Generating collective online information sharing: The framing effect of questions on response network

Community Question-Answering (CQA) sites are virtual communities where users participate in collective online information sharing. Questions in CQA sites serve as starting points for information sharing, eliciting a response network (RN), where nodes are the postings, while edges represent the responses between postings. This research employed framing theory to investigate how question frames affected their resulting RNs. Question frames were operationalized as conversational and informational. Social network analysis was conducted to explore the RNs of different question frames for both Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM communities. Results revealed that most RNs of STEM conversational questions were larger in size and had higher centrality, whereas RNs of informational questions comprised closer relationships between postings. However, no significant differences were found in the non-STEM community. Our research suggests that community moderators and askers should appropriately utilize question frames to organize information sharing inside CQA communities.