Everyday life information seeking with mobile Q&A

Abstract

Mobile social Q&A is a novel environment in which people ask questions to the online crowd through mobile devices (e.g., SMS), showing different usage patterns from traditional social Q&A services. This thesis seeks to understand the role of mobile Q&A in everyday life information seeking (ELIS). Towards this goal, we analyze the survey results of 555 mobile Q&A users, the interview results of 20 survey participants, and the crawled dataset of Naver SMS Q&A. We identify the char-acteristics of mobile Q&A by relevance criteria of selecting information channel, and then analyze the role of mobile social Q&A for ELIS by investigating how people use information sources when dealing with several representative questions and users’ own questions asked to mobile Q&A. We also analyze different information seeking patterns by contrasting heavy and light users of mobile Q&A. Our research results show that individuals have their own source preferences that could differ by content, quality, and accessibility. Our analysis of information source preferences shows that, the light users of mobile social Q&A tend to proactively use online information systems (e.g., web search) and to consider other channels as coping mechanisms (e.g., social Q&A, human resources), whereas the heavy users tend to show some satisficing behavior in that they spend less time and effort by seeking immediate help from human resources and social Q&A. Finally, we conclude the thesis with the discussion of relevant topics such as social support, smartphone usage.