Abstract:

Understanding the information adoption intention in online health communities can be beneficial to improve information service quality, enhance user experience and promote the benign health knowledge communication. This paper has developed a causal model, which based on the traditional information adoption model and social support theory, using trust as a mediator and health literacy as moderator. A survey in China was conducted to test the proposed research model and hypotheses. The results show the following key findings: user's trust in online health communities positively affects the information adoption intention; user's trust mainly comes from information support which relies on argument quality and source credibility; user's health literacy positively moderates the relations between source credibility and information support, and negatively regulates the relations between argument quality and information support.

Key words: Online health community, Information adoption intention, Health literacy, Trust