Capturing social presence: concept explication through an empirical analysis of social presence measures

Initially the province of telecommunication and early computer-mediated communication (CMC) literature, multiple systematic reviews suggest “social presence” is now used for an increasingly diverse set of phenomena across various communication settings. Drawing upon Chaffee’s (1991) description of concept explication as the dialectic process between the conceptual and operational aspects of research, this study provides a mixed methods analysis of social presence measures to evaluate construct validity and inform a modified conceptual definition. Results reveal several distinct constructs commonly measured in the empirical literature on social presence, including salience, perceived actorhood, co-location/non-mediation, understanding, association, involvement, and medium sociability. Based on the frequencies and co-occurrences of these constructs within instruments and across different research fields, we conclude that social presence, in practice, most commonly consists of the perceptual salience of another social actor. Implications for the measurement and theorizing of social presence—and its distinction from other social experiences with media—are then considered.