What Drives the Influence of Health Science Communication Accounts on TikTok? A Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Ran Liu, Tianan Yang, Wenhao Deng, Xiaoyan Liu and Jianwei Deng ()
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Ran Liu: School of Public Health and Management, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325035, China
Tianan Yang: School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Wenhao Deng: School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Xiaoyan Liu: School of Languages and Communication Studies, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Jianwei Deng: School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 21, 1-11

Abstract: Medical institutions face a variety of challenges as they seek to enhance their reputation and increase the influence of their social media accounts. Becoming a social media influencer in the health field in today’s complex online environment requires integrated social and technical systems. However, rather than holistically investigating the mechanism of account influence, studies have focused on a narrow subset of social and technical conditions that drive online influence. We attribute this to the mismatch between complex causality problems and traditional symmetric regression methods. In this study, we adopted an asymmetric configurational perspective that allowed us to test a causally complex model of the conditions that create strong and not-strong account influence. We used fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to detect the effects of varying configurations of three social system characteristics (i.e., an oncology-related attribute, a public attribute, and comment interaction) and two technical system characteristics (i.e., telepresence and video collection) on the TikTok accounts of 63 elderly Chinese doctors (60 to 92 years old). Our results revealed two pathways associated with distinct sociotechnical configurations to strong account influence and three pathways associated with distinct sociotechnical configurations to not-strong account influence. Furthermore, the results confirmed that a single antecedent condition cannot, on its own, produce an outcome, i.e., account influence. Multiple inter-related conditions are required to produce an influential account. These results offer a more holistic picture of how health science communication accounts operate and reconcile the scattered results in the literature. We also demonstrate how configurational theory and methods can be used to analyze the complexities of social media platforms.

Keywords: TikTok; microvideo; health science communication; account influence; fsQCA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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