Understanding user participation in online communities: A systematic literature review of empirical studies
Introduction
Since their introduction over 20 years ago, online communities have become one of the most popular forms of online services globally. Consequently, a large number of studies exist on the topic. While online communities have been studied in various contexts, there has not been a cohesive review that would synthesize the results obtained on the various topics and contribute to theory development in the field. In this article, we make an attempt at creating such synthesis while placing particular emphasis on participation as a criterion for online community formation. In this study, online communities are understood as web-based online services with features that enable members to communicate with each other. From a historical perspective, listservs, bulletin boards and chatrooms were the first technologies of online communities. For this reason, online communities are often understood as text-based discussion forums. However, with the constant emergence of new technologies, today’s online communities are supported by a wide range of software.
The Internet is generally considered to enhance participation by encouraging and enabling more people to voice their opinion. However, not only users benefit from online participation: one of the most fascinating and at the same time the most challenging aspects of online communities is their dependency on users for the generation of content, as any user can act as a producer of the content consumed on the sites (Baumer et al., 2011, Velasquez et al., 2013). Encouraging participation and building thriving communities are frequently cited central challenges for any online community provider. Therefore, understanding what makes users participate has become a key question in online community studies. Research has found that online participation is connected to many positive outcomes as it indicates greater member loyalty and satisfaction with the online community (Blanchard & Markus, 2004). All in all, social media has dramatically changed the user’s role by collapsing the distinction between media consumers and producers, and making users who participate by generating and circulating content the key element of any social media site (Miller, 2011). In this sense, participation is essential for the sustainability of online communities.
This systematic review seeks to analyze empirical findings on online community participation to date in order to provide an overview of main research themes and methods, as well as implications for future research and practice. The objective of this study is twofold: first, we review articles in order to understand the current state of research, particularly how the concept of participation has been defined. Second, we discuss the main issues influencing user participation based on the empirical findings presented in the reviewed studies. In conclusion, we aim to point out emerging research topics and the most important gaps in the field to help the direction of future work.
Section snippets
Definitions and approaches to online communities
The first and presumably the most cited definition of an online community was produced in 1993 by Howard Rheingold, who described them as “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling” (Rheingold, 1993, p. 5). Jenny Preece (2000) approached online communities from the administrator’s viewpoint, emphasizing that developing them constitutes a practical activity and that a definition of an online community is
Selection of studies
Systematic literature review was chosen as a method in order to identify and review how online community participation has been understood in academic research articles. A systematic review is conducted using a systematic, rigorous standard, aiming not only to summarize existing research on the topic but also to include an element of analytical criticism (Okoli & Schabram, 2010). In a stand-alone literature review, literature in a chosen field is reviewed without collecting or analyzing any
Online community types
The selection of studies covers a wide spectrum of websites; the most actively studied sites were discussion forums or bulletin boards dedicated to a certain topic, such as health or a specific hobby (21), communities of practice intended for learning or professionals (11), enterprise communities or communities of transaction (9), social network sites (7), wikis (5), creative communities including open-source software development (5), and question–answering sites (5). The sizes of the
Discussion
The research on online community participation can be categorized into five main research types. The majority of the reviewed studies have focused on users’ individual characteristics and investigated their relation to participation. Among the individual characteristics are psychological topics such as motivations, personality traits, values, and benefits that are perceived from participation. Research on individual characteristics has identified different user types and their relation to both
Conclusions
Several issues have emerged from the review to be considered in future studies. First of all, there is still no universally accepted definition for online communities, and when definitions have been employed, they originate from the early online community studies, with Jenny Preece (2000) as the most often cited source. In the majority of the studies, ‘online community’ is used as a general term to describe software that allows people to interact and share content in the same online
Acknowledgement
This work was funded by Doctoral programme of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tampere. The author thanks professors Frans Mäyrä and Eero Sormunen for their valuable comments on the work throughout the writing process.
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