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...