Factors Influence Intention to Adopt Internet Medical Information on Bulletin Boards: A Heuristic-Systematic Perspective

The considerable attention that increasing needs to acquire Internet Medical Information (IMI) has received in recent years, there has been little research to systematically investigate the factors influencing users’ intention to adopt the IMI. The authors apply the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM) to evaluate how users form the intention to adopt IMI on bulletin boards. An online survey was conducted collecting 339 questionnaires from users of bulletin boards to validate the proposed model. The authors’ findings suggest that both systematic and heuristic processes had significant effects on intention to adopt information. Subjective knowledge positively moderated the systematic process, while trust in word of mouth positively moderated the heuristic process. The key contributions of this study are: (1) the HSM was examined in a natural setting instead of a laboratory setting, which made the results more credible and generalizable; (2) the HSM was extended by proposing two moderators (subjective knowledge and trust in word of mouth) to give insight into the users’ considerations when evaluating IMI. KEywORdS Intention to Adopt Information, Internet Medical Information, Perceived Readability, Source Authority, Subjective Knowledge, Trust in Word of Mouth