The Impact of Virtual Community Participation on Youth Cultural Consumption: Evidence from User Behavior Data in Interest-Based Communities

Abstract

Virtual interest-based communities have emerged as pivotal digital spaces through which young people discover, select, and consume cultural content. However, prior research has relied predominantly on survey-based methodologies, self-reported measures of participation, and stated consumption intentions, with limited integration of actual social-network structures and observable behavioral consumption traces. Addressing this gap, this study leverages linked public datasets from the music-scrobbling platform Last.fm to analyze the behavioral patterns of 3,764 users aged 18 to 35. Virtual community participation is operationalized through three structural dimensions: participation breadth, network embeddedness, and community cohesion. Cultural consumption is measured across four complementary indicators: consumption intensity, consumption breadth, consumption diversity, and novelty preference. Employing social network analysis, multivariate regression, and a series of robustness checks, the study examines the relationships between these participation dimensions and consumption outcomes. The findings reveal that participation breadth is most strongly associated with consumption intensity, while network embeddedness is positively related to both consumption breadth and diversity. Community cohesion, by contrast, is negatively associated with novelty preference, suggesting that tightly connected local networks may reinforce familiar cultural choices. These relationships are generally more pronounced among users aged 18 to 24 than among those aged 25 to 35. The study contributes behavioral evidence to the literature on youth cultural consumption and offers practical implications for cross-community recommendation systems and cultural-content discovery. Nevertheless, the observational design cannot fully disentangle social influence from homophily or reverse selection.