JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Many studies concluded that sharing medical information and giving advices are both important motivation for physicians to blog. However, most articles available in this subject field only describe the blog phenomena without providing a theoretical background and an empirical analysis of the phenomena.

Objective:

Since many studies were conducted to investigate the reasons why Physicians blog without a theoretical framework for a rigorous discussion. This study based on social cognitive theory (SCT) to explore the factors influencing physicians’ intention of continuously blogging.

Methods:

Eight Hundreds and seventy seven physicians’ bloggers were invited to participate an online survey and 128 valid responses returned. The SCT is proved to be useful in explaining 36.8 % of the variation in physicians' continuous intention to blog.

Results:

This study based on social cognitive theory (SCT) to explore the factors influencing physicians’ intention of continuously blogging by adding negative outcome expectations that most IS studies excluded. Further, the results of this study can remedy the insufficient knowledge and make a significant contribution to the IS literature.

Conclusions:

Helping others is a creed for physicians, including those who seek helps from the Internet, the healing counts. Using the blog as a vehicle to educate, heal, and prevent disease is coincident with physicians’ oath. Therefore, this study strongly recommends physicians to create blogs to communicate with the public and blogging in a continuous manner. To motivate physicians to continue to blog, the platform developers can promote physicians by equipping them to have higher blog self-efficacy, a high positive performance/personal outcome expectation and lower negative outcome expectation from blogging, and also a higher satisfaction with their blogging behavior.