Are Diverse Media Better than a Single Medium? The Relationship between Mixed Media and Perceived Effect from the Perspective of Online Psychological Counseling.

Jingfang Liu,Lu Gao

doi:10.3390/ijerph18168603

Abstract

The progress of new media has promoted the development of online health consultations. Previous research has investigated the impact of media richness on user satisfaction; however, little attention has been given to the mixed effects of the nesting of multiple media. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact and differences of the use of single or mixed media on users’ perceived effect from the perspectives of social support and satisfaction by mining user reviews on online health platforms. The data were collected from a professional online psychological counseling platform. We collected data on 48,807 reviews from 11,694 users. Text annotation and sentiment analysis were then used to extract variable eigenvalues from the reviews. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and hierarchical regression analysis were used for statistical analysis. The results show that mixed media with different richness has a significant impact on the users’ perceived effects. Among them, compared to “text + audio,” using “text + audio + video/face to face” can significantly improve the users’ perceived social support and satisfaction. However, compared to single medium, mixed media with higher richness may not necessarily achieve a better effect. We found that the inclusion of “video/face to face” mixed media significantly reduced the users’ perceived social support and satisfaction compared to text or audio use alone. These research results complement the blank media richness theory in the field of online health care and provide guidance for improving the personalized customization of online psychological counseling platforms.

Highlights

We ran a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on perceived social support
The results show that compared to the mixed media of “text + audio,” using “text + audio
From the perspective of online mental health consultation and based on the theory of media richness, this paper studied the impact of a single medium and mixed media on the users’ perceived effects

Summary

Introduction

With the development of the Internet and the popularization of new media, Internetbased health consultation has been booming. An increasing number of users are seeking doctors and exchanging health information through network platforms [1]. Online consultation has become the main way for users to seek health help. The forms of doctor–patient communication on Internet health platforms have evolved over time. Online consultation was mainly text-based real-time chat in which patients communicated health information with doctors by sending text or images [3]. As a medium with high timeliness, wide transmission, and strong communication, audio has been widely introduced [5]. The addition of visual information provides a new understanding of online health development and has attracted extensive research attention [6,7]

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