An Empirical Study on the Influence of Social Interactions for the Acceptance of Answers in Stack Overflow

In knowledge-sharing communities like Stack Overflow (SO), users can post questions, give answers and choose one answer as an accepted answer. The accepted answers will be important references for users when they encounter similar questions. Essentially, posting questions and giving answers is an interactive process occurring among community users, and choosing accepted answers is actually a decision-making process involving multiple factors. Previous works examined the impact on this decision process from the user, question and answer viewpoints. Social interactions between the questioners and answerers, although being popular according to our pre-analysis, have never been considered as a factor that can influence the decisions. To fill this gap, this paper first proposes a comprehensive answer acceptance model that integrates the answer features established by social interactions as well as information of users, questions and answers. We then divide social interactions into two stages and propose a method to calculate the relationship between the questioner and the answerer by analyzing these social interactions. Finally, we investigate the influence of social interactions for the acceptance of answers by performing logistic regression analysis. The results reveal several findings: (1) social-based features explain 16.6 % of the variance explained together, indicating that social interactions have significant and important effects on the acceptance of answers; (2) social interactions that occur after the answer is posted are more influential than these occur before the answer is posted. Based on the findings, we further conduct an online study of 132 SO users, and the respondents report that social interactions have a greater impact on the acceptance of answers than other judgments of answers such as upvotes, downvotes and not accepting answers.