Flow, enduring, and situational involvement in the Web environment: A tripartite second‐order examination

Abstract Flow, a construct borrowed from reference disciplines, has been proposed as the central process in Web navigation. However, when flow is applied directly to the context of marketing, it suffers from conceptual ambiguity and overlap with the popular marketing construct, involvement. The present study aims to provide a clear framework within which to delineate the relationship between flow and involvement, and thus develop a better theoretical basis that incorporates the flow construct into Internet marketing. This study first distinguishes explicitly between flow, enduring involvement, and situational involvement. It then operationalizes these constructs with the use of customary measures to disclose their unique and common characteristics. Finally, a second‐order confirmatory factor analysis allowing measurement errors is used to identify explicitly the tripartite relationship between the three constructs. The conceptual and operational implications are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.