Social support for expatriates through virtual platforms: exploring the role of online and offline participation

By combining expatriate social support and online community literature, we explore the role Internet-based expat platforms can play in creating complementary opportunities of interaction leading to informational, emotional and instrumental support for expatriates in the host country. For this purpose, two studies were conducted: 1) a text analysis using computational linguistic methods for 13 500 posts from 45 expat platforms to find evidence of different kinds of social support based on the type of platform; 2) an online survey distributed to gather insights on expatriates' types of participation and the types of social support they receive. We find that relations generated through virtual platforms - which we call platform contacts - are complementary sources for expatriates to obtain informational, emotional, and instrumental support, the latter two being higher for hybrid participants, i.e. for those who use online and offline features of the platform. This study further presents that expatriates who receive social support from platform contacts also show higher sustained participation, especially if they are hybrid participants. Based on these results, we present a dynamic model with testable propositions and discuss implications.