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Top1. Introduction
As the Internet continues to impact people and societies (Teo, 2007; Lane, et al., 2017), researchers have explored ways to maximize successes of Internet-based technology implementations or global information management (Roztocki & Weistroffer, 2011; Caprio, et al., 2015; Hung, et al., 2016; Silic & Back, 2016; Soja, 2016; Chatterjee, et al., 2017). Social question-and-answer (SQA) websites are an important category of such implementations.
An SQA website is an online community in which users can post or answer questions. Users of these websites seek answers to a wide variety of questions that are organized under topical categories; they also share their own knowledge, experiences, and opinions (Zhang et al., 2020; Oh, 2018). Thanks to the extensive participation of Web users, SQA websites have become some of the most popular destinations for online information seekers (Zhao et al., 2018; Oh, 2018; Jiang et al., 2018; Zhang & Zhao, 2013). SQA websites such as Yahoo!Answers, Stack Overflow, and Answers.com have been listed among the top 50 popular websites in the reference category of Alexa (Alexa, 2020).
Inducing more and higher-quality answers is essential to sustainable development of SQA websites. To facilitate sustainable development of SQA websites, numerous researchers have studied user motivation in knowledge contribution (Wasko & Faraj, 2000), factors attracting or motivating answerers (Jin et al., 2015), criteria measuring question success or failure (Shah et al., 2012), search-result relevance judgment (Zhang et al., 2020), search-result measurement (Zhang et al., 2019), answer quality (Zhao et al., 2019), website evaluation (Huang et al., 2006), and solutions to improve response rate (Liu & Jansen,2017; Oh, 2018; Elalfy et al., 2017; Ren et al., 2018; Sin et al., 2018; Wang, et al., 2018; Li et al., 2016). However, little is known about how the question itself affects the answer outcome on an SQA website.
To bridge this gap, this study aims to reveal impact of question characteristics (readability, emotionality, additional descriptions, and question type) on answer outcome. Research questions include (1) whether question readability affects its answer outcome on SQA websites, (2) whether question emotionality affects its answer outcome on SQA websites, (3) whether additional descriptions in a question affect its answer outcome on SQA websites, and (4) whether question type affects its answer outcome on SQA websites.
The contributions of this paper are summarized as follow: