ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1592093
Research on the influencing factors of maternal online health information-seeking behavior
Provisionally accepted
- 1shanxi police college, Taiyuan, China
- 2Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, Shandong Province, China
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As an important social group, mothers possess unique physiological and psychological characteristics. They may rely on Internet sources for obtaining health information about themselves and their children. Therefore, the present study determined the factors that influence maternal online health information-seeking behavior. An influencing factors model of maternal online health information-seeking behavior was constructed based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). A questionnaire survey conducted in China yielded 903 valid responses. SPSS software was used to empirically analyze the influence of different factors on maternal online health information-seeking behavior. The study found that, perceived usefulness mediated between the Internet information quality and online health information-seeking behavior, accounting for 59.46% of the variance. Anxiety mediated between maternal stress and online health information-seeking behavior, accounting for 19.40% of the variance. Internet information quality positively affected mothers’ perception of the usefulness of the information. Perceived usefulness and anxiety played a partial mediating role in the central and peripheral paths, respectively. Furthermore, social support effectively moderated the influence of maternal stress on their anxiety.
Keywords: maternal, Perceived usefulness, anxious emotion, social support, online health information-seeking behavior
Received: 31 Mar 2025; Accepted: 09 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xu, Zhou and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Huajie Xu, shanxi police college, Taiyuan, China
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