Full length articleUsers' continued participation behavior in social Q&A communities: A motivation perspective
Introduction
Knowledge sharing and transmission are always subjects of continued interest owing to the significant role they play in promoting the development of human society. In pre-Internet era, knowledge was preserved and shared largely by means of apprenticeship, story telling, dances, festivities, and most importantly writing and publishing (Macharia, 2011). These ways of sharing have been exercising profound influence on preventing people from reinventing the wheel and on aiding in innovation throughout history, and will continue to make contributions in the future. Despite that, their disadvantages are also obvious. Knowledge transmission by those ways is usually restricted in terms of time and space. For instance, it could take years for a new technique to be widely known within a specific region. However, the advent of Internet at the end of 20th century has enormously revolutionized how knowledge is shared. Because Internet is infinitely expandable, knowledge is not necessarily subject to the restrictions of time and space, which are imposed on those traditional ways. As a result, the efficiency of knowledge sharing has increased, and the volume of knowledge has grown exponentially with more and more people getting involved in the process of knowledge production and transmission. People's surging demand of knowledge sharing has also fostered creation of various online utilities, which aim to better facilitate the process. Social Q&A community is one of the most commonly used tools.
In earlier Internet era, people who sought knowledge online often started with the submission of a few keywords to a search engine, and then received pages of information that matched the keywords best. But recently, the emergence of social Q&A communities has provided knowledge seekers with another alternative. Examples of popular social Q&A communities worldwide include Quora (https://www.quora.com), Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com) and Zhihu (https://www.zhihu.com). Registered users in these communities are able to pose their questions in natural language to a group of potential knowledge providers, and then receive personalized answers (Shah & Kitzie, 2012). More importantly, social Q&A communities extend regular Q&A systems with social networking features that help to build social bonds among users (Jin, Li, Zhong, & Zhai, 2015). In social Q&A communities, registered users ask, answer and rate content while interacting around it. Almost all content is created by them, and transmitted through user networks. To be specific, questions are first matched against an index of existing documents, and become new documents themselves as soon as they are posted. Then, these questions go through algorithmic, economic and social strategies designed to attract users to give answers, ratings and comments, thus helping to address the questions and augment the documents with each contribution (Gazan, 2011). Users are also encouraged to follow questions and topics, so they will be notified when new content related to the questions or topics comes out. This provides users with an efficient way to gain knowledge in fields that interest them (Wang, Gill, Mohanlal, Zheng, & Zhao, 2013).
Although popular, social Q&A communities still face the challenge of high churn rate, particularly for those early-stage users. For example, by studying a large dataset from Stack Overflow, Pudipeddi, Akoglu, and Tong (2014) depicted the fraction of users churning at various stages. The result showed that most users only post a few posts, and a large number of them leave the community just after 1 or 2 posts. As Bhattacherjee (2001) claimed, attracting users' initial adoption is merely the first step in accomplishing information system (IS) success, and retaining them is considered to be the most essential aspect. The term ‘continuance’ is used by IS researchers to describe the continued usage of a particular IS, comparative to its initial adoption (Bhattacherjee, 2001). Given the high churn rate of early-stage users, it should be of great importance for both researchers and managers to understand users' motivations of continued participation in social Q&A communities.
Previous literature has applied multiple theories to explore IS continuance, such as theory of planned behavior (Al-Debei, Al-Lozi, & Papazafeiropoulou, 2013), motivation theory (Lin & Lu, 2011) and expectation-confirmation theory (Bhattacherjee, 2001). Regular Q&A systems and social media are among the most commonly studied IS. For example, Jin, Zhou, Lee, and Cheung (2013) established a model that incorporates knowledge sharing factors and knowledge self-efficacy into the expectation-confirmation theory when studying users' continuance motivations of knowledge sharing in online Q&A communities. Lin and Lu (2011) proposed a rational model that integrates motivation theory with network externalities to interpret users' continued participation in social networking sites. However, literature on users' motivations to continuously join in social Q&A communities is still relatively limited. Despite the fact that social Q&A communities share some common features with regular Q&A and social media, the differences between them are non-negligible. On the one hand, compared with regular Q&A communities, social Q&A further enables users to build and maintain social networks with others based on common interests (Jin et al., 2015). In this case, users can possibly form a sense of belonging to the communities, and follow certain standards of interaction. Moreover, the social bonds among users have been indicated to increase their inclination to contribute knowledge in communities (Wellman & Hampton, 1999). On the other hand, compared with social media, online social Q&A communities have a concentration on knowledge sharing and transmission, as against information such as users' real-time mood, news or reviews. Besides, social networks in online social Q&A communities are largely formed by strangers who share common interests, while those in social media are often formed by acquaintances (Jin et al., 2015). Considering these differences, effort should be additionally made to interpret users' continuance motivations in social Q&A communities. Thus, our first research question is: What are the factors that motivate users to continuously participate in online social Q&A communities?
