Answers from the Crowd: How Credible are Strangers in Social Q&A?

Jeon, Grace YoungJoo; Rieh, Soo Young

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/47266 Copy

Description

Title

Answers from the Crowd: How Credible are Strangers in Social Q&A?

Author(s)

• Jeon, Grace YoungJoo
• Rieh, Soo Young

Issue Date

2014-03-01

Keyword(s)

• social Q&A
• credibility
• information seeking
• social media
• crowdsourcing

Abstract

Individuals may encounter distinct kinds of challenges in assessing credibility in a social Q&A setting where they interact with strangers. It is necessary to better understand how people make credibility judgments when seeking information using social Q&A services because people increasingly use such services to obtain personalized answers from a large pool of unknown people. In this paper, we report preliminary findings from a quasi-field study where participants were asked to use Yahoo! Answers for one week and were interviewed afterwards. We find that participants' assessment of the credibility of strangers who answered their questions occurred in three different dimensions: attitude, trustworthiness, and expertise. Furthermore, different elements were noticed and interpreted in each dimension of the credibility assessment. Our work provides insights into source credibility assessment in social Q&A settings and implications for the design of social technologies that better support people's online credibility assessment.

Publisher

iSchools

Series/Report Name or Number

iConference 2014 Proceedings

Type of Resource

text

Language

english

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/47266

DOI

https://doi.org/10.9776/14309

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 is held by the authors of individual items in the proceedings. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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