Users’ Willingness to Share Health Information in a Social Question-and-Answer Community: Cross-sectional Survey in China (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Social Q&A communities are playing an increasingly important role in the dissemination of health information. The identification of influencing factors of user willingness to share health information (WSHI) is very important to improve public health literacy. OBJECTIVE in order to provide a reference for the construction of high-quality health information sharing community, this paper studied the influencing factors of social question-and-answer community users sharing health information. METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted through snowball sampling among 921 users of Zhihu in China. Structural equation analysis was used to verify the interaction and influence strength between variables in the model. Hierarchical regression was also used to test the mediating effect in the model. RESULTS Altruism (AL, β=0.264, P＜0.001), Intrinsic Reward (IR, β=0.260, P＜0.05), Self-Efficacy (SE, β=0.468, P＜0.001) and Community Influence (CI, β=0.277, P＜0.01) had a positive effect while Extrinsic Reward (ER, β=0.351, P＜0.001) had a negative effect on WSHI. SE also had a mediating effect (βmediation=0.147, 29.15%, 0.147/0.505) between CI and WSHI. CONCLUSIONS Findings suggest that WSHI is simultaneously influenced by many factors such as AL, SE, CI and IR. Improving the social atmosphere of the platform is an effective method to encourage users to share health information.

Exploring the relationship between self-management behaviour, family function and health information adoption behaviour in Chinese diabetic foot patients: a mixed-methods study protocol

“…Health Information Adoption Behaviour Questionnaire 45 : This questionnaire was designed by Pengfei. The scale contains six dimensions: performance expectation, usability expectations, promotion condition, perceived risk, adoption willingness and behaviour change.…”