Getting to know my disease better: The influence of linguistic features of patients’ self-disclosure on physicians’ social support in online health consultation

The popularity of online health consultation (OHC) has grown rapidly in recent years and has become a common method for patients to receive affordable healthcare. Despite its widespread use, the impact of patients’ linguistic styles when describing disease symptoms on their continued engagement in consultation remains unclear. Drawing upon social support theory, this study examines the relationship between patients’ linguistic features in self-disclosing disease symptoms and their continued consultation behavior, specifically investigating the role of doctors’ social support. Data was collected from 46,012 patient consultation records on a leading Chinese online health platform. The study’s empirical results demonstrate that the sentence complexity of patients’ self-disclosure has an inverted-U relationship with physicians’ doctors’ social support, while the text length and affective expression of patients’ self-disclosure are positively effective in invoking doctors’ social support in online health consultation. Moreover, the study identifies the moderating influence of patients’ offline visit experience on the above relationships. Finally, for patients with (or without) offline visit experience, doctors’ informational support increases (or decreases) the likelihood of patients’ continued consultation. This study contributes to the creation of long-term doctor-patient relationships in OHCs and the design of platforms through the retention of patients.