Strange Intersections - Revisited

This post discusses a dissertation that could have easily been included in my "scholarly research" post, but I felt it was worthy of a post of its own. The reason it’s a "strange intersection" is because it is directly related to three different significant academic interests of mine, and they all converged in one dissertation. In fact, I had trouble deciding on which blog to post it, and finally decided this one – and make a link to this post from my other blog.

Why do people engage in social computing?: A need fulfillment perspective
by Sachdev, Vishal, Ph.D., The University of Texas at Arlington, 2007, 112 pages; AAT 3307230 This is a dissertation that thoroughly explores constructs related to measuring and defining interactivity. (You may need to be logged into a library data base with access to ProQuest searches, such as BYU's library, to access this link)

I was first interested in the content of the dissertation because of our new media class. And also because of the two main research questions it attempts to answer:
a. What is the motivation for users to participate in social computing?
b. What will it take for these sites to retain existing users and attract new ones?

I was interested in it from a web analytics perspective because the key element Sachdev researched in answering these questions was interactivity. Interactivity and all of its’ sub-constructs are exactly what we’d like analytics to be able to measure better for educational purposes. Sachdev’s study gives me some solid research on which to base ideas about possible improvements or applications of web-analytics. Additionally, there are some possibilities about segmentation that can be gleaned from the information here – another big part of web analytics.

Last, but not least, (nerd alert here) he presents his hypothesis and his results in (among other ways) factor analysis diagrams, which I recently studied this summer! So…instead of just flipping through the statistical results to get to the “meat” of the written conclusion, I was actually quite interested in reading about the methods he used. I was also familiar with the software he used for the analysis, and actually understood what he did, and the diagrams and reported results made perfect sense! That, in and of itself was really exciting (as well as a little unusual  ) I also was encouraged to see that he used both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.

Ok, Ok, but will YOU be interested? Well here are the factors he explores in relation to interactivity: control, autonomy, responsiveness, social presence, deep profiling, self-presentation, competence, and relatedness – all loading on motivation, and then intention, and then use. Wouldn’t most everyone in our field with interests in improving learning want to know more about those constructs?