Impression formation in social work-sharing sites

Abstract

My dissertation work focuses on understanding how and why professionals use activity traces generated by social work-sharing sites online to form impressions of fellow professionals' expertise and inform personal interactions around work artifacts. I have conducted interviews with professionals in different domains who post and share their work online. These findings will then inform a model of factors contributing to impression formation in this specific context, as well as experiments testing and providing design recommendations for improving members' ability to interact and effectively learn about each other.