Research On The Influence Of Personality Trait On Users’ Continuous Usage Intention Of Online Question-Answering Community

With the development of online Question-Answering communities (Q&A communities), a large number of well-known Q&A communities have emerged both at home and abroad, such as Google Answer, Yahoo! Answer, Baidu Know, Zhihu and so on.The number of users and the size of repository increase rapidly.The online Q&A communities have become the important channel of people to access information and solve problems.Like many other online connunities, the sustainable development of online Q&A communities depends on users’continuous usage. Users are the most critical factors of the success of online Q&A communities.If an online Q&A community wants to survive in the fierce competition, it must find key factors affecting users’ continuous usage from the user Angle in order to improve services and promote users’continuous usage.There are three kinds of users in online Q&A communities:questioner, responder and commenter. The three kinds of users correspond to three types of behavior:questioning, answering and commenting.Different kinds of user’s continuous usage intention will be affected by different factors. So it is necessary to research the three kinds of users and the three behaviors respectively to get more targeted conclusion.Psychology shows that:psychological factor will affect one’s subjective intention and actual behavior.So in different psychological states,different users’ continuous usage intention is different in online Q&A communities.This study introduces personality trait theory of personality psychology to dicuss the difference of continuous usage intention among different users in online Q&A communities.Based on Big Five Personality Theory, ECT and ECM-ISC, this study constructs research model, which contains four variables:Big Five Personality Traits, Perceived Performance, Satisfaction and Continuous Usage Intention. Through literature research and interviews, the study extracts different perceived performance variables for questioner, responder and commenter.The perceived performance of questioner contains:Perceived Usefullness and Perceived Timeliness; the perceived performance of questioner contains:Perceived Repution Enhancement, Perceived Tangible Rewards and Perceived Happiness from helping others;the perceived performance of commenter contains:Perceived Repution Enhancement, Perceived Happiness from helping others, Perceived Emotional Expression, Perceived Interaction and Perceived Community Development.Combining the the extracted perceived performance of the three kinds of users with research model, this study constructs Continuance Usage Intention models for questioner, responder and commenter respectively and develops corresponding measurement scales.After a large-scale survey, through analyzing data by SPSS, this study obtains the following findings:(1) personality traits will have an impact on the different users’ perceived performance at different degree; (2) users’ perceived performance will influence user satisfaction significantly and positively; (3) user satisfaction will influence continuous usage intention significantly and positively; (4) personality traits will influence continuous usage intention through perceived performance which will be influenced by corresponding personality traits and user satisfaction.