Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 9, 2023
Date Accepted: Oct 18, 2023
Factors influencing the answerability and popularity of a health-related post in the Q&A community: Infodemiology Study of Metafilter
ABSTRACT
Background:
Online health question-and-answer (Q&A) community has become the primary way for people to directly access health information and knowledge.
Objective:
The purpose of this study is to investigate how different variables influence users’ health consultation behavior.
Methods:
The full-scale data about health consultations were obtained from Metafilter Q&A community. The variables were designed in terms of context, content and contributors, and their influence on the number of favorites and responses was examined using negative binomial regression models.
Results:
For content variables, the Readability and Sentiment of the title are related to the answerability and popularity of the question. In particular, sentiment values are positively related to the favorite count and negatively associated with the comment count. As for context variables, the Topic diversity variable is negatively related to comment count and positively associated with favorite count, while Topic intensity only has a significant effect on the favorite count. Regarding contributor variables, the Sociability intensity is positively related to the comment count and negatively associated with the favorite count. However, the Participation breadth only has a significant effect on the comment count.
Conclusions:
The research results not only uncover patterns of people’s health consultation behavior, which can help them obtain high-quality answers more efficiently, but also provide a theoretical basis for platform operators to enhance user engagement within health Q&A communities.
Citation
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Copyright
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