The Co-construction of Credibility in Online Product Reviews

Abstract

Reviews of products on Web sites like Epinions.com make explicit the ways in which credible identities are co-constructed. Product reviews reveal not only how reviewers construct credibility for themselves but also how readers of reviews, through their comments about reviews, ratify and contribute to reviewer credibility. I present a framework and analyze examples of reviews of digital cameras to examine how reviewers of a technical product convey credibility and how review readers coconstruct reviewers' credibility. The framework and analysis can help identify those reviewers who are likely to influence review Web site users.

Notes

¹In conducting research on Epinions.com reviews and the comments they generate, I referred to the recommendations of the Association of Internet Researchers (Ess & AoIR, 2002). The research reported here accords with the AoIR's guidelines. Namely, with studies of discourse in public venues like Epinions.com, particularly venues in which contributors know their discourse will be archived and can be accessible to anyone, researchers are under less obligation in regard to privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent. The Epinions.com contributors whose reviews and comments I discuss in this study have made their discourse public and have done so willingly. They know that their reviews, comments, and other discourse will be archived and accessible. Indeed, the AoIR differentiates between “participants … best understood as ‘subjects’ (in the senses common in human subjects research in medicine and the social sciences)” and “authors whose texts/artifacts are intended as public” (p. 7). Epinions.com contributors are the latter type. Still, the AoIR asks researchers to consider risk to the authors whose discourse is under analysis. The AoIR states that whether form or content is being studied, “if the content is relatively trivial, doesn't address sensitive topics, etc., then clearly the risk to the subject is low” (p. 8). In the case of this study, which analyzes both the form and content of online credibility, no content likely to “result in shame, threats to material well-being (denial of insurance, job loss, physical harassment, etc.)” (p. 8), including no discussion of intimate topics, was included. Thus, in this study, I refer to Epinions.com contributors by their usernames, giving them attribution for their work.