Xiaohui Vincent Wang

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong

Health misinformation has become rampant in the digital age, because people often share unauthenticated health messages on online platforms. While previous studies have pinpointed different factors that influence the dissemination of such unverified health content, few have delved into the transition from exposure to online health information to it...

This study sought to investigate whether scholarly impact and academic influence differ between men and women in the field of communication and the extent to which the gender gap has persisted on social media platforms, an arena increasingly used for research dissemination. Data were collected from 10,736 articles, published in prominent communicat...

This study proposed an information-response model, which hypothesized that information acquisition determines individuals' preventive behaviors during the pandemic through cognitive, affective, and instrumental processes. Through a two-wave survey (N = 1,501) conducted in Hong Kong, results revealed that information acquisition was associated with...

Narratives play a critical role in health communication and promotion on social media. This study aimed to identify the features of popular social media narratives that generate emotional support and engage users in cancer communication. We conducted a content analysis of popular breast cancer narratives (N = 410) by five influential breast cancer...

Since its inception, computational social science (CSS) has been characterized as an interdisciplinary field. Nevertheless, unlike a mature interdisciplinary field that duly integrates knowledge beyond disciplinary boundaries, CSS has arguably been fragmented into multiple lines of inquiry. Although such fragmentation has been a constant concern, l...

Online health information is critical during pandemics. Previous research has focused on examining antecedents or consequences of particular information behaviors (e.g., seeking, sharing), but the process by which one information behavior influences or transforms into other information behaviors remains poorly understood. Guided by theories of info...

This study uses longitudinal data to profile psychological characteristics of COVID-19 vaccine advocates, resisters, and converts. We conducted a two-wave longitudinal survey (Nwave1 = 3190, Nwave2 = 2193) in Hong Kong using stratified quota sampling. Among those who completed both survey waves, 458 (30.5%) were classified as vaccine advocates, 295...

Amid emerging information and communication technologies with unique affordances for storytelling and story sharing, most studies in narrative communication still focus on narratives delivered through traditional mediums. There has been little research on how emotionally charged stories can be used to engage audiences on social media. This study ex...

Networked framing focuses on how the public becomes gatekeepers on social media. To unpack the dynamics of networked framing, we conducted an automated frame analysis to identify the shift of frame structures of government media (N = 12,090) and the public (N = 1.49 million) on Weibo during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found a moderate level of frame...

Background: Cancer ranks among the most serious public health challenges worldwide. In China—the world’s most populous country—about one-quarter of the population consists of people with cancer. Social media has become an important platform that the Chinese public uses to express opinions. Objective: We investigated cancer-related discussions on t...

Following the COVID-19’s outbreak in China, wildlife-related issues such as wildlife management and conservation made headlines around the world due to the potential zoonotic nature of the newly discovered coronavirus. In our study, we examined the dynamic interaction of the news agenda and public agenda concerning wildlife-related issues on social...

In the last 10 years, many canonical findings in the social sciences appear unreliable. This so-called “replication crisis” has spurred calls for open science practices, which aim to increase the reproducibility, replicability, and generalizability of findings. Communication research is subject to many of the same challenges that have caused low re...

Background Cancer ranks among the most serious public health challenges worldwide. In China—the world’s most populous country—about one-quarter of the population consists of people with cancer. Social media has become an important platform that the Chinese public uses to express opinions. Objective We investigated cancer-related discussions on the...

Purpose Drawing on the cognitive-functional model of emotions and emotional contagion, the authors aim to examine the role of negative emotions in the diffusion of cancer tweets. Design/methodology/approach Using an integrated approach of social network and text analytics, the authors analyzed 142,883 cancer tweets from February to March 2018. The...

BACKGROUND Although recent developments in mobile health (mHealth) have elevated the importance of assessing the extent to which smartphones empower individuals to seek information online, research in Asian countries investigating the behavior of seeking health information on smartphones has been rare. OBJECTIVE The twofold goal of our study was t...

