Investigating the Theory of Planned Behaviour in the health care electronic word-of-mouth environment. A sender's perspective.

This paper presents a new approach to model in an integrative manner the sender’s motivations to engage in electronic word of mouth (eWOM) communication following the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) principles in health... [ view full abstract ]

This paper presents a new approach to model in an integrative manner the sender’s motivations to engage in electronic word of mouth (eWOM) communication following the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) principles in health care services. To ascertain this objective, a self-administered questionnaire was employed on a sample of 362 students in order to build an extended TPB model for health care services.
The extended TPB model encompassed the variables from Ajzen’s TPB model (1991) and other two components, specific to the health care context. As such, the extended TPB model was composed of five independent variables: subjective norm, attitude, perceived behavioural control, situational factors and moral norm, and, respectively, the dependant variable, the intention to post eWOM messages on health care forums. Moreover, the model’s internal consistency, reliability and the established relationships between the constructs were assessed by using factor analysis in SPSS and Structural Equation Modeling in WrapPls.
Further, the study revealed that the attitude and subjective norms do not have significant influence on intention. However, attitude can be measured indirectly as subjective norm, moral norm and situational factors influence it in a significant manner. Also, subjective norms have established a significant relationship with perceived behavioral control.