Culture Matters: A Survey Study of Social Q&A Behavior
By Jiang Yang, Meredith Ringel Morris, Jaime Teevan, Lada A. Adamic, Mark S. Ackerman. 2011
125 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Online social networking tools are used around the world by people to ask questions of their friends, because friends provide direct, reliable, contextualized, and interactive responses. However, although the tools used in different cultures for question asking are often very similar, the way they are used can be very different, reflecting unique inherent cultural characteristics. We present the results of a survey designed to elicit cultural differences in people’s social question asking behaviors across the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and India. The survey received responses from 933 people distributed across the four countries who held similar job roles and were employed by a single organization. Responses included information about the questions they ask via social networking tools, and their motivations for asking and answering questions online. The results reveal culture as a consistently significant factor in predicting people’s social question and answer behavior. The prominent cultural differences we observe might be traced to people’s inherent cultural characteristics (e.g., their cognitive patterns and social orientation), and should be comprehensively considered in designing social search systems.
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
- Alexandra Olteanu
- Carlos Castillo
- Fernando Diaz
- Emre Kıcıman
- Zhe Zhao
- Qiaozhu Mei
- Paul Resnick
- Charu C. Aggarwal
Citations in the corpus
- Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “Hence, it is important for guiding the design of cross-cultural tools (Hong et al., 2011; Yang et al., 2011), and for understanding socio-economic phenomena (Garcia-Gavilanes et al., 2013).”
- Enquiring Minds: Early Detection of Rumors in Social Media from Enquiry Posts (2015, background): “They analyzed the survey responses and presented findings such as how differently users ask questions via social media and via search engines, and how different cultures influence the behaviors [24, 23, 36].”