IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamist/v61y2010i9p1933-1944.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A structuration approach to online communities of practice: The case of Q&A communities

Author

Listed:
  • Howard Rosenbaum
  • Pnina Shachaf

Abstract

This article describes an approach based on structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1984; Orlikowski, 1992, 2000) and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) that can be used to guide investigation into the dynamics of online question and answer (Q&A) communities. This approach is useful because most research on Q&A sites has focused attention on information retrieval, information‐seeking behavior, and information intermediation and has assumed uncritically that the online Q&A community plays an important role in these domains of study. Assuming instead that research on online communities should take into account social, technical, and contextual factors (Kling, Rosenbaum, & Sawyer, 2005), the utility of this approach is demonstrated with an analysis of three online Q&A communities seen as communities of practice. This article makes a theoretical contribution to the study of online Q&A communities and, more generally, to the domain of social reference.

Suggested Citation

  • Howard Rosenbaum & Pnina Shachaf, 2010. "A structuration approach to online communities of practice: The case of Q&A communities," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(9), pages 1933-1944, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:61:y:2010:i:9:p:1933-1944
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.21340
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21340
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.21340?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bernard Quinio & Rolande Marciniak, 2013. "Virtual Social Network Characterization: Reference Framework for a Comparative Analysis," Post-Print hal-01755733, HAL.
    2. Jie Lou & Yulin Fang & Kai H. Lim & Jerry Zeyu Peng, 2013. "Contributing high quantity and quality knowledge to online Q&A communities," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(2), pages 356-371, February.
    3. Junghwa Bahng & Chang Heon Lee, 2020. "Topic Modeling for Analyzing Patients’ Perceptions and Concerns of Hearing Loss on Social Q&A Sites: Incorporating Patients’ Perspective," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(17), pages 1-14, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:61:y:2010:i:9:p:1933-1944. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.