Page 246 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese Edition of Journal of Library Science in China 2015 Vol.41 245

successful implementation of SQA and its underlying challenges and issues, researchers from a
variety of fields of LIS (Library & Information Science), such as information search, information
behavior, and human computer interaction have devoted to identifying the user’s motivation and
behavior in SQA for the past few years. Those user-oriented studies may focus on the cognitive,
social and psychological aspects of answer adoption and diffusion of SQA. However, there is
still a lack of comprehensive and systematic understanding toward the topic of investigating the
assessment or the indicators of answer quality for SQA.
On the basis of the existing studies and the research context of social search, this paper aims to
develop an evaluation index of answer quality of SQA from the user perspective. Baidu Knows
(zhidao.baidu.com), which is the largest Chinese community of SQA website, is used to conduct
the empirical study. A mixed-method research with scholar interview and survey was employed
to investigate the dominant factors of answer quality of SQA by Exploratory Factor Analysis
(EFA) and Confirmative Factor Analysis (CFA). First, in order to improve the evaluation index
and adjust the original indicators, before the questionnaire survey and analysis, scholar interviews
were assumed to detect indicators that were ignored or not easily understood in this paper. Five
scholars with deep knowledge and rich research experience in the field of information quality were
selected as our interview objects. The primary purpose of conducting the interview was to focus
on the rationality and integrity of the index, which helps us in evaluating whether the indicators
proposed indeed measured the answer quality constructs in SQA context. Then, we employed
users of Baidu Knows as the investigative object to collect data, and issued an e-questionnaire
(the answer quality survey of Baidu Knows) on the website named Sojump (www.sojump.com) to
complete the survey. The questionnaire mainly consisted of two parts. The first part was related to
the demographic characteristic of interviewees, the average time they used to ask for an answer, as
well as the themes they were interested in. The second part was the measurement about the level
of answer quality that users perceived from the usage of and the interaction with SQA. Afterwards,
a principal component analysis was conducted to test the preliminary survey data, and the index
model was revised for the first time. Finally, an EFA using SPSS 18.0 and a CFA using AMOS
17.0 were synthetically employed to test the formal survey data, and the indicators of the model
were amended for the second time.
The research findings show that, the evaluation index of answer quality of SQA includes four
dimensions, i.e., content quality, context quality, source quality and emotional quality with a
total of 18 key indicators in detail. Theoretically, this study is significant to expand the research
fields of LIS, web information resources management, and quality management. Practically,
the research may yield some implications for the interaction design of SQA systems and UGC
applications.
In the future work, in order to discuss information quality perceived and evaluated by users of
different groups for SQA, we will conduct a classified statistic to explore the average time that an
asker spent in seeking for information, and topics concerned by interviewees. Meanwhile, we will