Exploring the impact of linguistic signals transmission on patients’ health consultation choice: web mining of online reviews
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Archivos
Fecha
2021-09
Profesor/a Guía
Facultad/escuela
Idioma
en
Título de la revista
ISSN de la revista
Título del volumen
Editor
MDPI
Nombre de Curso
Licencia CC
Atribución 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0)
Licencia CC
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.es
Resumen
Background: Patients face difficulties identifying appropriate physicians owing to the sizeable quantity and uneven quality of information in physician rating websites. Therefore, an increasing dependence of consumers on online platforms as a source of information for decision-making has given rise to the need for further research into the quality of information in the form of online physician reviews (OPRs). Methods: Drawing on the signaling theory, this study develops a theoretical model to examine how linguistic signals (affective signals and informative signals) in physician rating websites affect consumers’ decision making. The hypotheses are tested using 5521 physicians’ six-month data drawn from two leading health rating platforms in the U.S (i.e., Healthgrades.com and Vitals.com) during the COVID-19 pandemic. A sentic computing-based sentiment analysis framework is used to implicitly analyze patients’ opinions regarding their treatment choice. Results: The results indicate that negative sentiment, review readability, review depth, review spelling, and information helpfulness play a significant role in inducing patients’ decision-making. The influence of negative sentiment, review depth on patients’ treatment choice was indirectly medi-ated by information helpfulness. Conclusions: This paper is a first step toward the understanding of the linguistic characteristics of information relating to the patient experience, particularly the emerg-ing field of online health behavior and signaling theory. It is also the first effort to our knowledge that employs sentic computing-based sentiment analysis in this context and provides implications for practice. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Notas
Indexación: Scopus
Palabras clave
Consumer decision-making, COVID-19, Online review helpfulness, Physician rating websites, Sentiment analysis, Signaling theory
Citación
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health Open Access Volume 18, Issue 19September 2021 Article number 9969
DOI
10.3390/ijerph18199969