is eliminated) 0.407 (x)AL2 (x) RMR: 0.000 0.410 (x)AL3 (x) GFI: 1.000 0.484 (x)

AGFI:NFI: 1.000IFI: 1.000CFI: 1.000RMSEA: 0.257

Perceived encouragement PE1 CMIN/DF (0): 2.027 CMIN/DF (0): 2.027 0.800PE2 RMR: 0.018 RMR: 0.018 0.765PE3 GFI: 0.990 GFI: 0.990 0.793PE4 AGFI: 0.948 AGFI: 0.948 0.843

NFI: 0.987 NFI: 0.987IFI: 0.994 IFI: 0.994CFI: 0.993 CFI: 0.993RMSEA: 0.074 RMSEA: 0.074

Social trust ST1 CMIN/DF (0): CMIN/DF (0): 0.611ST2 RMR: 0.000 RMR: 0.000 0.600ST3 GFI: 1.000 GFI: 1.000 0.615

AGFI: AGFI:NFI: 1.000 NFI: 1.000IFI: 1.000 IFI: 1.000CFI: 1.000 CFI: 1.000RMSEA: 0.411 RMSEA: 0.411

Perceived playfulness PP1 (x) CMIN/DF (0):10.519 CMIN/DF (0): 0.797 (x)PP2 (x) RMR: RMR: 0.763 (x)PP3 GFI: GFI: 0.782PP4 AGFI: AGFI: 0.728PP5 NFI: 0.848 NFI: 1.000 0.759

IFI: 0.860 IFI: 1.000CFI: 0.858 CFI: 1.000RMSEA: 0.227 RMSEA: 0.601

Intention to use IU1 CMIN/DF (0): CMIN/DF (0): 0.706IU2 RMR: 0.000 RMR: 0.000 0.678IU3 GFI: 1.000 GFI: 1.000 0.749

AGFI: AGFI:NFI: 1.000 NFI: 1.000IFI: 1.000 IFI: 1.000CFI: 1.000 CFI: 1.000RMSEA: 0.544 RMSEA: 0.544

X indicates ‘‘deleted item’’.

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on knowledge of the other people. Based on these empirical stud-ies, perceived encouragement may have an impact on social trustin the context of UCC services, and thus the following hypothesisis proposed:

Hypothesis 21. Perceived encouragement will have a positiveeffect on social trust in the UCC services participation context.

4. Research methods

4.1. Data collection

The body of work aimed at empirically studying the determi-nants of the intention to participate in user-created contents(UCCs) services. A survey technique was used to collect data. First,a pilot study on UCC users was run to find out any ambiguousitems. And then the pre-test included five undergraduate studentsand two graduate students who were experienced in UCC and hadgood knowledge concerning UCC.

The subjects were selected from Korean undergraduate stu-dents from various departments (Computer Science, InformationSystems, Management, Business, Economics, Marketing, Social Sci-ence, etc.) in Jeonju University, South Korea. Note that the surveywas first made in English and then translated to Korean. The surveywas conducted in four different classrooms by directly handingeach of them a survey form in the Korean language, held fromthe 3rd to 14th of December 2009. Of the total 225 distributedsamples, 186 usable survey responses (82.66%) were obtained.The subjects consisted of 61.83% females and 38.17% males, over95% using the Internet for more than 3 years, and 98% acknowledg-ing UCC. Respondents’ demographic information relating to therespondents’ characteristics is shown in Table 2.

4.2. Measurement

Measurement items were developed by adopting measures thathad been validated in prior studies and modifying them to the con-text of UCC service use. The list of these items is shown AppendixA.

Measurements for perceived ease of use (PEU), perceived use-fulness (PU), and intention to use (IU) were developed from thestudy of Ryu et al. (2009), based on Davis’ prior studies. Measure-ments for social identity (IS), altruism (AL), telepresence (TE), andperceived encouragement were developed from Kwon & Wen’s(2010) study, with modifications to fit the specific context of theUCC use. The measurement of perceived playfulness (PP) was fromMoon & Kim’s (2001) study while only five out of nine measure-ments were selected from the original study which best fittedour context study. Finally the measurements for social trust (ST)were modified from Chow & Chan’s (2008) study.

