Lurking and Information Sharing on E-Commerce Sites

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2. Theoretical Background And Research Model

The research approach taken in this study is in the exploratory region for two reasons: 1) information privacy research on social media is in its infancy, and 2) there is no known study that has established a relationship between lurking and concern form information privacy in the social media context. This region is described by Stebbins (2010) as the region of little known phenomena. Research in this region typically combines the report of descriptive statistics and generation of relationships between concepts based on existing data in order to contribute to the understanding of relevant existing prior related studies (Boudreau, 2010). Hence, this study explores relationships between lurking, concern for information privacy, and behavioral intentions. As shown in Figure 1, the research model for this study is developed based on exploratory relationships between the model variables.

Figure 1.

The research model

Key Terms in this Chapter

Unauthorized Access: Refers to concern that data about individuals are readily available to people authorized to view or work with this data.

Secondary Use: Describes the use of personal data collected by an organization for a legitimate reason, but used for a secondary purpose without the consent of the user.

Errors: Describe the inaccurate storage or representation of the data collected by an organization.

Lurking: Describe the act of joining an online community with the aim of passively participating for a period of time before making a decision to actively participate in the community.

Concern for Information Privacy: Describe consumers’ concern about how their personal information is gathered, stored, and used by online technologies such as e-commerce sites and social media sites.

Collection: Describes an individual’s perception of the amount of information being captured via organizational practices.

Behavioral Intentions: Describe users’ future intention to register/create online accounts with online merchants to facilitate online transactions.