Patrick C. Dwyer

What makes users rate (share, tag, edit...)?: predicting patterns of participation in online communities

Administrators of online communities face the crucial issue of understanding and developing their user communities. Will new users become committed members? What types of roles are particular individuals most likely to take on? We report on a study that investigates these questions. We administered a survey (based on standard psychological instruments) to nearly 4000 new users of the MovieLens film recommendation community from October 2009 to March 2010 and logged their usage history on MovieLens. We found that general volunteer motivations, pro-social behavioral history, and community-specific motivations predicted both the amount of use and specific types of activities users engaged in after joining the community. These findings have implications for the design and management of online communities.

When Stigma-by-Association Threatens, Self-Esteem Helps: Self-Esteem Protects Volunteers in Stigmatizing Contexts

Drawing from theory and research on self-esteem as an important coping resource, we hypothesized that higher self-esteem would protect volunteers from the pernicious effects of stigma-by-association. In a longitudinal study of AIDS volunteers, higher anticipated stigma-by-association deterred the initiation of volunteerism for people with lower self-esteem. Three months later, greater stigma-by-association was related to less contact with an HIV+client in public (relative to private) settings, but only among volunteers lower in self-esteem. Moreover, greater relative public client contact predicted less overall satisfaction, but only for volunteers with relatively lower self-esteem. Implications for coping, stigma, and volunteer organizations are discussed.

Time perspective and volunteerism: The importance of focusing on the future

ABSTRACT Because volunteerism is a planned activity that unfolds over time, people who more frequently focus on the future might also be more likely to initiate volunteerism and sustain it over time. Using longitudinal (Study 1) and experimental (Study 2) paradigms, we investigated whether time perspective, and in particular a person’s orientation toward the future, is related to volunteers’ beliefs and behavior. In Study 1, a person’s dispositional level of future time perspective was closely linked to volunteer beliefs and behavior. In Study 2, people who wrote about the future reported higher intentions to volunteer, and this was particularly true for infrequent volunteers and those with lower levels of dispositional future time perspective. Across two studies, we found evidence that future time perspective, whether a chronic disposition or a pattern of thought elicited by someone else, is linked to volunteer beliefs and behavior.