<h3 class="page">Model</h3>

A Sense of Community

To probe the link between the existence of narratives in an online community’s culture and participation, I relied on the concept of sense of community, what Peterson, Speer, and McMillan describe as “the phenomenon of collective experience.” A sense of community is based on four elements:

1. Membership: a feeling of belonging and personal relatedness.
2. Influence: a sense of mattering and making a difference to the community and its members.
3. Integration and fulfillment of needs: members’ expectations of having their needs fulfilled by the community’s resources.
4. A shared emotional connection: a commitment and belief that members have shared and will continue to share a history together.

Hypotheses and Model

Based on this concept and on the way in which narratives work, I came up with three hypotheses to test:

Hypothesis 1: The higher the sense of community, the more likely members are to participate in culture formation through narrative accrual.

Hypothesis 2a: Members who participate in collective narrative accrual are likely to participate in community successes.

Hypothesis 2b: Members who participate in collective narrative accrual are more likely to participate in community successes than those who do not.

Hypothesis 3: Members with a higher sense of community are more likely to participate in community successes.

The model in the first image shows how these variables would interact.

First proposed model

However, once I collected the data and started doing some analysis, it became clear that dividing up the variable sense of community, the model could have more concise links. The second image shows what the final model looks like, in which we can see that the use of narratives in an online community does have an effect in member participation levels.

Final model: Use of narratives in member participation in online communities.

What we can see on the final model is that, while Membership and Shared values affect likelihood of participation directly, two other variables—Influence and shared emotional connection, and Needs fulfillment— do not have an effect on participation unless there is a use of narratives. It becomes clear now: a sense of community can partly account for higher participation in an online community, but the use of narratives as tools for culture creation allows for more variables to also channel participation.