Abstract
Technical Question & Answering (Q&A) websites have become promising sources of information for a wide range of topics and the most popular is Stack Overflow. Aiming to attract the continuous users’ interest, Stack Overflow enabled the gamification system. By rewarding users’ participation and contribution to the community, the site provides motivation to increase their participation. A well-known gamification process is the badge awards. In this paper, we propose a methodology to model and analyze the effect of the badge award gamification process on user’s personality traits based on data recorded before and after award time, employing the Big Five personality Factors. Using statistical univariate analysis and mainly multivariate cluster analysis, we show that: (1) On the average, users’ personality scores for each one of the individual personality traits are not significantly affected by the badge award; (2) When personality traits are considered together as multivariate data, there are clusters of users, each one characterized by different scores of traits. The comparison of clusters before and after the badge award shows that the badges favor changes from conservative to more open-minded and eager for new knowledge personality profiles; (3) The effect of the badge on user personality profiles is different for different activity groups, characterized by reputation, number of given and accepted answers. The results of the proposed methodology can assist to model and understand better the effect of gamification for technical users. Additionally, other similar Q&A sites can use these results to adopt or improve gamification tools. Furthermore, the proposed clustering methodology can be used as a generic framework for simulating and predicting user behavior in collaborative communities using gamification mechanisms.
Published Version
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