PurposeTo address the problem of how to guide and promote health knowledge adoption, based on online diabetes communities, this study explores the impact mechanism of social support on users' individual health knowledge adoption to provide insights for online diabetes community management and personal health management.Design/methodology/approachIntegrating the theories of cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) and social support, this study constructs a theoretical model, collects data through a questionnaire and uses a structural equation model to analyse 356 data.FindingsThe results show that: (1) Considering the online diabetes communities, it is reasonable to divide social support into emotional, information, network and respect support. (2) Social support affects individual health knowledge adoption through the intermediaries of knowledge argument quality, knowledge source credibility and positive emotions. (3) The order of the mediating effect of cognitive and emotional factors between social support and health knowledge adoption is knowledge argument quality > knowledge source credibility > positive emotions and rationality > sensibility. (4) Users pay more attention to the source credibility of professional health knowledge than that of experiential health knowledge.Originality/valueThis research expands the application scope of CAPS and opens the “black box” of the impact of social support on individual health knowledge adoption behaviour. Simultaneously, the dimensions of social support and the mediating effect between social support and the two types of health knowledge are discussed.

This study is to solve the problem of blocked help-seeking behavior and “hitchhiking” in patient user groups, to explore the mechanism of knowledge seeking and sharing behaviors influenced by individual cognition and motivation. The thesis integrates the ERG theory cognitive behavior factors then construct the theoretical model of cognition-motivation-behavior. The structural equation model of 390 valid data is analyzed. The results showed that: (1) Perceived ease of use has no effect on motivation and knowledge seeking, but only on knowledge sharing; (2) survival motivation, relationship motivation and growth motivation, all promote knowledge seeking, while only growth motivation promotes knowledge sharing; (3) perceived usefulness, perceived interpersonal trust and disease cognition have different effects on all these three motivations; (4) perceived usefulness, perceived interpersonal trust and disease cognition have direct effects on knowledge seeking, while perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have direct effects on knowledge sharing; (5) the key factor to promote knowledge seeking is perceived usefulness, while the key factor to promote knowledge sharing is perceived ease of use; (6) survival motivation and growth motivation play an intermediary role between perceived usefulness, perceived interpersonal trust, disease cognition and knowledge seeking respectively, while only growth motivation plays an intermediary role between these three cognitive factors and knowledge sharing.