The Sense of Virtual Community: Theoretical Background and Methodological Advances

Sense of community is a subjective experience and expresses a feeling of individual´s belonging to the community. This concept place against feeling of loneliness and social isolation, while is conceptually common to social cohesion and social capital. Although there is no full agreement on its definition, it is considered as a useful conceptual instrument, through which vitality and happiness of communities can be evaluated. Sense of community at the beginning of its development was mainly restricted to the territorial communities, but gradually progressed into relational ones. Recently, researchers have given their attention to sense of community due to the growth of virtual communities. The purpose of this article is to study sense of community as well as introducing new construction of sense of virtual community. For this aim, firstly, conceptual transformation of community and its various forms are considered and then, sense of community is described. Accordingly, its various dimensions and importance in social researches are identified. Furthermore, while mention of some researches in which sense of virtual community is studied, we try to answersome questions such as: “whether members of virtual communities experience a sense of community or not?”, «What factors influence the development of sense of virtual community?» and finally, «How and under what conditions, virtual communities affect on place-based communities?»