Journal Article

Influencing Factors of User Participation Behavior in Online Health Community under the Dimension of Emotional Experience

ZHU Yiping, ZHU Yi, ZHANG Cheng

2022

Overview

[Purpose/Significance] Emotional experience is a purely subjective feeling of the interaction between users and products. Exploring user participation behavior and influencing factors in online health communities under the influence of user emotional experience has obvious significance for retaining users. [Method/Process] A total of 25 users of the online health platform were selected as the research objects. The semi-structured interview method was used, and the basic information of the interviewees was combined with the questionnaire. With the help of grounded theory, the original interview data were coded, and the factors influencing user participation in online health communities were analyzed. Then, the emotional experience and feedback mechanism model of user participation in online health communities was constructed by combining the \"emotion-cognitive recursive model\". Finally, effective cases were screened from the questionnaire, and the configuration of the influencing factors of user participation behavior and affective feedback was explored based on the principle of qualitative comparative analysis and calculation of fuzzy sets. [Results/Conclusions] Through the grounded theory coding, six factors affecting user participation behavior are obtained: risk perception, platform cognition, demand motivation, platform experience, user emotion and environment. Then combined with the cognitive-affective model, the seven main categories derived from the rooted coding were divided into three dimensions: cognitive assessment, affective experience and participatory behavior. The feedback mechanism of emotional experience after participating behavior is further studied. It is found that the cognitive evaluation including risk perception, platform cognition and demand motivation affects the emotional experience of users, thus affecting their actual participation behavior. In the process of user participation in online health community, the factors of cognitive assessment, emotional experience and participation behavior interact with each other, and have a two-way effect on user participation behavior and user cognitive assessment. Further verification by fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) shows that among the six factors affecting user participation behavior, platform experience and demand motivation are the core conditions affecting user participation in online health community, and the three single factor variables of user emotion, environment and platform cognition do not necessarily affect the generation of user participation behavior. The extraction of influencing factors and the definition of user behavior are not comprehensive, and some real variables and key engagement behaviors may be overlooked. In addition, there is an imbalance in the number of samples on each platform. Follow-up related research can improve the pertinence of the platform and expand the sample capacity.

• Publisher: Editorial Department of Journal of Library and Information Science in Agriculture
• Subject: online health community|user participation|influence factors|configuration effect|emotional experience