Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 46, May 2015, Pages 228-238
Computers in Human Behavior

Understanding user participation in online communities: A systematic literature review of empirical studies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.01.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This article reviews empirical studies on online community participation.

  • Research has mainly focused on the most visible active participants.

  • User participation is often treated as an instrument for community maintenance.

  • A simple active–passive dichotomy does not adequately describe user participation.

  • The complexity of online participation and its implications are discussed.

Abstract

Online communities have become a popular and widely studied research topic. As active participation has been acknowledged as essential for the sustainability of the communities, research has focused largely on the most visible participants with the greatest financial value for community providers. However, users can engage with the sites in different ways, which calls for a more diverse classification of participation, instead of a simple active–passive dichotomy. This systematic literature review discusses empirical studies on online community participation. The results indicate that despite the large amount of research conducted on the topic, a theoretical and conceptual framework for user participation remains undefined as most of the research has approached participation in terms of its quantity. The complexity of online participation and its implications for methodology in future studies is discussed.

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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