• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• 제20권3호
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• pp.167-190
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• 2010

The research conducted here focuses on the effect of factors that affect the behavior of UCC (User Created Content) website users, other than user's rational recognition of how useful a UCC website can be. Most discussions in the existing literature on information systems have focused on users' evaluation how a UCC website can help to attain the users' own goals. However, there are other factors and this research pays attention to an individual's 'personality,' which is stable and biological in nature. Specifically, I have noted here that 'extroversion' and 'neuroticism,' the two common personality factors presented in Eysenck's most representative 'EPQ Model' and 'Big Five Model,' are the two personality factors that affect a site's 'usefulness,' by this I mean how useful does the user consider the website and its content. How useful a site is considered by the user is the other factor that has been regarded as the antecedent factor that influences the adoption of information systems in the existing MIS (Management Information System) research. Secondly, as using or creating a UCC website does not guarantee the user's or the creator's extrinsic motivation, unlike when using the information system within an organization, there is a greater likelihood that the increase in user's activities in relation to a UCC website is motivated by emotional factors rather than rational factors. Thus, I have decided to include the relationship between an individual's personality and what they find pleasurable in the research model. Thirdly, when based on the S-O-R Paradigm of Mehrabian and Russell, the two cognitive factors and emotional factors are finally affected by stimulus, and thus these factors ultimately have an effect on an individual's respondent behavior. Therefore, this research has presented an assumption that the recognition of how useful the site and content is and what emotional pleasure it provides will finally affect the behavior of the UCC website users. Finally, the relationship between the recognition of how useful a site is and how pleasurable it is to useand UCC usage may differ depending on certain situational conditions. In other words, the relationship between the three factors may vary according to how much users are involved in the creation of the website content. Creation thus emerges as the keyword of UCC. I analyzed the above relationships through the moderating variable of the user's involvement in the creation of the site. The research result shows the following: When it comes to the relationship between an individual's personality and what they find pleasurable it is extroverted users who have a greater likelihood to feel pleasure when using a UCC website, as was expected in this research. This in turn leads to a more active usage of the UCC web site because a person who is an extrovert likes to spend time on activities with other people, is sensitive to new experiences and stimuli and thus actively responds to these. An extroverted person accepts new UCC activities as part of his/her social life, rather than getting away from this new UCC environment. This is represented by the term 'Foxonomy' where the users meet a variety of users from all over the world and contact new types of content created by these users. However, neuroticism creates the opposite situation to that created by extroversion. The representative symptoms of neuroticism are instability, stress, and tension. These dispositions are more closely related to stress caused by a new environment rather than this creatingcuriosity or pleasure. Thus, neurotic persons have an uneasy feeling and will eventually avoid the situation where their own or others' daily lives are frequently exposed to the open web environment, this eventually makes them have a negative attitude towards the web environment. When it comes to an individual's personality and how useful site is, the two personality factors of extroversion and neuroticism both have a positive relationship with the recognition of how useful the site and its content is. The positive, curious, and social dispositions of extroverted persons tend to make them consider the future usefulness and possibilities of a new type of information system, or website, based on their positive attitude, which has a significant influence on the recognition of how useful these UCC sites are. Neuroticism also favorably affects how useful a UCC website can be through a different mechanism from that of extroversion. As the neurotic persons tend to feel uneasy and have much doubt about a new type of information system, they actively explore its usefulness in order to relieve their uncomfortable feelings. In other words, neurotic persons seek out how useful a site can be in order to secure their own stable feelings. Meanwhile, extroverted persons explore how useful a site can be because of their positive attitude and curiosity. As a lot of MIS research has revealed that the recognition of how useful a site can be and how pleasurable it can be to use have been proven to have a significant effect on UCC activity. However, the relationship between these factors reveals different aspects based on the user's involvement in creation. This factor of creationgauges the interest of users in the creation of UCC contents. Involvement is a variable that shows the level of an individual's mental effort in creating UCC contents. When a user is highly involved in the creation process and makes an enormous effort to create UCC content (classed a part of a high-involvement group), their own pleasure and recognition of how useful the site is have a significantly higher effect on the future usage of the UCC contents, more significantly than the users who sit back and just retrieve the UCC content created by others. The cognitive and emotional response of those in the low-involvement group is unlikely to last long,even if they recognize the contents of a UCC website is pleasurable and useful to them. However, the high-involvement group tends to participate in the creation and the usage of UCC more favorably, connecting the experience with their own goals. In this respect, this research presents an answer to the question; why so many people are participating in the usage of UCC, the representative form of the Web 2.0 that has drastically involved more and more people in the creation of UCC, even if they cannot gain any monetary or social compensation. Neither information system nor a website can succeed unless it secures a certain level of user base. Moreover, it cannot be further developed when the reasons, or problems, for people's participation are not suitably explored, even if it has a certain user base. Thus, what is significant in this research is that it has studied users' respondent behavior based on an individual's innate personality, emotion, and cognitive interaction, unlike the existing research that has focused on 'compensation' to explain users' participation with the UCC website. There are also limitations in this research. Firstly, I divided an individual's personality into extroversion and neuroticism; however, there are many other personal factors such as neuro-psychiatricism, which also needs to be analyzed for its influence on UCC activities. Secondly, as a UCC website comes in many types such as multimedia, Wikis, and podcasting, these types need to be included as a sub-category of the UCC websites and their relationship with personality, emotion, cognition, and behavior also needs to be analyzed.