The Motivations Of Chronic Patients For Health Information Sharing In Online Communities

The rapid development of the Internet and Web 2.0 has provided users including chronic patients with more channels for information exchanging and information sharing.Therefore,more and more chronic patients begin to use the Internet to manage their physical condition,and online communities are effective for them to achieve this purpose.Online communities for patients' cooperation have obtained great development,such as PatientsLikeMe and National Health Service.Meanwhile,the online healthcare communities in China are mainly used for medical information inquiry and online appointment registration,few of them could support online mutual-assistance among patients.Though some specialized communities such as 39 JianKang APP and JianKangZhiLu APP have this function,low participation,low awareness,inadequate communication and other problems still obstruct their further development.Besides,chronic patients usually prefer to share their health information in unspecialized online communities such as Baidu Tieba,QQ Group,WeChat Group,and Weibo instead of specialized ones.Since this information sharing in online communities depends on patients' motivations,we will take hypertensive patients for example,exploring the motivations that affect their health information sharing in online communitiesFirstly,this paper introduces the research background and existing researches related to health information sharing,and then propose research issues,research methods and research framework are introduced.Secondly,we investigate chronic patients'motivations of information sharing in online communities with social exchange theory,social cognitive theory,self-determination theory and organizational citizenship behavior theory.After participatory observation,we find that types of health information shared by chronic patients in online communities include:disease status,medication information,emotional status,life information,disease-related knowledge,emotional support,etc.Then we interview 30 hypertensive patients online,and discover 43 concepts,15 general categories and 8 main categories related to information sharing and construct the motivation model of information sharing through Grounded Theory.All the motivations could be divided into two categories—extrinsic motivations such as self-development,individual needs and reciprocity,and intrinsic motivations including emotional-oriented motivation,social participation,community-oriented motivation and altruism.We believe that these motivations are independent as well as interrelated.Specifically,social participation in intrinsic motivations could influence community-oriented motivation and altruism.While extrinsic motivations also affect internal motivations.Note that except for the 8 main categories of motivation,all the concepts contained in each category are significant.In addition,we put forward some suggestions for the development of online communities,especially for the online healthcare communities,based on the extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation.The contributions of this study are as follows:(1)Combining social exchange theory,social cognitive theory,self-determination theory and organizational citizenship behavior theory,we comprehensively understand chronic patients'motivations of information sharing from management,psychology,sociology perspectives.(2)With online ethnography and grounded theory,we thoroughly understand chronic patients' motivations of information sharing in online communities.(3)We put forward reasonable suggestions for the development of online communities where chronic patients participate,especially for the online healthcare communities.For example,online healthcare communities could encourage the active participation of multiple stakeholders and establish a personalized recommendation mechanism to stimulate the self-development motivation of chronic patients.Besides,stimulating patients' social participation and self-efficacy through detailed classification criterions of chronic patients is also helpful.Moreover,advocating the organizational citizenship of chronic patients could contribute to altruism.