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Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics

Date Submitted: Dec 4, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 3, 2020 - Jan 28, 2021
Date Accepted: Mar 7, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

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

Li P, Xu L, Tang T, Wu X, Huang C

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

JMIR Med Inform 2021;9(3):e26265

DOI: 10.2196/26265

PMID: 33783364

PMCID: 8075348

Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

Factors influencing users' willingness to share health information in the social question-and-answer community represented by Zhihu: An online questionnaire survey

  • PengFei Li; 
  • Lin Xu; 
  • TingT Tang; 
  • Xiaoqian Wu; 
  • Cheng Huang

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.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Li P, Xu L, Tang T, Wu X, Huang C

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

JMIR Med Inform 2021;9(3):e26265

DOI: 10.2196/26265

PMID: 33783364

PMCID: 8075348

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