Nongye tushu qingbao xuebao (Jul 2022)
Influencing Factors of Elderly Users' Health Information Adoption Behavior Based on Social Platforms: Taking WeChat as an Example
Abstract
[Purpose/Significance] Based on the social background of population aging, studies on health literacy and health information behavior of the elderly have become an important issue as China enters an aging society and information society. This paper aims to explore the influencing factors of health information adoption behavior of elderly users on social platforms, so as to provide reference for social platform managers to screen health information and optimize health information service for the elderly. [Method/Process] This study followed an inductive qualitative approach. The case study methodology was adopted. To be specific, the WeChat platform was selected as one of the typical social platforms, and a semi-structured interview with 27 WeChat users was used for data collection. After collecting the qualitative interview data, the thematic analysis was carried out, which contains six steps, namely (1) becoming familiar with the data, (2) coding the data, (3) connecting codes and identifying themes, (4) reviewing themes, (5) developing concept maps, and (6) writing a report. Following the steps, all identified codes were distributed into 11 sub-themes and regrouped into 4 main themes. [Results/Conclusions] The results showed that factors of individual, informational, technical, and environmental are the key factors that affect the health information adoption behavior of elderly users when they are using WeChat platforms. Moreover, the influencing factor model of elderly users' health information adoption based on social platform was developed and the mechanism between various factors and adoption behavior is deeply discussed. Further analysis of the interview data indicated that living environment and technical support are external factors while information quality and individual characteristics are internal factors. In addition, in order to promote the development of social platforms and improve their health information service capabilities, this paper puts forward relevant suggestions from the two dimensions of social platform developers and users perspective. In particular, the social platform development team should fully identify elderly needs and habits of using the health information and the health information they need, which is helpful to providing elderly with comprehensive and targeted information services. The elderly needs to improve their health literacy and their ability to deal with health information, so as to adapt to the Internet era. Finally, due to the limited interviewee number, this paper only takes 27 elderly users and WeChat as an example. In the future work, more social platforms can be explored and horizontal comparative studies can be carried out.
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