Each item was measured on a five-point Likert scale, rangingfrom ‘‘strongly disagree’’ (1) to ‘‘strongly agree’’ (5).

5. Results

5.1. Validation

Factor analysis was used to reduce the number for items of eachconstruct to maintain its reliability and validity (see Table 3). As aresult:

� Three items were eliminated from perceived playfulnessbecause their SMC (Squared Multiple Correlations) less than 0.4.– ‘‘When using UCC, I do not realize the time elapsed.’’– ‘‘When using UCC, I often forget the work I do.’’

� For the altruism construct, its Cronbach’s alpha was less than0.7, and each item also had less than 0.7 of Cronbach’s alphaand had less than 0.4 of SMC. Thus, the altruism constructwas eliminated from our model.

Reliability and convergent validity of the constructs were esti-mated by Cronbach’s alpha (Table 4). Cronbach’s alphas for mostconstructs were above 0.70 except telepresence (0.671).

5.2. The structural model

The research model was analyzed using structural equationmodel (SEM) using AMOS 17. The fitness measures for the mea-surement models are shown in Table 5. The value of v2 to degreeof freedom (345) was 1.397 less than 2.00 which indicate a goodfit of the model. The value of goodness-of-fit index (GFI) was0.863, adjusted goodness-of-fit index (AGFI) was 0.824, normalizedfit index (NFI) was 0.841, incremental Fit index (IFI) was 0.949,comparative fit index (CFI) was 0.948, root mean square residual(RMR) was 0.045, and root mean square error of approximation(RMSEA) was 0.046. Almost of them are greater than the recom-mended threshold value. Therefore, the results show a good fit ofthe model.

Table 6 describes the hypothesis-testing results. Also, Fig. 2 ex-plains each model’s proven hypothesis, where bold lines indicatesignificant and dotted lines indicate not supported. Note that altru-ism was removed from our model.

The results unexpectedly showed that in the TAM constructs,except a relationship from perceived ease of use to perceived use-fulness (H1, b = 0.175, p < 0.05), the other two relationships, onefrom perceived ease of use to intention to use (H2) and anotherfrom perceived usefulness to intention to use (H3), were not signif-icant (b = �0.256, p < 0.05; b = 0.159, p > 0.05), hence were not sup-ported. Also, perceived ease of use had no influence on perceivedplayfulness (H4, b = 0.042, p > 0.05); instead, perceived playfulnessitself had total effect on intention to use (H5, b = 0.517, p < 0.001).Similarly, social trust had impact on intention to use (H7, b = 0.634,p < 0.05) while it got no influence from perceived ease of use (H6,

Table 4Cronbach’s alpha of constructs.

Constructs Items Cronbach’s alpha

Perceived usefulness (PU) PU 1, 2, 3, 4 0.853Perceived ease of use (PEU) PEU 1, 2, 3 0.771Social identity (SI) SI 1, 2, 3 0.738Telepresence (TE) TE 1, 2, 3 0.671Altruism (AL) AL 1, 2, 3 0.535Perceived encouragement (PE) PE 1, 2, 3, 4 0.843Social trust (ST) ST 1, 2, 3 0.700Perceived playfulness (PP) PP 1, 2 0.804Intention to use UCC services (IU) IU 1, 2, 3 0.789

Table 5Fit indices for measurement and structural model.

