Modalities, motivations, and materials – investigating traditional and social online Q&A services

Abstract

With the advent of ubiquitous connectivity and a constant flux of user-generated content, people’s online information-seeking behaviours are rapidly changing, one o f which includes seeking information from peers through online questioning. Ways to understand this new behaviour can be broken down into three aspects, also referred to as the three M’s – the modalities (sources and strategies) that people use when asking their questions online, their motivations behind asking these questions and choosing specific services, and the types and quality of the materials (content) generated in such an online Q&A environment. This article will provide a new framework – three M’s – based on the synthesis of relevant literature. It will then identify some of the gaps in our knowledge about online Q&A based on this framework. These gaps will be transformed into six research questions, stemming from the three M’s, and addressed by (a) consolidating and synthesizing findings previously reported in the literature, (b) conducting new analyses of data used in prior work, and (c) administering a new study to answer questions unaddressed by the pre-existing and new analyses of prior work.

Bias effects, synergistic effects, and information contingency effects: Developing and testing an extended information adoption model in social Q&A

“…There are several limitations to be acknowledged. First, following previous studies on social Q&A (e.g., Salmerón et al, ; Savolainen, ; Shah, Kitzie, & Choi, ), this study collected data from university students. This sampling strategy was used because college students were identified as the most active user population.…”

Social media and problematic everyday life information‐seeking outcomes: Differences across use frequency, gender, and problem‐solving styles

“…In part due to the increasing speed of communication, recency has become a prevalent criterion for information evaluation (Shah, Kitzie, & Choi, ). Many social media platforms, especially microblogs such as Twitter, are frequently used for real‐time information sharing.…”

Shared values, new vision: Collaboration and communities of practice in virtual reference and SQA

“…From the perspective of answering the question of what lessons or enhancements could VRS offer that would be valuable to SQA sites, perhaps the most significant feature would be giving the people answering the questions the ability to refer questions to or collaborate with others. Although no SQA site answerers were interviewed in this phase of the grant project, results from other phases indicate that those answering on SQA do not have a trusted community of answerers similar to the VRS librarians, which would make referrals or collaboration among them unlikely (see Shah & Kitzie, ; Shah et al, ).…”

“…An extension of the concept of “social reference” is to look to crowd‐sourced SQA services, which function under a model of one questioner to many answerers rather than the VRS model of one questioner to one (professional) answer—who may answer the question or may refer it, again, to one more professional answerer (see Gazan, ; Shah, Oh, & Oh, ). Additional researchers such as Shah, Kitzie, and Choi () and Kim, Oh, and Oh () have studied information‐seeking behavior in these web‐based communities, and Harper, Raban, Rafaeli, and Konstan () have examined the selection of resources. Gazan () analyzed social annotations and Su, Pavlov, Chow, and Baker () compared a number of question‐answering services.…”