With the advancement of technology and the development of society, internet-based social media has gradually penetrated into people's lives. Social media not only meets people's indispensable social needs, but also forms a more complex social network, making information sharing and transmission an important link for communication in social networks, and one of the important purposes of people to use social networks. Users can easily spread and share information by clicking the share buttons. However, multiple factors that will affect the users' willingness to share and the occurrence of sharing behavior. Hence, it is necessary to conduct in-depth analysis of user's information sharing behavior, especially to explore the influence factors of user’s information sharing behavior, which is helpful to understand from the perspective of the audience which factors will cause information to be widely forwarded and shared, thus promote the effect of information dissemination, and can also effectively intervene the spread of false information.
At present, the research on the information sharing behavior of internet users has gradually attracted the attention of scholars, and the information sharing behavior has been discussed from different disciplines and different perspectives. However, according to the previous studies, there are few studies have been conducted on the health information sharing behavior of social media users from the perspective of communication, and there are few studies on the construction of a complete model of relevant influencing factors and the testing of empirical hypotheses on the basis of existing theories. Based on this, from the perspective of communication, this study attempts to analyze the influencing factors of WeChat platform users’ health information sharing behavior and construct a theoretical model.
WeChat has become the main social media platform for users to obtain information. And health information is one of the most important content which can easily trigger users’ sharing behavior on WeChat platform. Therefore, in order to discuss the impact factors of user’s health information sharing behavior, this paper establishes research hypothesis based on the theory of planned behavior, technology acceptance model and social cognitive theory. The impact factors are divided into attitude, value and environment, which is including six variables: perceived usefulness, information quality, self-efficacy, perceived benefits, social support and critical mass. Questionnaire was used to collect data (N=375), and structural equation model was constructed to test the theoretical hypothesis. The study found that the all variables have positive impact on the share intention. Among them, value factor is the most important factor, and the attitude of individuals toward information and the influence of environment on themselves are also important factors, but the degree of action decreases. Meanwhile, users’ age and self-perceived health status are also affect their health information sharing behavior. From the perspective of communication, this study lays a theoretical and practical foundation for the effect of health communication.