The Impact of Beliefs on Health Information Social Sharing for Users: The Perspectives of Social Psychology and Information Technology

With the integration and penetration of digitization into healthcare services, the comprehensive health industrial market is developing flourishingly. Users are fast-changing the way of health communication. This study investigates psychosocial and technological factors on health information sharing adoption through social sharing services. Based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, social influence theory, and innovation diffusion theory, we developed a hypothesized model for health information social sharing adoption (HISSA), and dimensions of attitude beliefs, control beliefs, and normative beliefs were created. We conducted an empirical study on the adoption intention using a survey for data collection. The results were obtained from 375 valid questionnaires, and their interactions were tested and analyzed using PLS-structural equation modeling. Results implied that (1) social identity of normative beliefs was the most critical variable affecting behavioral intention, which revealed the importance of psychosocial factors; (2) behavioral intention was also determined by user's performance expectancy, facilitating conditions, subjective norm; (3) personal innovativeness had a negative effect on behavioral intention and positive effect on effort expectancy; and (4) effort expectancy and social identity had a positive effect on performance expectancy. This study advances the understanding of social sharing for health and provides references for the development of both virtual health communities and social sharing services to upgrade their products from user's behavior and psychology. This empirical research model may also be useful for researchers who are interested in user's health information behavior.