Existing literature has also claimed that different types of users may have diverse continuance motivations in IS (e.g., Hau and Kim, 2011, Tan, 2011, Zhang et al., 2017). And two most frequently discussed user classifications in online communities are contributors (or posters) and lurkers (e.g., Hung et al., 2015, Lai and Chen, 2014, Ridings et al., 2006). For instance, by integrating extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, as well as intra-community factors, Lai and Chen (2014) examined the differences between posters and lurkers in forces that drive their knowledge sharing behavior in interest online communities. Likewise, Hung et al. (2015) decomposed the constructs of theory of planned behavior to address ten potential factors, and investigated the differential degrees of impacts of these factors on posters' and lurkers' willingness to share knowledge in professional virtual communities. Wang and Yu (2012) briefly reviewed previous literature and tried to further clarify the definitions of ‘contributor’ and ‘lurker’. In general, contributors are always considered to be users who create and provide new information or content in online communities, while lurkers are those who merely view it.
However, according to Wagner (2004), individuals in a conversational environment can create and provide knowledge through dialog with both questions and answers. Phang, Kankanhalli, and Sabherwal (2009) additionally claimed that the value of online communities should lie in users' continuous participation in both two essential activities, i.e., knowledge seeking and contribution. Hence, in social Q&A communities, ‘information or content’ should include questions and answers alike, based on which we further distinguish contributors into askers and answerers. To be specific, askers are users who have only posted queries in social Q&A communities, while answerers are those who have provided answers.1 Guan, Wang, Jin, and Song (2018) argued that motivations for these two types of users to participate in online social Q&A communities could be very different. They explained that askers have inherent motivations to be engaged in communities for gaining more answers and knowledge. But for answerers, additional incentives may be needed to keep their interests and encourage them to contribute more knowledge in communities (Jabr, Mookerjee, Tan, & Mookerjee, 2014). Therefore, given the substantial differences among lurkers, askers and answerers, more researches should be devoted to the distinctions of their continuance motivations in social Q&A communities as well as underlying causes. The result may help managers to design user-specific strategies. Accordingly, our second research question is: How do the factors that motivate users to continuously participate in social Q&A communities differ across lurkers, askers and answerers?
To address these two research questions, we first established a comprehensive framework to portray the potential factors that may drive users to continuously join in online social Q&A communities, and then conducted a quantitative survey to verify the proposed framework. Most importantly, interviewees were classified into three groups, namely lurkers, askers and answerers. Verifications were performed on the survey data for each user group, and comparisons were made across groups to differentiate their varied motivations of continued participation in online social Q&A communities.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Following this introduction, an extensive literature review is performed in section 2, together with our research framework and hypotheses, which illustrate the underlying motivations we intend to study. The research methodology is described in section 3. And in section 4, empirical results derived from statistical analysis are presented and discussed in relation to the proposed hypotheses. Finally, the major findings are highlighted in section 5, in conjunction with their implications for academics and practitioners. Section 6 concludes this paper.
Section snippets
Literature review and hypotheses
Based on our two research questions, we intend to review the previous literature from two major streams: IS continuance and how it differs across various user types. And then, we construct our research framework and propose our hypotheses accordingly.
Research methodology
To test the proposed hypotheses, a web-based survey was conducted. This methodology was chosen because it can access larger and more geographically distributed populations than paper-based survey (Lefever, Dal, & Matthíasdóttir, 2007). It can also be conducted more quickly, effectively, cheaply and/or easily (Fricker & Schonlau, 2002). Moreover, as we have a particular interest on users' continued participation behavior in online social Q&A communities and those who have no access to Internet
Results
In this study, data analysis was performed using a partial least squares (PLS) model, a component-based structural equation modeling technique. Compared with covariance-based SEM techniques, PLS is more proper for the data analysis in our study, because it maximizes the variances explained in dependent variables, and it performs better when sample size is not large or in the presence of noisy data (Chin, 1998, Garson, 2016). Specifically, data analysis was conducted in two steps. First,
Discussion and implications
This paper investigates users' continued participation behavior in online social Q&A communities from a motivation perspective. Specifically, it adopts theory of planned behavior as its theoretical basis, and then extends the theory with motivational antecedents (i.e., psychological, social and functional) that may affect users' attitude of continued participation in social Q&A communities. Moreover, how these continuance motivations vary across different types of users (i.e., lurkers, askers
Conclusion
This study aims to investigate motivational antecedents influencing users' continued participation intention and behavior in online social Q&A communities from three different perspectives (i.e., psychological, social and functional). Theory of planned behavior is used as a theoretical basis, and how the motivations vary across different types of users is further examined and compared. Accordingly, we find that commitment, shared language and shared vision, which are all within social
Acknowledgement
This research was financially supported by the China Scholarship Council (Grant # 201706260217) and Shanghai Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (Grant # 2018BGL004).
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