Purpose The spread of rumors on social media has caused increasing concerns about an under-informed or even misinformed public when it comes to scientific issues. However, researchers have rarely investigated their diffusion in non-western contexts. This study aims to systematically examine the content and network structure of rumor-related discuss...

To examine the nature and content of messages presented in a popular Chinese online community about intimate partner violence (IPV), this study utilized a two-step analytic approach that combined quantitative content analysis and automatic content analysis. We collected 90,040 messages from the online community’s IPV group. Study 1 analyzed 8,343 r...

Online health information, as an emerging field in health communication research, has attracted close attention from researchers. To identify major determinants of why individuals seek health information online, we conducted a meta-analysis that systematically accumulates the existing research findings. To that end, by integrating three theories or...

Risk perceptions and technology innovativeness are the two primary factors related to the adoption of mobile technologies. The current study examines the role of technology innovativeness and risk perceptions on smartphone use and dependence in an Asian context. A total of 9,086 participants were recruited through online surveys from ten Asian coun...

Given the increasing popularity of gamified crowdsourcing, the study reported here involved examining determinants of users' continuance intention toward crowdsourcing games, both with longitudinal data and reference to a revised unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT). At three time points, data were collected from an online sur...

A persistent challenge in video game studies has been articulating the various components of game experience inferred from traditional methods such as surveys and focus groups. To that purpose, online user reviews remain a rich yet underexplored resource for collecting feedback about game experience for the video game industry. After all, such data...

To elucidate the Chinese public's awareness of cancer and its possible prevention, we investigated cancer-prevention messages presented on Weibo, a Twitter-like Chinese social media platform, with reference to the extended parallel process model (EPPM) and attribution theory. With a sample of 16,654 cancer-related messages, we analyzed whether the...

Although critical in practice, as well as prevalent, limited effort has gone into understanding the driving factors behind the diffusion of cancer information on social media. This study seeks to comprehensively examine both the content and sender factors that determine cancer information diffusion. Specifically, a multidimensional measure is propo...

Background: Over the last two decades, the incidence and mortality rates of gynecologic cancers have increased at a constant rate in China. Gynecologic cancers have become one of the most serious threats to women's health in China. With the widespread use of social media, an increasing number of individuals have employed social media to produce, s...

The current study systematically reviews and summarizes the existing literature of game acceptance, identifies the core determinants, and evaluates the strength of the relationships in the extended technology acceptance model. Moreover, this study segments video games into two categories: hedonic and utilitarian and examines player acceptance of th...

This study investigated the driving mechanism of building interaction ties among the people living with HIV/AIDS in one of the largest virtual HIV communities in China using social network analysis. Specifically, we explained the probability of forming interaction ties with homophily and popularity characteristics. The exponential random graph mode...

Within the human computation paradigm, gamification is increasingly gaining interest. This is because an enjoyable experience generated by game features can be a powerful approach to attract participants. Although potentially useful, there has been little research conducted into understanding the effectiveness of gamification in human computation....

Purpose – Human computation games (HCGs) that blend gaming with utilitarian purposes are a potentially effective channel for content creation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the driving factors behind players’ adoption of HCGs through a music video tagging game. The effects of perceived aesthetic experience (PAE) and perceived output q...

A network perspective was adopted in this study to identify influential users in an online HIV community in China. Specifically, the indegree centrality, outdegree centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and clustering coefficient of individuals were evaluated to measure the user influence in such a community. Moreover, this stu...

Human computation games (HCGs) are applications that leverage games to solve computational problems that are out reach of the capacity of computers. Game aesthetics are critical for HCG acceptance, and the game elements should motivate users to contribute time and effort. In this paper, we examine the effect of aesthetic experience on intention to...

Human computation games (HCGs) are applications that use games to harness human intelligence to perform computations that cannot be effectively done by software systems alone. Despite their increasing popularity, insufficient research has been conducted to examine the predictors of player acceptance for HCGs. In particular, prior work underlined th...