Empirical study on personal motivation of ugc in q&a community

Based on the existed literature and in-depth interviews,this paper puts forward a theoretical model of relationship between the users’ personal motivation and ugc (user generated content) performance in q&a community (question and answering community) incorporating achievement need theory and social exchange theory. furthermore,294 questionnaires are collected from a famous domestic q&a community for hypothesis testing and data analysis by spss 19.0. the results show that,achievement need,power need,affiliation need and external reward are in positive correlation with q&a quality and q&a quantity; while input cost is in an obvious negative correlation with q&a quality and q&a quantity. the affiliation need,power need and achievement can be predictors of q&a quantity; while the affiliation need,the power need and external reward can be predictors of q&a quality. cost has no predictive function on the performance of the generated contents (q&a quality or q&a quantity). © 2014 pakistan journal of statistics.