Does Help-Seeking Message Content Impact Online Charitable Behavior? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis Based on 40 Waterdrop Projects

Yanzhi Liu, Rong Cao () and Zheng Wang
Additional contact information
Yanzhi Liu: College of Public Management, Northwest University, Xi’an 710127, China
Rong Cao: College of Public Management, Northwest University, Xi’an 710127, China
Zheng Wang: College of Public Management, Northwest University, Xi’an 710127, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 2, 1-18

Abstract: A help-seeking message is composed of abundant types of content; therefore, it is unsuitable for analysis by the traditional methods that assume that variables are independent of one another. To address this problem, we introduced qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to explore the synergistic effects of help-seeking message content on online charitable behavior. Crisp-set QCA and fuzzy-set QCA were both used to analyze qualitative and quantitative data from 40 Waterdrop projects. To analyze the qualitative data, three members of our research team intensively and separately read a large number of help-seeking messages, analyzed and summarized the main content referring to previous studies on charitable donation, extracted rational appeals, positive emotions, negative emotions, moral appeals, and the economic condition as condition variables, and finally determined the coding rules collaboratively. The necessity analysis results show that moral appeals and rational appeals are necessary conditions for online charitable behavior. The sufficiency analysis results show that there are three configurations impacting online charitable behavior. This study can help inspire future studies shifting from a traditional perspective to a configuration perspective and help seekers obtain more charitable donations.

Keywords: charity; online charitable behavior; fundraising; help-seeking message content; qualitative comparative analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/2/1094/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/2/1094/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:2:p:1094-:d:1027496

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().