How does WeChat’s active engagement with health information contribute to psychological well-being through social capital?

This study aims to examine how the users’ engagement with health information benefits their well-being and to demonstrate the underlying mechanism of the relationships through bonding and bridging social capital. An online survey was conducted with 522 WeChat users in China. Structural equation modeling using the maximum likelihood of estimation was employed to test the study’s hypothesized model. Bootstrapping methods were used to examine mediation effects. The results revealed that users’ liking, sharing, and commenting behaviors were positively related to the bonding and bridging capital accumulated on WeChat. These two forms of social capital were also positively associated with users’ psychological well-being, though bridging capital exerted more power in our research model. Moreover, both bonding and bridging capital mediated the relationship between WeChat affordances and psychological well-being. The findings shed new light on directions for leveraging mobile social media as an alternative means to bring about improvements in well-being in mobile-phone-saturated China. This is likely to be the first study that examines the mediating roles of bonding and bridging social capital on the relationship between users’ health information engagement and users’ psychological well-being. By providing robust findings by adopting the variable-centered approach in a health context, the findings of this study are promising for the extension and theoretical development of mobile social media research in the context of health information engagement.