Informed, Empowered, or Paralyzed?: Outcomes from Engaging in a Website

Background

Empowerment is both a process and an outcome (Pires et al., 2006). Empowerment as a process involves the transformative manner by which individuals develop skills, test their knowledge and gain control over issues that concern them. Empowerment as an outcome results in a state or condition of the individual who feels a greater sense of understanding, a greater sense of control and may demonstrate more active efforts to exert that control (Zimmerman & Warschausky, 1998). The process of empowerment does not necessarily lead to empowerment outcomes, although empowerment outcomes can be greatly reinforced by empowerment mechanisms.

Denegri-Knott et al (2006) suggest that studies of empowerment should be contextualized and situated. Hence, we locate our study of empowerment within the context of the e-environment, focusing specifically on the transformative impact of the e-environment in relation to empowerment outcomes.

A selection of empirical studies that assess the degree to which use of the internet and technology empowers individuals in their consumption practice is summarized in Table 1. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather presented as an overview of illustrative empirical work. Whilst these studies have clearly shown the empowering impact of the technology, they have failed to adequately account for the theoretical conceptualization of e-empowerment and have tended to focus on affective or psychological outcomes of technology use rather than behavioral outcomes. We address these limitations by developing measurement items for e-empowerment that account for psychological and behavioral empowerment outcomes.