How Question Characteristics Impact Answer Outcomes on Social Question-and-Answer Websites

Abstract

Inducing more and higher-quality answers to questions is essential to sustainable development of Social Question-and-Answer (SQA) websites. Previous research has studied factors affecting question success and user motivation in answering questions, but how a question’s own characteristics affect the question’s answer outcome on SQA websites remains unknown. This study examines the impact of the characteristics of a question, namely readability, emotionality, additional descriptions, and question type, on the question’s answer outcome as measured by number of answers, average answer length, and number of “likes” received by answers to the question. Regression analyses reveal that readability, additional descriptions, and question type have significant impact on multiple measurements of answer outcome, while emotionality only affects the average answer length. This study provides insights to SQA website builders as they instruct users on question construction. It also provides insights to SQA website users on how to induce more and higher-quality answers to their questions.