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Gamification effects on users' motivation to participate: A case of a Portuguese Q&A community.
- Author(s)
- OLIVEIRA JORDAO DO AMARAL ISABEL
- Advisor
- Minhyung Kang
- Department
- 일반대학원 경영정보학과
- Publisher
- The Graduate School, Ajou University
- Publication Year
- 2020-02
- Language
- eng
- Alternative Abstract
- This study investigates the effect of gamification elements (points, badges, and leaderboards) on motivational factors that lead to knowledge contribution, as well as learning, in an online question and answering (Q&A) community. These websites are spaces where individuals with mutual interests exchange their knowledge systematically. The most usual way to participate in these kinds of sites is by asking or answering questions. While asking initializes knowledge exchange, answering finalizes it. Thus, Q&A communities primarily depend on users’ knowledge contributions to keep themselves functional, making it crucial to stimulate users to participate actively. The employment of game features outside of the gaming environment, known as gamification, has recently gained popularity for encouraging users to provide voluntary contributions. Previous studies have mostly focused on educational contexts, where they verified that gamification could positively captivate students to learn. This research applies molds of prior studies about gamification in a Q&A community, which is different from the traditional educational contexts, and examines how gamification affects users. To verify the assumption that gamification affects users’ voluntary knowledge contribution, as well as learning, data were collected from one of the successful Q&A communities, Stack Overflow in Portuguese (SOpt). SOpt is a mirror of the largest online Q&A community that discusses software development related topics, Stack Overflow. The original site is in English, but SOpt was created in Portuguese to enhance the participation of users from Lusophony countries. This fact is also verified by this research that investigated language as an extra factor to induce knowledge contribution and learning. The researcher selected SOpt as the research context of the study because it is a growing online community with a vast repository of knowledge about software development in Portuguese. Thus, this study's purpose was to investigate gamification as an enhancer of users’ motivation to provide knowledge contributions and to learn. Additionally, considering the uniqueness of SOpt, the language was examined as a factor to induce participation and learning. The online questionnaire had 154 participants. By using the respondents’ user IDs, information about their public profile activities were also gathered. The analysis utilized subjective survey data about users’ perceptions and objective log data about users’ activities to cross-analyze their behavior concerning gamification. The findings show that implementing a gamification mechanism can enhance users’ motivation to practice knowledge contribution and to learn. However, depending on the type of activities the user is performing in the Q&A site, each gamification feature will affect them differently. Usually, there are different types of users in Q&A communities, such as knowledge contributors and knowledge seekers. Because of this, it is necessary to identify which gamification elements are meant for each type of user to utilize them successfully. More specifically, the results suggest that Q&A sites should focus on gamification elements that increase users’ reputation and self-worth. As for users seeking knowledge, Q&A sites should consider emphasizing gamification elements that intensify challenge and goal setting feelings.
- Fulltext
- Appears in Collections:
- Graduate School of Ajou University > Department of Management Information Systems > 3. Theses(Master)
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