Open AccessHow Question Characteristics Impact Answer Outcomes on Social Question-and-Answer Websites
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of global information management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.315
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1533-7995
pISSN - 1062-7375
DOI - 10.4018/jgim.20211101oa31
Subject(s) - readability , questions and answers , outcome (game theory) , quality (philosophy) , psychology , affect (linguistics) , closed ended question , emotionality , question answering , social psychology , computer science , world wide web , information retrieval , epistemology , statistics , mathematics , communication , programming language , philosophy , mathematical economics
Inducing more and higher-quality answers to questions is essential to sustainable development of Social Question-and-Answer (SQA) websites. Previous research has studied factors affecting question success and user motivation in answering questions, but how a question’s own characteristics affect the question’s answer outcome on SQA websites remains unknown. This study examines the impact of the characteristics of a question, namely readability, emotionality, additional descriptions, and question type, on the question’s answer outcome as measured by number of answers, average answer length, and number of “likes” received by answers to the question. Regression analyses reveal that readability, additional descriptions, and question type have significant impact on multiple measurements of answer outcome, while emotionality only affects the average answer length. This study provides insights to SQA website builders as they instruct users on question construction. It also provides insights to SQA website users on how to induce more and higher-quality answers to their questions.