Answerers' Motivations and Strategies for Providing Information and Social Support in Social Q&A: An Investigation of Health Question Answering

Social Q&A allows people to ask and answer questions for each other and to solve problems in everyday life collaboratively. The purpose of the current study is to understand the motivations and strategies of answerers in social Q&A. Thus, three research questions were investigated: 1)Why do answerers participate and contribute in social Q&A? 2)What strategies do they use to provide effective answers in social Q&A? 3)What are the relationships between motivations and strategies? The domain of health is chosen because health is one of the most popular topics that people search information and support online. A model of answering behaviors has been proposed with a composition of 10 motivations and 32 strategies related to five steps of answering behaviors - question selection, question interpretation, information seeking, answer creation and answer evaluation. Two research methods - a survey and content analysis - were used. A survey questionnaire was distributed to top answerers and recent answerers in the health category of Yahoo! Answers. Answers of the survey participants were additionally collected in order to analyze the types of health messages and the sources of the answers. Altruism was found to be the most influential motivation, followed closely by Enjoyment and Efficacy. Answerers select questions based on their confidence or interest in the topic of the question. When interpreting questions, answerers believe that they understand the question most of the time. When seeking information for answers, most of the sources of answers are from the answerers' own information and experiences. When creating answers, accuracy and completeness are the most frequently used criteria for evaluating information sources. When evaluating answers, answerers review responses to their answers from questioners, other answerers, and other members in Yahoo! Answers. Additionally, motivations and strategies of all participants, top answerers, and health experts and the relationship between motivations and strategies are reported. Findings from the current study have practical implications for promoting the use of social Q&A as well as other similar Q&A services. The other important research implication is its contributions to the body of knowledge on information providing behaviors

Understanding user motivations for asking and answering a question on brainly, online social learning network

As an emergence of social question-answering (Q&A) services has spurred the growth of social information seeking through question-answering interactions in order to share knowledge and information for users’ need in their learning processes, the current study focuses on conceptualizing and gaining a holistic view of what motivates students to visit social Q&A services and engage in social interactions for sharing and seeking knowledge. The findings show that an immediate help, learning, verification are the top motivations for asking a question, while altruism, learning, and self-enjoyment are the top motivations for answering a question on Brainly, an online social learning Q&A service

Social Search Behavior in a Social Q&A Service: Goals, Strategies, and Outcomes

information seekers to reach out to a larger, more distributed group of people online when searching for information. In this study, people’s question-asking behavior using a social Q&A service is conceptualized as social search behavior. We are particularly interested in investigating social search goals, strategies, tactics, informational outcomes, and social outcomes. We collected a total of 406 questions posted on Yahoo! Answers by 78 participants over one week. Interviews based on those questions and answers they received were conducted and content-analyzed. We identify five distinct search strategies and 15 tactics positioned on a continuum of two different dimensions in terms of answer quantity and answer quality. Pursuit of quantity or quality is influenced by five categories of goals identified in this study. The goals and associated strategies and tactics also influence people’s perceived informational outcomes and social outcomes. Contributions of this study to the social search research community and implications for practitioners in the area of social Q&A services are discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/115871/1/Jeon Rieh ASIST 2015 published.pd

The value of social search: Seeking collective personal experience in social Q&A

In this paper, we examine the value of social question‐answering (Q&A) services as a platform for social search. We present a quasi‐field study where we instructed 20 study participants to use a social Q&A service, Yahoo! Answers, for a period of one week, and interviewed them about their experience with Yahoo! Answers based on the questions (N=99) they posted to the site. The results indicate that participants turned to a social search system when they needed firsthand information, diverse perspectives, and others' value judgments. Participants also preferred social search systems over web search engines in situations where they could obtain tailored information, access original and non‐popular information, filter out information, and interact with real people. Various strategies that participants employed to ensure that their questions would be likely to be answered were also identified. This study contributes to the field of information science by investigating a social Q&A service using the framework of social search from the information seeker's perspective. The results have implications for developers and designers of social search systems.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106937/1/14505001067_ftp.pd

