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SERVICE USER PARTICIPATION IN housing and support is an important issue in national services. Nonetheless, research has found wide variations in the levels of service user participation in housing and support schemes. This paper reports on a case study evaluation of approaches to service user participation in housing and support, drawing out key requirements: for flexible approaches to service user participation, to embed service user participation within organisations, for independent facilitation, and the importance of the participation process.

This paper aims to explore a case of customer and user participation in an agile software development project, which produced a tailor‐made information system for workplace support as a step towards a theory of participatory design in agile software development.

Based on an integrated framework for user participation derived from the participatory design literature the research was performed as a case study and semi‐structured, open‐ended interviews were conducted with about a third of the development team and with a representative sample of key players and future users in the customer organization. The interview data were supplemented with company and project documents.

The paper found genuine customer and user participation carried out by onsite customers and by other operational staff in the form of direct and indirect participation and with functional and democratic empowerment. The onsite customers played informative, consultative and participative roles. The analysis revealed that planning games, user stories and story cards, working software and acceptance tests structured the customer and user participation. This form of user participation supported a balance between flexibility and project progress and resulted in a project and a product which were considered a success by the customer and the development organization. The analysis showed that the integrative framework for user participation can also fruitfully be used in a new context to understand what participatory design is and how, when and where it can be performed as an instance of a design process in agile development. As such the paper contributes to an analytical and a design theory of participatory design in agile development. Furthermore the paper explicates why participatory design contributes to the successful completion of the investigated project. By drawing on innovation theory it was found that participatory design in agile development bears the characteristics of a successful organizational innovation. Grounding further explanations in complex adaptive systems theory the paper provides an additional argument why participatory design despite some identified challenges fosters project staff to successfully carry out the agile development project.

The paper presents an exploratory, empirical study of an understudied phenomenon and contributes to theory building.

The purpose of this research is to investigate if, and in that case, how and what the e‐government field can learn from user participation concepts and theories in general information systems (IS) research. It aims to contribute with further understanding of the importance of citizen participation and involvement within the e‐government research body of knowledge and when developing public e‐services in practice.

The analysis in the paper is made from a comparative, qualitative case study of two e‐government projects. Three analysis themes are induced from the literature review; practice of participation, incentives for participation, and organization of participation. These themes are guiding the comparative analysis of our data with a concurrent openness to interpretations from the field.

The main results in this paper are that the e‐government field can get inspiration and learn from methods and approaches in traditional IS projects concerning user participation, but in e‐government, methods are also needed to handle the challenges that arise when designing public e‐services for large, heterogeneous user groups. Citizen engagement cannot be seen as a separate challenge in e‐government, but rather as an integrated part of the process of organizing, managing, and performing e‐government projects. Analysis themes of participation generated from literature; practice, incentives and organization can be used in order to highlight, analyze, and discuss main issues regarding the challenges of citizen participation within e‐government. This is an important implication based on this paper that contributes both to theory on and practice of e‐government.

Lessons to learn from this paper concern that many e‐government projects have a public e‐service as one outcome and an internal e‐administration system as another outcome. A dominating internal, agency perspective in such projects might imply that citizens as the user group of the e‐service are only seen as passive receivers of the outcome – not as active participants in the development. By applying the analysis themes, proposed in this paper, citizens as active participants can be thoroughly discussed when initiating (or evaluating) an e‐government project.

The paper addresses challenges regarding citizen participation in e‐government development projects. User participation is well researched within the IS discipline, but the e‐government setting implies new challenges that are not explored enough.

Government social media profiles (GSPs) are increasingly used by government agencies during social crises, and the success of GSPs is highly dependent on netizens’ participation behavior (NPB). Drawing upon the social support theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model to examine the determinants and outcomes of NPB during a social crisis.

To test the research model, a field survey was conducted in the context of Tianjin 2015 explosions in China. The authors adopted a two-step approach to test the models. First, the authors conducted exploratory factor analysis to evaluate the measurement properties of the reflective latent constructs. Then, the authors performed a structural equation analysis to test the hypotheses.

The results show that information support and emotional support are significant determinants of NPB and persona involvement moderates the relationships between them. Additionally, this study reveals that information source preference and increasing enthusiasm for becoming a civil journalist are two critical and significant outcomes of NPB.

There are some limitations in this paper that must be taken into account when interpreting its findings. First, the study is designed on a single profile and concerns a single social crisis. Additionally, future research might consider incorporating factors beyond the individual level, e.g., community social capital (Putnam, 1993). Finally, with the emergence of various IT platforms, such as a government’s own website and online forms, future research can investigate how their characteristics can facilitate other social media platforms’ participation.

This paper offers a number of crucial research implications to the literature of social media in crisis management, thereby contributing to the explanation of NPB on GSPs in the management of social crises. Considering social support as a factor affecting NPB on GSPs, the authors also add personal involvement to the research on the functions of NPB on GSPs and include encouraging civil journalist and making GSPs the principal source of political information.

The research provides participating netizens on GSPs with some suggestions about generating more cost-effective and useful interventions to improve netizen participation levels on GSPs. The findings highlight that governmental social media profiles must focus on continuous development, such as trying best to satisfy the habits of netizens, to motivate netizens to create dependence of information acquisition on the GSPs, called information source preference. On the other hand, the study reminds netizens of the importance of NPB on GSPs during crises and encourages them to act as civil journalist.

First, the study investigated the outcome effect of NPB on GSPs on netizens’ information source preference and civil journalist. Second, this study identifies the determinants of NBPs on GSPs from both the informational and the emotional support perspectives. Third, this study investigates the moderating effects of personal involvement on the relationships between determinants from social support and NPB on GSPs.

