TITLE:
Research on the Model of Consumer Health Information Seeking Behavior via Social Media
AUTHORS:
Juan Chen, Xiaorong Hou, Wenlong Zhao
KEYWORDS:
Health Information Seeking Behavior, Research Model, Structural Equation Model, Social Media
JOURNAL NAME:
International Journal of Communications, Network and System Sciences,
Vol.9 No.8,
August
11,
2016
ABSTRACT: Purpose: We aim to create a model of
consumer health information seeking behavior via social media, then to have a
better understand of it. After that further efforts should be made to provide
targeted recommendations for media managers to promote health communication via
social media. Methods: Our custom model was derived from literature review,
empirical research was tested by the use of questionnaire investigation, and
then the collected data were analyzed by structural equation model tool
SmartPLS. Finally, the custom model was modified according to the experimental
results of SmartPLS. Results: A total of 239 (66.39%) of the respondents were
female and 121 (33.61%) were male. The maximum of two stages of age were 18 -
29 (70.56%), 30 - 39 (13.89%). Wechat (60.28%), QQ Zone (55.22%), Micro-blog
(48.89%) were the most commonly used social media to obtain health information.
About 44.72% of respondents used social media to obtain health information
multiple times a day. The whole numerical values of AVE, cronbach’s alpha, CR
and square roots of AVE were above the benchmarks of themselves and showed
great reliability and validity. All the 11 hypotheses had obvious statistical
significance, the P-value of eight path coefficients exhibited