Video-based Observations on the Construction of Social Presence in Virtual Worlds

Social presence as the sense of being with others is a prerequisite for creating shared understanding between people. Teams that collaborate towards a shared goal need social presence for achieving mutual awareness and engagement between members for creating a shared context, defined as a mutual understanding of the team and an agreement on how the team should work. However, social presence is hard to establish in virtual teams where members are physically dispersed and collaborate by using communication technology. Virtual worlds as communication technologies are proposed to benefit social presence in virtual teams. Virtual worlds provide unique elements for mediated interaction such as a shared space, virtual objects, and virtually embodied interaction with avatar characters. Theories and empirical research on social presence in virtual worlds have been mainly concentrating on the individual perceptions of social presence. The scarcity of observational research has led to limited understanding on how the elements of virtual worlds are used to construct social presence. Filling this gap through empirically grounded research is the focus of this dissertation. The research objectives of this dissertation are to provide further understanding on how social presence in virtual worlds should be empirically studied to theorize it as a socially constructed rather than a psychologically perceived phenomenon; to enlighten how virtual team members construct social presence in virtual worlds; and to understand the implications of how social presence is constructed to the creation of shared context in virtual teams that operate in virtual worlds. This dissertation comprises four studies that address the research objectives. The empirical research is conducted in the virtual world Second Life. The data comprises 12 video recorded virtual team collaboration sessions and the teams' task outcomes. Interaction Analysis based on ethnomethodology is applied for analysis. As an answer to the first objective, this dissertation proposes the application of a dual video strategy for studying the theoretical propositions of social presence in virtual worlds. By using this strategy, this dissertation illustrates how theorizations on social presence can be approached as social constructions. As an answer to the second objective, this dissertation illustrates how people engage in verbal, nonverbal, and virtually embodied interaction for constructing social presence. Relying on the video-based observations, this dissertation shows how the elements of virtual worlds are used to initiate and maintain social presence. As an answer to the third objective, this dissertation shows how constructing social presence in virtually embodied interaction can foster the creation of shared context in virtual teams. However, engagement in virtually embodied interaction can result in either a facilitating or disrupting shared context for collaboration. These findings provide practical implications for managing virtual teams and for developing new collaboration…