Abstract
With the development of the healthcare industry and the enhancement of people's self-care awareness, people have begun to take proactive measures to maintain their health. As a preventive healthcare behaviour, the self-test has become widely adopted action. In terms of female privacy health (e.g., sexual and reproductive health), on the one hand, the frequent occurrence of privacy diseases makes a self-test more important. On the other hand, in many cultures, certain areas such as female sexual health and reproductive health are still considered taboo topics. Faced with the an increasing number of privacy disease self-test products on the market, this has become an important issue how to improve the purchase of privacy disease self-test products for female consumers. This research aims to explore the individual and product characteristics that promote consumers to purchase privacy disease self-test products. Drawing on the health beliefs, technology acceptance, and preventive healthcare literatures, this thesis proposes 7 predictive factors, including consumer innovativeness, consumer self-efficacy, product technology promptness, product quality, product risk, and product enjoyment, and explores the mediating role of consumers’ perception of ease to use, usefulness and pleasure to use in the relationship. In addition, this study explores the moderating role of consumers’ interactive needs and disease severity. Through an online survey, this study collects
198 female samples from various regions in China. By analysing the data, this thesis found that all predictive factors except product quality can substantially affect consumers' purchase intention through the perception of ease of use, usefulness, and pleasure. These relationships are relatively stable and are not substantially moderated by consumer need for interactions or disease severity. By exploring the factors that influence the purchase intention of privacy disease self-test products, this research has brought helpful implications to theory and practice