Identifying Influential Factors of Knowledge Sharing in Emergency Events: A Virtual Community Perspective

Abstract

Knowledge sharing on emergency events in virtual communities is a significant information source for emergency management. Based on social cognitive theory and social capital theory as well as the consideration of the characteristics of emergency events, we employ a survey questionnaire for the empirical study and adopt the two‐stage confirmatory factor analysis method to construct a structural equation model for identifying the influential factors in knowledge sharing in emergencies. Through conducting a detailed data analysis, our study reveals that that some emergency event characteristics have significant effects on both the quality and quantity of knowledge sharing. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.