Study On Factors That Affect User Participation Behavior In Online Health Communities

With the advent of the Web 2.0 era,great changes have taken place in the environment for users to obtain medical and health information.According to the data,up to 63%of Internet users search for health care-related information online in the United States.With the increasing of people's health awareness,online health community has gradually become an important channel for the public to obtain health information,which has developed rapidly in recent years.Studying the factors that influence the user participation behavior in the online health community in the context of Health 2.0 is of great significance for optimizing online health community services to improve user participation enthusiasm.This paper adopts an empirical research method and uses statistical software STATA as an analysis tool to study the affecting factors of user participation in online health communities from two aspects:user knowledge sharing behavior and user continuous use behavior.On this basis,further explore whether the use of online health community can improve user participation effect.The specific research work is as follows:(1)This chapter explored the factors that affect the user knowledge sharing behavior in the online health community.We use social capital to explain their sharing behaviors and further propose that five factors(social interaction ties,a sense of shared identity,trust,expertise and a sense of shared values)have significant positive effects on sharing behaviors and there are differences among patients who have spent different lengths of time participating in online depression communities.Then,we employed panel data regression analysis to test all of the six hypotheses.The results reveal that all five factors have significant positive effects on patients'sharing behaviors,and the effects are significantly different across groups.(2)This chapter explored the factors that affect the user continuous use behavior in the online health community.According to the social support theory,we divided social supports into three types:informational,emotional and relational,and then developed a theoretical model based on the proposition that different types of social supports have different effects on user continuous use behavior and the user's emotion is added as a mediation variable.We use panel data step-by-step regression method to test the model.The results show that informational,emotional support,and social support provided by online health communities have positive impacts on user continuous use behavior,and the effects were significantly mediated by emotion.(3)This chapter explored whether the use of online health community can improve user participation effect.We use Sense of online community and proposed that two dimensions of the sense of belonging(sense of identity and trust)and three dimensions of the sense of support(informational,emotional and socializing)have significant effects on user participation effect,and further considered gender difference and its effect on user participation effect.The results reveal that the sense of shared identity,trust,informational support and emotional support have positive effects on user participation effect,while socializing support have negative effects on it.In addition,the sense of shared identity and trust have more positive effects on user participation effect for female patients than male patients while socializing support has a more negative effect on it for female patients than for male patients.This paper explored the factors that affect the users' participation behavior in the online health community.The research is conducive to enriching the empirical research framework of participation behavior in the online health community participation and provide a new reference for the future research in this field.The research helps the relevant platform community to better understand user's needs and optimize the design of human-computer interface.It also provides more personalized tools and functions so that users can better participate in the communication and discussion.