This blog currently receives 30 page views a month on average. The number of comments is minuscule. It’s safe to say, then, that I write entries for my pure enjoyment and not as a sense of obligation to a huge reader base. That’s not to say I wouldn’t enjoy more page views and comments. I really would. When I see my view average go up, I get excited because I believe I’m making connections with people who enjoy reading about things that interest me. This encourages a continuation to write more.
And wouldn’t you know it, there have been studies conducted about blog writing and motivation. According to researchers from Penn State, traffic-measuring and comments are just the things that may give bloggers more motivation to write. Carmen Stavrositu, one of the researchers, says female bloggers enjoy blogging because it makes them feel empowered and part of a community.
“Women who received a high number of site visitors felt a deeper sense of agency about blogging compared to those who received fewer visitors, ultimately leading to a greater sense of influence,” Stavrositu said. “Also, women who received many comments felt more empowered than those who received very few comments, due to a strong perceived sense of community.”
S. Shyam Sundar, who worked with Stavrositu, says that comments indicate connections and page view stats indicate influence.
To test their theory, the researchers surveyed 340 female blog writers about their blog activities and feelings of empowerment.
The survey of bloggers, who were drawn at random from a Web directory of blogs written predominantly by women, showed that those who blogged for personal reasons felt a greater sense of community in the blogosphere, whereas bloggers who wrote about external subjects believed said they felt that blogging made them competent, assertive and confident.
In a follow-up experiment, researchers asked 106 female college students to create a blog and write over two days about a personal topic — for instance, personal relationships or their health. Another group of 108 participants were asked to write about external issues that were important to them, such as racism, science, social issues and politics.
The researchers then manipulated site metrics indicating the number of visitors to the blog to test how they affected the bloggers’ sense of agency. The site metrics were tweaked to indicate that some blogs received 50 visitors each day, while others received just 20.
To test how a sense of community affected the attitudes of bloggers, the researchers added more comments to some blogs, while leaving only a few comments on others. Even though the content of the comments did not differ, bloggers who received a greater number of comments felt a higher sense of community.
“Those women who write mostly about their personal lives and daily experiences become more empowered by developing a strong sense of community,” Stavrositu said. “That is, they connect with others who share similar experiences and feel like they are a part of the community.”
Stavrositu and Sundar chose female blog writers because they create more more blogs than men and continued them longer.
“In general, it seems that, unlike in a lot of technology areas, women have widely adopted blogging and social networks,” Sundar said. “However, there’s no reason to think that these results would be restricted just to women.”
If you write blog entries, and money isn’t a reason, what keeps you writing?
(Story materials from Penn State. Image via Flickr: Adam Tinworth / Creative Commons.)
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