What answers do questioners want on social Q&A? User preferences of answers about STDs

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand consumers’ preferences for answers about sexually transmitted diseases on social question and answer (Q&A) sites by employing message features and information sources as conceptual frameworks. Design/methodology/approach: The study compared best answers selected by questioners with their randomly drawn counterpart non-best answers on Yahoo! Answers as a paired sample (n=180). Findings: The findings indicate that questioners on social Q&A sites were more likely to prefer answers including message features such as numeric information, social norms, optimistic information, and loss-framing, as well as information sources that featured expertise, references, and links to other websites. Pessimistic information was negatively associated with questioners’ preference for answers. Research limitations/implications: The study extended the discussion of consumers’ selection of best answers to message features and information sources as additional criteria. Practical implications: The findings suggest that answerers on social Q&A sites communicate more effectively with their audiences by utilizing persuasive communication. Social implications: There is a quality issue on social Q&A sites. The findings will be helpful for health professionals to develop answers that are more likely to be selected as best answers, which will enhance overall quality of health information on social Q&A sites. Originality/value: Consumers’ preference criteria for health information have been investigated using many different approaches. However, no study has used a persuasion framework to examine how consumers appraise answer quality. The present study confirmed consumers’ preference criteria as found in previous social Q&A studies and extended the discussion of consumers’ perceptions of answer quality by applying the frameworks of message features and information sources.