Theory Development from Qualitative Data Mining in Knowledge Sharing and Designing its Native Scale: A case study

Over the recent years، we witnessed the advent and development of knowledge discovery approaches، especially data mining along with its particular techniques. There also have been theoretical and approach-centered analyses، studies and processing in qualitative research. The current study has discovered the effective factors in knowledge sharing among university faculty members through basic theory data mining. The findings indicated that there are four major factors in knowledge sharing among university academic staff including social-affective communication، market pricing، individual growth، internal and external authority factors. Then، a short form of the knowledge sharing questionnaire was formulated based on unstructured interviews. Data was collected from a sample of 92 faculty members of Gorgan University. The instrument validation indicated that the 20-item questionnaire had adequate reliability and validity indexes.