Exploring Information Need of Personal Investment and Finance from Social Q&A Websites

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to explore investment and finance information needs from social Q&Awebsites. The question types and information need characteristics were analaysized from social Q&Awebsites’s question data in order to understand investment and finance information needs and trend.This study used content analysis method to analyze a total of 800 questions selected from savings,stock, insurance and real estate knowledge categories of Yahoo! Answers. The research results sixquestion types are shown as the followings: factual, advice, identification, quality, prescriptive andothers. The factual question is the most frequent questions among six question types; it indicates thatinvestors need objective information. Furthermore, three problem stages were identified in this studyincluding information clarification stage, assess stage and decision‐making stage. Most questions areasked during the information clarification stage, it shows that investors encountered difficulties whenthey explore investment and finance information from the very beginning. Question characteristicsinclude action, cognition, and emotion dimensions. Each knowledge categories appear differentdimension characteristics. Overall, in each knowledge categories, the action dimension is the mostfrequent question dimensions; thereafter, cognition dimension and emotion dimension. In actiondimension, when investors encountered savings problem, they asked direct questions with fewpersonal background information. However, investors often provided their personal information in order to get the suitable answer when encountering insurance problem. In cognition dimension,investors needed more analytical information in stock knowledge categories and more factualinformation in real estate knowledge categories. In emotion dimension, the highest amount ofquestions was in the real estate knowledge categories. Questions among stock knowledge categoriespresented the most various types of emotions and showed variety kinds of positive and negativeemotions.

Keywords

• 資訊需求；資訊需求特徵；投資理財資訊；問題類型；社會性問答網站