Personal Characteristics, Privacy Concern, and Membership in Virtual Health Communities: An Empirical Study

In this age of social media, an increasing number of individuals adopt health social media platforms to exchange social support with other Internet users. However, sharing PHI in publicly available virtual environments may yield negative outcomes. This may raise privacy concerns for users of these platforms. In this study, we examined the privacy concern associated with disclosing personal health information (PHI) in virtual health communities (VHCs). We collected data from 146 university students, analyzed the dataset, and assessed the hypotheses using a series of t-tests, Pearson correlation coefficients, and logistic regression analysis. The results demonstrated that compared with men, women are more concerned about their privacy. Furthermore, we found that PHI privacy concern is negatively related with the likelihood of joining VHCs. Our analysis, however, did not show any significant relation between neither age nor health status and PHI privacy concern. Our findings have implications for research and practice.

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