Users' Behavior In Social Q&A Communities:Antecedents And Mechanisms

As a newly knowledge-sharing platform,the social Q&A community spreads knowledge and information through the way of questioning-and-answering.Compared with the traditional searching engine,the social Q&A community can not only offer users knowledge and information,but also can provide users with an online platform for communication and interaction.Nowadays,the social Q&A communities are widely adopted by users,which also draws scholars' attention to investigate users' behavior.However,there are still some unresolved issues in managing and operating the social Q&A community.Firstly,how to form user attachment to attract users to stay in the social Q&A community?Secondly,what are the differences between active users and lurkers in such community?Thirdly,how to motivate users to participate actively in the community?Fourthly,concerning the paid knowledge product in the community,how to stimulate users to pay for the knowledge products?To tackle these questions,this thesis draws upon the Zhihu community and utilizes the methods of literature review,theoretical analysis,model building,and empirical research.The detailed contents are elaborated in the following three studies.Study 1 aims at exploring users' motivations to form user attachments within the social Q&A community context and identifying the differences between active users and lurkers when building attachments.By utilizing the media system dependency theory,this study investigates the driving factors of dependency relations(understanding,orientation,and play)to user attachments(i.e.,attachment to the social Q&A community,attachment to content creators).The research model is empirically validated by an online questionnaire among Zhihu users.The empirical results confirm that three aspects of media dependency relations significantly influence user attachments.Multi-group analysis suggests that the effect of understanding dependency relations on the attachment to content creators is stronger for active users than for lurkers.However,the effects of orientation dependency relations on user attachments are significant for lurkers but not significant for active users.This study enriches the knowledge of media system dependency theory by extending it to the social Q&A community setting.Moreover,this study is one of the first comparative studies in such context,providing a significant contribution in understanding different types of users'motivations and emotional responses.Study 2 explores the mechanism of users' active participation in the social Q&A community.By integrating the self-expansion theory and affect-as-information theory,this study builds the research model to know how the environmental factors in the community stimulate the establishment of user attachments,and thus influence the users' active participation.This research collects 420 valid responses from Zhihu users for empirical analysis.The results show that information quality and collective efficacy have significant positive effects on the attachment to the social Q&A community and the attachment to content creators,respectively.In addition,these two aspects of use attachments positively affect active participation.This study applies the self-expansion theory to the field of information systems and complements the research of relationship paradigm.The exploration of the community's characteristics can strengthen the description and understanding of the social Q&A community,which can also help managers to create a more effective community atmosphere and motivate users' active participation.Study 3 investigates the antecedents and mechanisms of users' payment behavior when facing paid knowledge products(live courses)in the social Q&A community.According to the information foraging theory and social information foraging theory,the research model is developed to analyze users' information processing and evaluation when making payment decisions.The research model is validated by collecting users' subjective responses and objective behavioral data from the Zhihu community.The results show that perceived quality of free content,the perceived credibility of content creators,and perceived quantity of participants positively influence users' willingness to pay,and thus,positively affect users'payment behavior.Social endorsement negatively moderates the relationship between willingness to pay and payment behavior.This study enhances the theoretical understanding of the drivers of users' payment for live courses in social Q&A communities.For IS practice,the findings provide unique insights for community managers and content creators to operate paid knowledge products appropriately and effectively.From the perspective of theoretical contribution,this thesis enriches and improves the research in the social Q&A community setting.Moreover,this thesis clarifies the types of users,which helps to form the user attachment under such community.By extending related theories to the social Q&A community context,this thesis can deepen the understanding of users' active participation and payment behavior.Also,this thesis can provide theoretical support in boosting users' activity degree and payment amount.Regarding the practical implication,the analysis and investigation of users' emotional responses and behavioral motivators can provide suggestions for community managers to enhance users' stickiness,strengthen users'active participation in the social Q&A community,and increase the revenue of paid knowledge products.