Many records professionals are involved in the design and development of recordkeeping systems. To design recordkeeping systems that meet user needs, their perspectives have to be included in the design process. The purpose of this paper is to explore what can be learned from the domain of information systems (IS) regarding user participation in design, and then to reflect on what related to the recordkeeping dimension should be further considered.

The study is based on a review of literature in the IS development field about user participation.

Analysing how users participate in IS development reveals several aspects of interest for records professionals. There are different approaches to, purposes of and driving values in user participation, which should be transparent. For user participation to be successful, an infrastructure has to be in place. The idea of user participation may be a way to include the secondary values of records in the near term, but it may also challenge traditional roles. New issues, such as the archivist’s role as a trusted third party, should be analysed further.

This study uses knowledge from the information system field to acquire new knowledge about user participation in design, and relate it to the recordkeeping domain. This study addresses issues surrounding user participation, which has been indicated as an area in need of further development in archives and information science.

The aim of this study is to debunk the relationship between user participation practices and the development and success of information systems/information technology implementations. While most studies practically rely on how many participation activities are performed, the process through which users engage in user participation is not specified.

A mixed method approach was applied to study the research questions. A number of relationships were tested by survey data collected among 143 end-users and 49 interviews of employees of a large Dutch social insurance organization that implemented a new and integrative business process management (BPM) system.

The results show that specification of the participation context is of key importance for understanding the success of BPM implementation. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that rich participation activities hold a stronger positive relationship with the BPM system development and implementation success than other participatory activities that only assist development or implementation. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the updated theory of user participation by Markus and Mao can be turned into a useful instrument for measuring the different aspects of participation.

Most studies on user participation “only” measure how many participation activities were performed, and not how or why they were performed. Furthermore, the combination of qualitative and quantitative data and instruments resulted in a greater understanding of how exactly user participation was brought into practice and how the consequences of this practice were interrelated.

Suggests that, though user involvement in the design and implementation of expert systems (ES) is generally encouraged in the literature, the incidence of successful user participation continues to be low. Draws on research carried out for a large British company on four expert systems projects, to illustrate the problems, and penalties, of not involving the users. Company culture has a bearing on why participation is difficult. Penalties of not involving the users include non‐implementation and poor interfaces. Suggested advantages of involving users are that happy users are the best advertisement for future systems and that users can make useful suggestions to the designers. Concludes that the concept of participation needs a strong push so that it will become a familiar part of management.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of platform characteristics (i.e. media richness and interactivity) on individual perception (i.e. outcome expectations) and consequent behavioral response (i.e. user participation in online health communities (OHCs)) based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model.

This study developed a research model to test the proposed hypotheses, and the proposed model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) for which data were collected from 321 users with OHC experience using an online survey.

The empirical results show the following: (1) the three dimensions of media richness significantly affect the three outcome expectations, except that richness of expression has no significant effect on the outcome expectation of health self-management competence. (2) Human-to-human interaction significantly affects the three outcome expectations. Moreover, compared with human-to-human interaction, human-to-system interaction has a stronger impact on the outcome expectation of health self-management competence. (3) The three outcome expectations have a significant influence on user participation in OHCs.

This study extends the understanding about how platform characteristics (i.e. media richness and interactivity) motivate user participation in the context of OHCs. Drawing on the S-O-R model, this study reveals the underlying mechanisms by which media richness and interactivity are associated with outcome expectations and by which outcome expectations is associated with user participation in OHCs. This study enriches the literature on media richness, interactivity, outcome expectations and user participation in OHCs, providing insights for developers and administrators of OHCs.

Online health communities (OHCs) can be complementary to healthcare systems to improve the health behaviors of older adults with chronic diseases. This study aims to examine the impacts of habit and social support receipt on older adults' continued participation in OHCs. Particularly, the authors discussed the influences of social support received in two ways: social support received by initiating threads (direct social support receipt) and social support received by being exposed to the threads initiated by others (indirect social support receipt).

Based on the dual-process model (i.e. conscious process and unconscious process), the authors developed the research model. Data from one of the biggest online diabetes communities in Europe were collected. Besides, we used the support vector machine algorithm for social support classification and used the Cox proportion hazards model for model validation.

Older adults' continued participation is influenced by habit and indirect informational support. Habit moderates the relationship between direct informational support receipt and older adults' continued participation. Furthermore, direct and indirect emotional support receipt are both not associated with older adults' continued participation, regardless of their habit strength.

This is the first study investigating older adults' continued participation in OHCs based on the dual-process model. The findings of this study reveal that older adults' continued participation is determined by both the habit and specific conscious evaluation of benefits based on the social support receipt.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some drivers of users’ participation in online social question-and-answer (Q&A) communities based on social cognitive theory and then identify the underlying mechanism of this process.

This study developed a research model to test the proposed hypotheses, and an online survey was employed to collected data. Totally, 313 valid responses were collected, and partial least squares structural equation modeling was adopted to analyze these data.

This study empirically finds that the outcome expectations (personal outcome expectations and knowledge self-management outcome expectations) are positively related to participation in online social Q&A communities. At the same time, users’ self-efficacy positively influences their participation behaviors. It can not only directly motivate users’ participation, but also indirectly promote participation behaviors through the two dimensions of outcome expectations. Besides, perceived expertise and perceived similarity are two positive and significant environmental elements affecting users’ participation.

This study extends the understanding about how participation behaviors will be motivated in the context of online social Q&A communities. Drawing on the social cognitive theory, constructs were established based on the features of these communities. Meanwhile, some mediating effects in the motivating process were also discussed.