The Framing Effect of Questions in Community Question-Answering Sites

Abstract

In Community Question-Answering (CQA) sites, the question is often the starting point for information exchange, eliciting a series of responses that result in a response network (RN) whose nodes are the postings, while edges represent the responses between postings. This argument is supported by framing theory which posits that different message forms, their “frames”, lead to different user responses. This research investigated how question frames influenced their resulting RNs. Question frames were operationalized as conversational and informational frames. Social network analysis was conducted to explore the RNs of different question frames for both Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM topics. Interestingly, most STEM conversational questions had postings that directly responded to the question, whereas informational questions attracted more comments on response postings. However, no significant differences were found in the non-STEM topics. Our research suggests that users should appropriately frame questions to generate desired responses from the community.