Goodness-of-fit measure Recommendedvalue

Cronbach’salpha

v2/degree of freedom (CMIN/DF) 62.00 1.397Root mean square residual (RMR) 60.05 0.045Goodness-of-fit index (GFI) P0.80 0.863Adjusted goodness-of-fit index (AGFI) P0.80 0.824Normalized fit index (NFI) P0.90 0.841Incremental fit Index (IFI) P0.90 0.949Comparative fit index (CFI) P0.90 0.948Root mean square error of approximation

(RMSEA)60.05 0.046

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b = 0.044, p > 0.05). Social identity had significant influence on per-ceived encouragement (H8, b = 0.231, p < 0.05) and on perceivedease of use (H10, b = 0.416, p < 0.001) but not on perceived useful-ness (H9, b = �0.063, p > 0.05). Telepresence was found to have animpact on perceived usefulness (H16, b = 0.395, p < 0.05), on per-ceived encouragement (H17, b = 0.759, p < 0.001) and on perceivedplayfulness (H18, b = 1.092, p < 0.001) while it did not show any ef-fect on perceived ease of use (H15, b = 0.084, p > 0.05). Perceivedencouragement had no influence on perceived usefulness (H19,b = �0.016, p > 0.05) and on intention to use (H20, b = 0.197,

p > 0.05); instead, perceived encouragement showed significantimpact on social trust (H21, b = 0.533, p < 0.001). Overall, amongst21 hypotheses, nine hypotheses (H5, H7, H8, H10, H16, H17, H18,and H21) were supported.

6. Conclusion

The goal of this study was developed to investigate what deter-minants would affect the user acceptance of a UCC service, byempirically studying TAM model and other six external variables– social identity, altruism, telepresence, perceived encouragement,perceived playfulness and social trust.

As mentioned previously, the findings of our study unexpect-edly showed that the impact of perceived ease of use and perceivedusefulness on intention to use UCC was not supported althoughthere was an impact of perceived ease of use on perceived useful-ness. As a matter of fact, many researchers, even Davis himself,have already argued that TAM model was not necessarily suitableto explain human behavior toward new technologies since themodel was designed to specifically explain computer usage behav-ior. Evidently today’s computer software is certainly powerful andthe Internet speed is especially fast. Also, Table 1 shows that everysurvey respondent has been using computers, and more than 95%of them have used the Internet for more than three years. Peopleget used to the usefulness and simplicity of technology, and sothe reason for their desire to use UCC perhaps stems from themwanting to find something greater. From this perspective, onecan conclude that TAM is not an appropriate model to explainthe UCC usage. It also suggests that people today expect this typeof technology to be more than just a useful and user-friendly tool.

In fact, the affect of perceived playfulness on intention to usewas shown to be highly significant, which suggests users needsomething else: playfulness. Actually, the relationship has alreadybeen hypothesized and also supported in Moon & Kim’s (2001) lit-erature. By combining their results with our experiments, ahypothesis of ours which states that ‘‘a UCC service that can offerhigher enjoyment is most likely to gain more members’’ is con-firmed. On the other hand, the experiments showed that perceivedplayfulness did not draw influence from perceived ease of usewhich is opposite to Kim and Moon’s study. Instead, perceivedplayfulness received a significant impact from telepresence, therelationship of which is one of our new supposed hypotheses.The relationship between telepresence, perceived playfulness and

Table 6Hypothesis-testing results.

