Has there been a scientific paper/research investigating the motivation of people contributing in Stack Overflow?

Question

In my opinion, Stack Overflow and the related websites have been very successful, especially considering the contents are mostly written voluntarily.

Has there been scientific research analyzing the main reasons people contribute here? It will be more interesting if the statistics are weighted by rep or answer upvotes, because I think the active and high-quality answerers are more interesting to know.

Answer 1

Yes and no. The reasons people contribute to Stack Overflow and its sister sites are the same reasons that drive all human behavior. There's more research out there on altruism, the desire to show off, intermittent reward, &c. than you can read in a lifetime. To the best of my knowledge, though, there hasn't been any formal research about any of those things specifically in the context of SO/SE.

If you're okay with less formal results, check out these MSO questions about why/how people participate:

• What aspects of psychology does Stack Overflow take advantage of?
• Why do you post to Stack Overflow?
• So, why do you contribute to SO? (SF?)
• Is answering questions on SO good for you?
• The problem with extrinsic motivation
• Does herd behavior influence the SO sites?
• Why do programmers help each other without pay? (requires 10k MSO rep)

There have also been several questions on MSO about SO/SE appearing in academic contexts, either as the topic of research or as a source in research. As far as I know, which is admittedly not that far, none of that research addresses your specific question, but some of it may touch on the issue, and/or lead you towards papers that do address your question.

• Is there any academic research going on regarding Stack Exchange?
• Repository of SO-based academic papers
• Is there any published research on Stack Overflow in the last 18 months?
• Academic papers using Stack Exchange data