Creating a Social Presence Measure: Self-Rated Behaviors that Indicate Mediated Presence

This study involved the creation and validation of a self-rated social presence measure. Study 1 utilized focus groups to create items. The focus group participants were presented with a set of items based upon past literature; through discussion of these items, a preliminary measure was created. Study 2 involved an exploratory factor analysis on the preliminary measure to eliminate items that did not work well with each other. This reduced the measure from 54 to 23 items. Study 3 validated a 21-item self-rated measure of creating a social presence (PSP), which can be used to determine if people have difficulty projecting themselves as real individuals willing to interact with other online communicators.