Questioners' credibility judgments of answers in a social question and answer site

Introduction. This paper explores a sample of thirty-six active users' experience of credibility judgments in Yahoo! Answers, the most popular social question and answer site in the U.S., to understand how users evaluate the credibility of answers provided by fellow users on the Web. Method. Interviews were conducted with thirty-six questioners of Yahoo! Answers by e-mail, Internet chat and telephone. Analysis. The interviews were transcribed and the data were analysed using the constant-comparison method of content analysis. Results. The questioners' credibility judgments in the site link to a broad context of an information seeking process, including pre-search activities and post-search verification behaviour. Many message- and source-related criteria from previous Web credibility research transfer to the social question and answer environment, but Website-related criteria do not apply here because questioners evaluate answerers in the same site. Also, the questioners evaluated message credibility more often than source credibility due to the frequent unavailability of source information. Conclusions. Many questioners exhibited critical evaluation skills at least to some extent. An improved design of the site and user instruction, however, could further help questioners and answerers find or provide credible information.