Online Communities for Customer Support: A Study of Participation and its Antecedents

Abstract

In this dissertation I study consumers’ participation in online communities for customer support. Based on an extensive literature review, I identify four different ways in which consumers participate in such communities: by help seeking, by help giving, by participating in reflective reframing, and by conducting reinforcing activities. An exploratory study of two online communities for customer support enables me to suggest items for measuring the four forms of participation. I statistically test and validate the new scales and items by performing a pretest on university students and running analyses in LISREL 9.10.