A good dentist or not: understanding the role of storytelling in online dentist reviews

Abstract

PurposeNarrative comments about dentists on physician review sites have been documented to increasingly influence people's selection of their dentists. From a communication standpoint, these comments are a type of narrative communication that people share their experiences with dentists by telling stories. Based on the frameworks of rhetoric structure theory and extended elaborated likelihood model, this study aimed to examine the effects of such storytelling from two perspectives including narrative structure and narrative focus.Design/methodology/approachA 4 (narrative structure) × 2 (narrative focus) between-subjects experiment was conducted to examine the proposed hypotheses and research questionsFindingsThe results showed that a one-sided comprehensive comment focusing on technical competence generated the strongest persuasion effects measured by attitude and behavioral intention. These effects were mediated by perceived narrative credibility and enjoyment.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the extant literature in two ways. First, it extends previous studies of online narrative comments by showing which narrative structure and focus are deemed to be more persuasive when selecting a dentist. Second, it offers a test of two routes of information processing (i.e. cognitive and experiential) to understand the mechanism underlying the effects of narrative comments.Peer reviewThe peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0359