Information exchange on an academic social networking site: A multidiscipline comparison on researchgate Q&A

The increasing popularity of academic social networking sites (ASNSs) requires studies on the usage of ASNSs among scholars and evaluations of the effectiveness of these ASNSs. However, it is unclear whether current ASNSs have fulfilled their design goal, as scholars' actual online interactions on these platforms remain unexplored. To fill the gap, this article presents a study based on data collected from ResearchGate. Adopting a mixed-method design by conducting qualitative content analysis and statistical analysis on 1,128 posts collected from ResearchGate Q&A, we examine how scholars exchange information and resources, and how their practices vary across three distinct disciplines: library and information services, history of art, and astrophysics. Our results show that the effect of a questioner's intention (i.e., seeking information or discussion) is greater than disciplinary factors in some circumstances. Across the three disciplines, responses to questions provide various resources, including experts' contact details, citations, links to Wikipedia, images, and so on. We further discuss several implications of the understanding of scholarly information exchange and the design of better academic social networking interfaces, which should stimulate scholarly interactions by minimizing confusion, improving the clarity of questions, and promoting scholarly content management

How content contributors assess and establish credibility on the web

The proliferation of user‐generated content (UGC) is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Web 2.0. Internet users contribute content online through platforms such as blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, and sites that allow user feedback. Yet little is known of the credibility practices of these content contributors. Through phone interviews conducted with 29 online content contributors, this study investigates how content contributors assess credibility when gathering information for their online content creation and mediation activities, as well as the strategies they use to establish the credibility of the content they create. These contributors reported that they engaged in content creation activities such as posting or commenting on blogs or online forums, rating or voting on online content, and uploading photos, music, or video. We found that credibility judgments made when gathering information for online content creation and mediation activities could be grouped into three levels: intuitive, heuristic, and strategy‐based. We identified three distinctive ways of establishing credibility that are applied during different phases of content contribution: ensuring credibility during the content creation phase; signaling credibility during the content presentation phase; and reinforcing credibility during the post‐production phase. We also discovered that content contributors tend to carry over the strategies they used for assessing credibility during information gathering to their strategies for establishing the credibility of their own content. Theoretical implications for credibility research and practical implications for developing information literacy programs are discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90253/1/14504801163_ftp.pd

“I can't express my thanks enough”: The “gratitude cycle” in online communities

Gratitude is a fundamental aspect of social interaction that positively influences emotional and social well-being. It is also crucial for promoting online community health by motivating participation. However, how gratitude occurs and can be encouraged in online communities is not yet well understood. This exploratory study investigated how online community users experience gratitude, focusing on how gratitude expression and acknowledgment occurs, can break down or can be reinforced. Semistructured Critical Incident interviews were conducted with 8 users of various online communities, including discussion and support groups, social Q&A sites, and review sites, eliciting 17 memorable examples of giving and receiving thanks online. The findings gave rise to a process model of gratitude in online communities—the “gratitude cycle,” which provides a detailed, holistic understanding of the experience of gratitude online that can inform the design of online community platforms that aim to motivate users to perpetuate the cycle. An enriched understanding of gratitude in online communities can help ensure future platforms better support the expression and acknowledgment of thanks, encouraging participation

Exploring Privacy-traces of Users from Online Community: A Case Study of Diabetes Topic Discussions

Online health communities (OHCs) have already become essential medium for people to obtain medical knowledge, share experiences and emotions. OHC users are able to post user-generated content (UGC) to interact with each other. However, the large amount of UGC may lead to personal information even privacy disclosed online. Although such disclosure may help users to trade some social support, which is the basis of sustaining a successful OHC, the users should be aware of the risks of leaving such traces online. This study selects a popular online Q & A community “Zhihu” in China as the research target. By collecting all questions and corresponding answers from 4 diabetes sub-communities, we would like to identify online privacy-traces of users from UGC. According to the theory of Communication Privacy Management, we build an explanatory model to understand user behaviors of concealing or revealing private information from the aspects of user characteristics, peer attention, and social support effects