Does Culture Matter? Impact of Individualism and Uncertainty Avoidance on App Reviews

TL;DR

This study investigates how cultural dimensions like Individualism and Uncertainty Avoidance influence user feedback in app reviews, highlighting significant differences across countries and languages.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the impact of cultural factors on app review content, using a large multilingual dataset and combining manual and automated analysis methods.

Findings

Cultural dimensions significantly affect review characteristics

Differences observed across countries and languages

Results can reduce bias in review analysis algorithms

Abstract

Mobile applications are often used by an international audience and therefore receive a high daily amount of user reviews from various countries. Previous work found evidence that app store reviews contain helpful information for software evolution processes. However, the cultural diversity of the reviews and its consequences on specific user feedback characteristics has only been researched to a limited extent so far. In this paper, we examine the influence of two cultural dimensions, Individualism and Uncertainty Avoidance on user feedback in Apple app store reviews written in different languages. For this purpose, we collected 647,141 reviews from eight countries and written in five languages over a period of six months. We then used manual content analysis and automated processing to examine a sample of 3,120 reviews. The results show that there is a statistically significant influence of Individualism and Uncertainty Avoidance on user feedback characteristics. The results of this study will help researchers and practitioners to reduce algorithm bias caused by less diversified training and test data and to raise awareness of the importance of analyzing diversified user feedback.