Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Creating And Maintaining Social Presence Via Computer-Mediated Communication: Measuring The Self-Rated Behaviors That Lead To Social Presence, Scott A. Christen

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation involved the creation and validation of a new measure of social presence. The first study involved the use of focus groups to create items for the future measure. The focus groups were presented with a set of items that were created based upon past literature; an through discussion of these items, a preliminary measure was created. The second study gathers data concerning the measure that was created from study one and an exploratory factor analysis was performed to eliminate items that did not work well with each other. This reduced the measure from 54 items to 23. The …