Hypothesis Effects Standard PathCoefficient

p-Value

H1 Perceived ease of use ? perceivedusefulness

0.175 0.025

H2 Perceived ease of use ? intentionto use

�0.256 0.021

H3 Perceived usefulness ? intentionto use

0.159 0.219

H4 Perceived ease of use ? perceivedPlayfulness

0.042 0.704

H5 Perceived playfulness ? intentionto use

0.517 0.000

H6 Perceived ease of use ? socialtrust

0.044 0.429

H7 Social trust ? intention to use 0.634 0.040H8 Social identity ? perceived

encouragement0.231 0.030

H9 Social identity ? perceivedusefulness

�0.063 0.548

H10 Social identity ? perceived ease ofuse

0.416 0.003

H15 Telepresence ? perceived ease ofuse

0.084 0.577

H16 Telepresence ? perceivedusefulness

0.395 0.027

H17 Telepresence ? perceivedencouragement

0.759 0.000

H18 Telepresence ? perceivedplayfulness

1.092 0.000

H19 Perceivedencouragement ? perceivedusefulness

�0.016 0.910

H20 Perceivedencouragement ? intention to use

0.197 0.383

H21 Perceivedencouragement ? social trust

0.533 0.000

0.231*

0.395*

0.533***

0.517***

0.634*

Significant path (p<0.05) Non-significant path

* p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001

Social Identity

Telepresence

Perceived Encouragement

Perceived Usefulness

Perceived Ease of Use

Perceived Playfulness

Social Trust

Intention to Use

0.175*

1.092***

0.416**

0.759***

Fig. 2. The results of the research model.

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the intention to use, indicates that the higher a UCC service stim-ulates users’ emotions, the higher playfulness they can perceive,resulting in a lot more of them participating in the service.

Actually, telepresence did not only exhibit influence on per-ceived playfulness but it also influenced other constructs includingperceived encouragement and perceived usefulness, although itdid not show any effect on perceived ease of use, which is contra-dictory to a finding in Kwon & Wen’s (2010) study. The impact oftelepresence on perceived encouragement implies that the highera UCC service stimulates users’ feeling, the more useful the serviceis regarded, and the higher the possibility the users will encourageothers to join the service. As mentioned, there is another influenceof telepresence on perceived usefulness; though since perceivedusefulness had no impact on intention to use, this influence seemsto be unnecessary.

As for social identity, the results showed that while it had noinfluence on perceived usefulness, social identity still had a signif-icant impact on perceived encouragement and on perceived ease ofuse. These relationships have already hypothesized in Mazman &Usluel’s (2009) study and confirmed in Kwon & Wen’s (2010)study. Therefore, concerning the relationship between social iden-tity to perceived encouragement, we reconfirm that individualswho have a higher social identity and hence relatively more pridetend to expect more encouraging messages and are more like to ex-press pride to their in-groups (Clement et al., 2001; Kwon & Wen,2010). Again, since perceived ease of use had no influence on inten-tion to use, the impact of social identity on perceived ease of usewill not be mentioned.

Another new relationship that has been discovered was causal-ity from perceived encouragement to social trust. The results indi-cated that perceived encouragement had highly significantinfluence on social trust. Thus, the hypothesis—one who perceiveshigher encouragement from a social tends to gain more trust in thesocial—is confirmed. Moreover, the aforementioned effect thencaused social trust to also have significant impact on intention touse, which showed a contrast to the result of Chow & Chan’s(2008) study where social trust was found to have no relationshipsat all in their model. By looking at the results a bit closer, it isshown that instead of a direct influence of perceived encourage-ment on intention to use, it firstly affects social trust and in turnsocial trust affects intention to use. A relationship between socialidentity and intention to use indicates that users may not readilyparticipate in a service soon after receiving encouragement fromthe service and/or members in the service, even though they havevery high social identity, until they fully trust in the service and/ormembers in the service.

In summary, this study contributes the following. Firstly, threenew relationships were discovered: (1) an influence of telepresenceon perceived playfulness, (2) an influence of perceived encourage-ment on social trust and (3) an influence of social trust on intentionto participate in UCC services. Additionally, we successfully adoptedperceived playfulness and perceived encouragement to this model.Last but not least, the findings showed that social identity was animportant factor of perceived encouragement, and telepresencewas an important factor of perceived encouragement as well asperceived playfulness in UCC usage context.

6.1. Implications for practitioners

This study pointed out the importance of understanding humanbehavior toward popular technologies such as UCC so that practi-tioners can gain greater advantage from UCC by paying more atten-tion to the value of the five variables: social identity, telepresence,perceived encouragement, social trust, perceived playfulness. Ourfindings have shown that individuals who have higher social iden-tity and telepresence tend to receive more encouragement. A

welcome message, birthday congratulation card, well done mes-sage, etc, are good examples of encouragement that a UCC serviceshould not forget. The service should actively continue introducingusers to friends, both old and new, so that they will become morecomfortable in knowing they are not alone in the service. Plus,there must be a provision of a functionality that allows them toencourage each other. Also, do not forget to persuade them to en-gage more in a community so that individuals who have a high so-cial identity may join the activity. Providing realistic content is alsoan important means encourage them as it provides adequate levelsof telepresence.

