| Summary: | 博士 === 國立中正大學 === 資訊管理所暨醫療資訊管理所 === 98 === Blogs are a worldwide phenomenon that has already hit the mainstream. With the ease of use and interactivity features of blogs, more and more people have started to build their own personal blogs. The phenomena occurred in the same manner within the physicians’ population. However, there are few studies focusing on physicians’ blogging behaviors. The purposes of this study were to understand the factors that influence physicians to blog and their continuance intention based on social cognitive theory and expectation disconfirmation theory. Another popular phenomenon, self-disclosure, was considered in this research. An online survey was the method of data collection. Through leaving an invitation message on doctors’ blogs or sending an email to them, 130 valid questionnaires were returned.
The motivations of physicians to build a blog are various, but the majority of physicians share medical knowledge or health information on their blogs as the results showed. The research model had measurement and structure validation. Also the full model had a large effect size of global goodness of fit (GoF was 0.49). The integrated model could explain 39.1 % variance of blog continuance intention (R2=0.391), and 37.4 % variance of user satisfaction (R2=0.374). The results indicated that physicians with different outcome expectations of blogs presented different behaviors on blog usage, self-disclosure, and user satisfaction. The blog usage had a positive association with unexpected positive outcome. Further, unexpected positive /negative outcomes had a significant effect on both satisfaction and blog continuance intention. The interesting finding is that self-disclosure had a significant negative relationship with unexpected negative outcomes.
The results of this study provided some implications. Most physician bloggers voluntarily build their own blogs, and the unexpected positive outcomes they received would result in their satisfaction and blog continuance intention. Thus, doctors keep sharing correct medical knowledge or health information that is good for general public, as well as it being beneficial for doctors themselves and other professionals, hospitals, and government. Therefore, the results could be a reference for hospital executives and officials when making rules or policies. For academics, the contribution of this study is that the modified EDT we proposed had a stronger explanatory power than initial EDT. The results could be a reference for research focusing on continuous use (intention) or repurchase.
Two limitations were including cross-sectional study issue and self-report issue in this study. Future research could be oriented toward several aspects, such as discovering other factors that may contribute blog continuance intention, verifying the model we propose in different fields, IT/IS (Information Technology/Information Systems), and other research subjects; or to further discuss the factors resulting in the occurrence of unexpected positive /negative outcomes.
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