Willingness to Adopt Health Information Among Social Question-and-Answer Community Users in China: Cross-sectional Survey Study (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND COVID-19 has spread around the world, increasing the public’s need for health information in the process. Meanwhile, in the context of lockdowns and other measures to prevent virus spread, the Internet has surged as an online resource for health information. Under these conditions, social question-and-answer communities (SQACs) are playing an increasingly important role in improving public health literacy. There is great theoretical and practical significance in exploring the influencing factors of SQAC users’ willingness to adopt health information. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to establish a UTAUT extended model which could analyze influence factors of SQAC users’ willingness to adopt health information during COVID-19 epidemic. Particularly, we tried to test the moderating effect of different demographic characteristics on the variables’ influences. METHODS The study was conducted with the administration of an online questionnaire survey and the analysis of the responses from a final total of 598 valid questionnaires after invalid data were cleaned. Using structural equation modeling, the influencing factors of SQAC users’ willingness to adopt health information were analyzed. The moderating effects of variables were verified by hierarchical regression. RESULTS Performance expectation (βPE = .282, P < .001), social influence (βSI = .238, P = .02) and facilitating conditions (βFC = .279, P = .002) positively affected users’ willingness to adopt health information, whereas effort expectancy (P = .79) and perceived risk (P = .41) had no significant effects. Gender had a significant moderating effect in the structural equation model. CONCLUSIONS SQAC users’ willingness to adopt health information was evidently affected by multiple factors such as performance expectation, social influence and facilitating conditions. The structural equation model proposed in this study has a good fitting situation and explanatory power of users’ willingness to adopt health information. Suggestions are provided for the SQAC operators and health management agencies based on research results.