Article Preview
TopIntroduction
With the acceleration of population ageing, chronic diseases becoming more prevalent, and the number of patients with critical illnesses escalating, global household health care spending is expected to increase at an annual rate of 5.4% from 2018 to 2022 (Deloitte, 2019). More than 35% of health care expenditures have increased due to out-of-pocket expenses; this increase partially explains why 100 million people have been driven into extreme poverty worldwide (World Health Organization, 2019). Accordingly, a particular type of crowdfunding called medical crowdfunding, aimed at raising funds to pay medical bills, has become increasingly popular (Gonzales et al., 2018).
Medical crowdfunding has become increasingly common among leading crowdfunding platforms. On the U.S.-based crowdfunding platform GoFundMe, for example, over 30% of fundraising activities concern personal health care expenses, and more than USD 650 million has been raised (McClanahan, 2018). In China, by August 2020, over USD 5.19 billion had been successfully fundraised for people with serious diseases in economic difficulties, with more than USD 1.05 billion raised in the first eight months of 2020.
However, successful medical crowdfunding is still difficult for most people (Jin, 2019). According to Berliner and Kenworthy’s (2017) analysis of randomly selected medical crowdfunding campaigns on GoFundMe, only 10% of campaigns had met their targets. An analysis of 143,917 medical fundraising campaigns on another leading medical crowdfunding platform, Qingsongchou, shows that merely 7% of such campaigns were ultimately successful. Therefore, much research has concentrated on the factors that affect the success rates of medical crowdfunding. However, most of the literature has focused on the influencing factors of people’s fundraising willingness and behaviour. Few studies have evaluated the factors that affect medical crowdfunding campaign sharing behaviour, yet large medical expenses in fundraising campaigns are typically covered by many small individual contributions (Li et al., 2020). In addition, the exposure of medical crowdfunding campaigns to potential contributors stems primarily from other people’s sharing behaviour. Whether a medical crowdfunding campaign can be sufficiently shared may thus significantly influence the campaign’s success (Bereczkei et al., 2010). However, the literature has rarely paid attention to this issue.
The development of mobile social media has led to a higher level of human engagement and connection (Muqadas et al., 2017). In social networks, an individual user’s behaviour can be affected by group norms and other members’ opinions (Zhou & Li, 2014). Rapidly growing mobile social media platforms have become the main channels for medical crowdfunding in China. That is, people who see a medical crowdfunding campaign shared via mobile social media will be affected by social influence based on relevant characteristics.
As the most commonly used social media platform, WeChat can frequently expose people to medical crowdfunding campaigns that are shared by others. When people share these medical campaigns, some of them may edit the textual content related to the campaigns (for example, “This is my uncle, a truck driver, the sole breadwinner of the family, whose small son is still in primary school . . .”). In contrast, other people may share a campaign without attaching any context, as Figure 1 shows. Accordingly, in this study, people who share medical crowdfunding campaigns on mobile social media are defined as retweeters, and any salient text that is attached or written by retweeters is defined as retweeted text. This study’s main research questions, therefore, are: (a) What factors influence social media users’ sharing willingness and behaviour when social media users observe medical crowdfunding campaigns shared by retweeters? (b) Does a retweeter’s editing of retweeted text facilitate sharing behaviour among other users? (c) What kind of retweeted text can positively affect sharing behaviour? The explanation of related concepts in this study is shown in Table 1.