Relationship Between Opinion Diffusion, Sense of Community, and Behavioral Consequences Moderated by Privacy Restrictiveness and Site Experience

Previous literature shows a relationship between opinion diffusion and behavioral consequences in social networks. Opinion diffusion proposes two roles: opinion leadership and opinion seeking. Behavioral consequences include forwarding and communication. The models for sense of community in social networks suggest that sense of community can also contribute to better explain behavioral consequences. Sense of community is composed by membership, influence, fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. Provided that there is a relationship between opinion diffusion, sense of community, and behavioral consequences, variables exist, known as moderators, that modify these mentioned relationships depending on the values of such moderator variables. A search for moderators conducted to identify site experience and privacy restrictiveness as possible candidates. This research relates opinion diffusion and sense of community to behavioral consequences and proposes site experience and privacy restrictiveness as moderators to the relationships. It is useful to identify variables that determine behavioral consequences, so actions may be performed to improve the benefits of participating in social networks. This study is carried out among students from a public university in Peru. The final recommendation suggests extending the study to other public and private universities.