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Abstract
Online policy deliberation forums (OPDFs) have been increasingly initiated by governments to allow citizens to provide their input and discuss policy issues. Yet, failure to garner participation, in terms of both quantity and quality, prevents the realization of their benefits. In this regard, prior research has suggested different antecedents for the quantity and quality of participation in online forums, but without systematically considering their differences. To address this research gap, in this study we develop a theoretical model to explain the antecedents of quantity and quality of OPDF participation and test the model using a survey and content analysis of forum logs. The results indicate that quantity of participation is enhanced by the information-technology-enabled resource factor of communality but negatively influenced by collective incentives. In contrast, the antecedents of the quality of participation include both motivational and resource factors. Furthermore, communality accentuates the perceived collective incentives and persuasion benefit of participation. This study contributes to the research by proposing and testing a theoretical model that explains the different antecedents of the quantity and quality of participation in OPDFs. More broadly, the findings inform research and practice on how outcomes of web-enabled cocreation, such as those generated through OPDF participation, can be evaluated and enhanced in these online communities.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the chief editor and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments provided throughout the review process of this article. The work described in this paper was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 71229101) and a grant from IBM (Grant R-253-000-081-720).
Supplemental Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2014.995549
Notes
1. http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/media-literacy/main.pdf; accessed May 10, 2014.
2. The URL of the online appendices is www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~atreyi/JMIS_Online_Appendices.docx.
3. See the online appendices for a depiction of the general incentives model (Figure A1).
4. For a depiction of the civic voluntarism model, refer to Figure A1 in the online appendices.
5. Because mobilization is similar to the social-norms-derived incentive in the general incentives model, we do not consider it separately.
6. See the online appendices (Figure A1) for an illustration.
7. We do not include the other two resource factors, that is, time and money. First, time has been noted as an elusive concept, which makes it difficult to measure reliably through perceptions—that is, by asking respondents how much time they think they have [Citation108]. Second, the effect of money in public participation manifests primarily in individuals’ ability to make donations in political campaigns or party activities [Citation114], and hence may not be directly relevant in our research context. Nevertheless, we capture the possible effect of money through the income variable, which is included as a control in our model.
8. For more details, see Table A2 in the online appendices.
9. A detailed explanation of the different levels of argumentation in the coding scheme is provided in the online appendices.
10. Examples of the discrepancies and how they were resolved are provided in Table A3 in the online appendices.
11. Although this kappa score is acceptable, we engaged another external rater (a graduate student) to further evaluate the adequacy of the coding. This time, the researcher who coded the remaining postings briefed the external rater in detail and explained to the rater the discrepancies that surfaced previously and how they were resolved. Based on the rater’s coding of a randomly selected set of 150 postings, the kappa score this time was 0.915. This improvement was likely due to a learning effect, whereby the issues that might surface and how they should be resolved were better known and dealt with. The higher kappa score lends us greater confidence that our content analysis of the postings is reliable.
12. A seven-point Likert scale was not considered necessary for this construct because a scale of five points was adequate to cover the range of distinguishable frequencies—never, very rarely, rarely, sometimes, and often, as in previous studies [Citation126].
13. Verification based on e-mail address might not be completely accurate as the number of contributors could be overestimated if a person uses more than one e-mail address to register multiple times in the OPDF. But we could not use personal identity information because registration at the OPDF only requires provision of common demographic information, such as gender and date of birth, to encourage more open participation. Nevertheless, with this approach, we identified forty-eight duplicates (i.e., registrations with different user names but the same e-mail address) and resolved them.
14. We could not avoid duplicate e-mails a priori within our respondent sample because we were not able to e-mail the survey link directly to members (due to member privacy restrictions). Rather we had to post the survey’s URL on the OPDF website, whereby there could be duplicate responses.
15. The computation of the response rate based on all identified participants during the whole time period could yield a conservative figure, given that high attrition rates are typical in online forums [Citation95]. As an alternative estimation, we split the logs into two equal time periods and found 711 active participants in the second period, at the end of which this study was conducted (350 out of 732 participants in the first period left the forum, yielding a 47.8 percent attrition rate, which is similar to that estimated in [Citation95]). Hence, the response rate could actually be higher—that is, 14.2 percent (101/711 × 100 percent).
16. For details, see Table A4 in the online appendices.
17. For details, see Table A5 in the online appendices.
18. For a depiction of this, see Figure A1 in the online appendices.
19. For details, see Supplementary Information and Table A2 in the online appendices.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Chee Wei Phang
Chee Wei Phang is an associate professor in the Department of Information Management and Information Systems at Fudan University, China. His research interests include online social media, electronic and mobile commerce, and information technology in the public sector. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in leading journals, including Management Science, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Journal of the AIS, Information & Management, Communications of the ACM, and Long Range Planning, and in the proceedings of conferences such as the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), and Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). He serves on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management and served as an associate editor of Information & Management, and Electronic Commerce Research and Applications.
Atreyi Kankanhalli
Atreyi Kankanhalli is an associate professor in the Department of Information Systems and assistant dean (research) of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. She conducts research in the areas of knowledge management, virtual teams and communities, and information-technology-enabled innovation in service sectors in a wide range of organizations, sponsored by government and industry grants. Her work has appeared in leading journals, such as Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, ACM Transactions on MIS, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and Journal of the AIS, among others. She has presented her research at leading conferences, including ICIS, Academy of Management Meeting, and HICSS. She has served on many conference committees and on the editorial boards of such journals as Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly. She is the recipient of the IDA Gold Medal, ACM-SIGMIS Best Doctoral Dissertation award, and IBM Faculty Award.
Lihua Huang
Lihua Huang is a professor in the Department of Information Management and Information Systems at Fudan University, China. Her research interests include electronic commerce, social media, and information systems implementation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading journals, including Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information & Management, European Journal of Information Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.