Investigating the determinants of Chinese adult children's intention to use online health information for their aged parents

Background The increasing number of older people and the dissemination of health information via the Internet have emerged and both are challenging to Chinese society. Available online health information highlights the importance of decision making processes, specially in relation to the elderly who almost have no online presence and depend on their adult children's help. The researchers mostly focus on parents’ health information search for their children, however, they overlook the adult children's intention to use online health information for their aged parents. Objective This study fills this gap by extending the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to identify the determinants of adult children's intention to use online health information for their aged parents. Method Relying on survey method, the data were collected from teachers and students at different participating Universities in Wuhan, China. The Partial Least Squares (PLS), a structural equation modeling technique, was employed to test the research model. Results This study found that attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control and risk (p <0.05) were the predictors of intention to use online health information, whereas, trust (p > 0.05) was not listed among the predictors. Conclusions This study is a significant addition to the literature, in that it confirms the utility of the TPB with additional variables in predicting adults’ children intention to use online health information for their aged parents.