User adoption of a hybrid social tagging approach in an online knowledge community

• Published in: Aslib journal of information management Vol. 71; no. 2; pp. 155 - 175
• Main Authors: Qin, Chunxiu, Liu, Yaxi, Mou, Jian, Chen, Jiangping
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bradford Emerald Publishing Limited 10.05.2019; Emerald Group Publishing Limited
• Subjects: Attitudes; Design; Empirical analysis; Knowledge discovery; Knowledge management; Knowledge organization; Knowledge sharing; Metadata; On-line systems; Ontology; Performance enhancement; Research methodology; Social networks; Subject specialists; Tagging; Tags; Taxonomy; Technology Acceptance Model; Technology utilization; User behavior; Virtual communities; Vocabularies & taxonomies; Web 2.0; China; Technology acceptance model; Social cognitive theory; User adoption; A hybrid social tagging approach; Online knowledge organization; Social tagging
• ISSN: 2050-3806; 2050-3814; 1758-3748
• DOI: 10.1108/AJIM-09-2018-0212

Purpose Online knowledge communities make great contributions to global knowledge sharing and innovation. Resource tagging approaches have been widely adopted in such communities to describe, annotate and organize knowledge resources mainly through users’ participation. However, it is unclear what causes the adoption of a particular resource tagging approach. The purpose of this paper is to identify factors that drive users to use a hybrid social tagging approach. Design/methodology/approach Technology acceptance model and social cognitive theory are adopted to support an integrated model proposed in this paper. Zhihu, one of the most popular online knowledge communities in China, is taken as the survey context. A survey was conducted with a questionnaire and collected data were analyzed through structural equation model. Findings A new hybrid social resource tagging approach was refined and described. The empirical results revealed that self-efficacy, perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use exert positive effect on users’ attitude. Moreover, social influence, PU and attitude impact significantly on users’ intention to use a hybrid social resource tagging approach. Originality/value Theoretically, this study enriches the type of resource tagging approaches and recognizes factors influencing user adoption to use it. Regarding the practical parts, the results provide online information system providers and designers with referential strategies to improve the performance of the current tagging approaches and promote them.