Conversely, encouragement can easily be confused as spam,scam or phishing11 if not carefully considered. For example, insteadof being encouraged, a lot of emails sent would only serve to annoyand lead to being marked as spam. Too much persuading could makethem suspicious about the service activity. Too much encourage-ment from other members may be confused as phishing. As is evi-dent from the experiment results, perceived encouragement neverhad direct influence on intention to use. Instead, it had influence firston social trust and then from social trust to intention use. Therefore,the service needs to carefully give encouragement in the degree towhich a person perceives that the service is trustful. Moreover, thesite should keep users’ confidential information and provide, forexample, trustful information with trustful sources, clear mission,and fact sheets, in order to build and strengthen trust in the service.

Another strong factor which directly affects intention to use isperceived playfulness. In terms of perceived playfulness, theservice provider should create more activities or games or even on-line games that could keep members joyfully busy in a website.Those activities should be frequently updated and made morechallenging so that members would find them refreshingly enjoy-able. Moreover, a new impact of telepresence on perceived playful-ness indicates that in order for a UCC service to be perceived moreas a playful place, users need to be provided higher telepresence—the feeling of being ‘‘there.’’ Also, a website should be strategicallytransformed to be more like a new society and should also provideusers the functionality to create their own societies.

6.2. Limitations

Although our study provided meaningful implication for UCC, ithad a few inherent limitations. Firstly, the survey data was lessthan 200 which could bias the result. Secondly, the survey respon-dents were all in their 20’s; hence, our findings may not be appliedto all age UCC users. Finally, all survey participants were Korean.Their culture, life style and background may differ from othercountries.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Francois Kotze for provid-ing language assistance.

Appendix A. List of items by construct

Perceived usefulness (PU)PU1 Using UCC is advantageousPU2 Using UCC is valuablePU3 Using UCC is beneficialPU4 Using UCC is useful

(continued on next page)

11 Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitiveinformation such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masqueradingas a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication (Wikipedia.org).

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Perceived ease of use (PEU)PEU1 UCC tool is clear and understandablePEU2 I find UCC easy to usePEU3 Learning to use UCC is easy for me

Social identity (SI)SI1 As a member of the community, my position in

community is very importantSI2 As a member of the community, I am the type of

person who likes to engage in my communitySI3 Activities in my community is the important part of

my life

Telepresence (TE)TE1 While engaging with the UCC, I feel I am in a different

societyTE2 I feel that UCC create a new societyTE3 When using UCC, I feel like other people and I talk to

each other

Altruism (AL)AL1 I like helping other peopleAL2 Creating UCC content can help others with similar

problemsAL3 I enjoy helping others through UCC

Perceived encouragement (PE)PE1 Members in UCC services tend to give me affirmative

evaluationPE2 Members in UCC services tend to be satisfied with mePE3 Members in UCC services give me great

encouragementPE4 Members in UCC services tend to be aware of my

existence

Social trust (ST)ST1 I trust other UCC members to help me out if I get into

difficultiesST2 I trust UCC services’ information to be trueST3 I would trust UCC services to do the work right

Perceived playfulness (PP)PP1 When using UCC, I do not realize the time elapsedPP2 When using UCC, I often forget the work I must doPP3 Using UCC gives enjoyment to me for my taskPP4 Using UCC stimulates my curiosityPP5 Using UCC arouses my imagination

Intention to use UCC services (IU)IU1 I will create UCC contents and share these with others,

if possibleIU2 I will participate in UCC services in the near futureIU3 It is worth to participate in UCC services

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