Understanding Members’ Active Participation in Online Question-and-Answer Communities: A Theory and Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) websites have become increasingly popular in recent years as an alternative to general-purpose Web search engines for open-ended complex questions. Despite their unique contextual characteristics, only a handful of Q&A websites have been successful in sustaining members’ active participation that, unlike lurking, consists of not only posting questions but also answering others’ inquiries. Because the specific design of the information technology artifacts on Q&A websites can influence their level of success, studying leading Q&A communities such as Yahoo! Answers (YA) provides insights into more effective design mechanisms. We tested a goal-oriented action framework using data from 2,920 YA users, and found that active online participation is largely driven by artifacts (e.g., incentives), membership (e.g., levels of membership and tenure), and habit (e.g., past behavior). This study contributes to the information systems literature by showing that active participation can be understood as the setting, pursuit, and automatic activation of goals.

Key words and phrases:

• active participation
• dynamic panel data analysis
• goal-oriented action
• habit
• incentives
• online community
• online question-and-answer community
• system-generated data

Notes

1. Because of the sheer volume of existing research that can be related to virtual knowledge collaboration, it is not our intent to give an exhaustive account of the relevant literature. Nonetheless, we strive to discuss all major streams within this broad research area that are closely related to the objective of our paper.

2. It is important to note that despite their interesting observations while tracking the time players spent in the World of Warcraft, Ducheneaut et al. [25] did not perform any sophisticated analysis that shed light on the specific players’ activities. We, on the other hand, differentiate between questioning and answering activities and their ramifications in terms of points rather than time spent.

3. General-purpose online communities (e.g., YA) differ from domain-specific online communities (e.g., Stack Overflow, which focuses on the computer programming domain). In domain-specific communities, although levels may still reflect commitment to some extent, they more clearly represent members’ knowledge in the specific domain of focus. Therefore, the generalizability of the hypotheses and results about membership levels may be limited to general-purpose online communities. We have conceded this limitation in the “Discussion” section, and we thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this critical distinguishing feature of online communities.

4. Our hypotheses predict the existence of habitual patterns that will lead actors to corresponding Web pages when faced with certain situational cues. Yet it is important to note that composing questions and answers always requires conscious thought.

5. We do not show results pertaining to specification tests and the pooled OLS, FEM, and REM models because of the page limit. These results will be available upon request from interested readers.

6. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this important concern about our data collection method.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lara Khansa

Lara Khansa is an associate professor of business information Technology in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech. She received her Ph.D. in information systems, M.S in computer engineering, and MBA in finance and investment banking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research has focused on the drivers and characteristics of participation behavior in online communities, and on the socioeconomic repercussions of such behavior. She has published numerous articles in journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Sciences, Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Computers and Operations Research, and European Journal of Operational Research, among others.

Xiao Ma

Xiao Ma is an assistant professor of information systems in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. He holds an A.M. from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on online gaming behavior and interventions, participation behavior in online communities, and the roles of habit relating to IT artifacts. He also studies the effect mechanisms of online auction website design. His research has been published in leading information systems journals such as Information Systems Research and Journal of Management Information Systems.

Divakaran Liginlal

Divakaran Liginlal is a teaching professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds an M.S. in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science and a Ph.D. in management information systems from the University of Arizona. His research in information security and decision support systems has been published in journals such as Communications of the ACM, various IEEE Transactions, European Journal of Operational Research, Computers and Security, and Decision Support Systems, among others.

Sung S. Kim

Sung S. Kim is an associate professor of operations and information management in the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds an M.S. in information systems from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D. in information technology management from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His primary research focuses on automaticity in IT use, online consumer behavior, information privacy, and philosophical and methodological issues. His research has appeared in Management Science, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and Decision Sciences.