Instrument Measure Development

Using traditional interview approaches and adapted measurement items in online communities, we attempt to understand the visitor experience in museum online communities through visitors’ behavior and preferences. The flow theory literature provides a comprehensive foundational perspective on consciousness and perception and integrates the various components of online museum communities as we construct the research model. Our research model combines flow theory and information communication technology to uncover the psychological factors that influence individuals’ involvement behavior. Three independent constructs were identified from flow theory and ICT interaction: playfulness, uniqueness, and technology interaction. A total of 17 questionnaire items for these three constructs were adapted from those in Mauri et al. (2011), Jafari et al. (2013), Shaw and Krug (2013), Csikszentmihalyi et al. (2014), Guo et al. (2016), King et al. (2016), Camarero et al. (2018), Kim (2018). Member perceptions of esteem and relevance in online communities, which include captivation and intangible experiences, relate to the social media tools used to enable the creation of immersion, flow, and physical pleasure pertaining to online community environment (Barker, 2015; Le et al., 2016; Legget, 2018). Given this, scholars contend that, only when individuals perceive esteem and relevance from a community will they habitually place the online community as a top priority. Because esteem and relevance within the community climate are intangible, the present study modifies items drawn from the survey approach of Barker (2015), which measures direct sensory perception, along with Siglioccolo et al. (2016), Legget (2018), constructing a total of six measurement items.

According to research, triggered situational interest is a temporary psychological state that describes the arousal of a person’s attention for a short period of time by affect, novelty, or external information, in turn creating more enduring and persistent individual interest (Hidi and Renninger, 2006; Wigfield and Cambria, 2010; Knogler et al., 2015; Falk et al., 2018). Following the definition of Hidi and Renninger (2006); Knogler et al. (2015), interest is a protracted tendency to engage with a particular subject or activity over time. The interest questionnaire used in the current study was adapted from Knogler et al. (2015) and includes two dimensions: emotional attention or affect and continual involvement in related tasks. Therefore, in this study, audience emotional resonance was conceptualized as an affective construct that represents the positive emotion and enjoyment that audiences experience during their participation. The term “involvement” as viewed from a participant’s perspective can be defined as easily interacting with community members, knowledge sharing and constructing, and switching between friendly online and off-line environments (Pietroni et al., 2018). To mitigate difficulties in measuring and observing continual participate behaviors, the present study used emotional resonance and involvement as indicators for continual behaviors, modifying question items from Sawyer et al. (2011); Charitonos et al. (2012), Knogler et al. (2015); Pietroni et al. (2018), Ch’ng et al. (2019) and on emotional resonance (four items) and community involvement (six items), and statements were modified to fit the context of the museum’s online community.

To operationalize this study, we converted each of the constructs into statements that could be measured using Likert scales. All items were measured using a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” (see Appendix Table A1 for survey items). These statements were included in our questionnaire to evaluate users’ subjective insights into experiences with museum websites and communities. Two stages were conducted in the pretest. Participants were allowed to complete the questionnaire on their own in 20 min, but could seek clarifications from the researchers at any time during the process in the first stage. After completing the questionnaires, researchers explained meaning of every question to participants and ensured no misinterpretation. The questionnaire was modified to ensure all statements were unambiguous and that participants would not feel overly burdened while completing it. This method allowed each participant to focus on latent insights while creating a compact instrument and avoided possible sources of misunderstanding. The initial questionnaires were administered to 100 students who reported that they had participated in a museum’s online community. The pilot test Cronbach’s α reliability scores ranged from 0.795 for relevance to 0.935 for playfulness, implying that the scales used in this study satisfactorily measured the constructs of interest.