Take one for the team: Social-emotional interactions and outcomes on social question and answers sites

Abstract

With a process- and interaction-focus, this study posited that the nature and flow of users' interactions on a social question & answer (SQA) thread can impact their collaborative information seeking outcomes. Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) was applied to investigate the types and outcomes of users' social-emotional interactions. Over 1,000 Stack Overflow postings were manually coded; Chi-square tests and logistic regressions were used for analysis. The study found that over half of the sample included IPA social-emotional acts. Interestingly, Disagrees, an act in IPA's negative social-emotional area, was the most frequently found category. Disagrees exhibited a significant negative relationship with the post-level outcome, post score, but a significant positive main effect and an interaction effect with a thread-level outcome, view count. The study identified two tension points: (1) potential benefits for the group of collaborative information seekers, at the slight expense of the individual who performed the negative social-emotional act; and (2) strains between the instrumental vs. social aspects of SQA. Research and practical implications of the findings were discussed.