Article published In:
PragmaticsVol. 33:4 (2023) ► pp.641–662
If I testify about others, my testimony is valid
A study of other-justified discourses in Chinese online medical crowdfunding
While trustworthiness has been found to exert a vital influence on the success of an online medical crowdfunding (Ba et al. 2021), scarce studies have investigated the concepts and culture of trust in Eastern scenarios like China (Wang 2020). This is the first study aiming to discursively analyze how other-justified discourses, i.e., enhancing objectivity and trustworthiness through other people’s comments, contribute to obtaining potential donors’ trust in Chinese online medical crowdfunding encounters. Through the discourse analysis of 496 other-justified comments on fifty pieces of fully-funded online medical crowdfunding projects, it is found that four different types of people (a family member, a person in the same business or occupation, a classmate, a friend) offer evidence through other-justified discourses oriented towards ethos, experience, and emotion. The Wu-Lun (five ethic orders) in the acquaintance society is the underlying theoretical rationale that supports the credibility of other-justified discourse, which provides a novel research perspective for the dissemination and transitivity of trust in online medical crowdfunding. The findings serve to offer commenters an array of other-justified orientations and identity choices to engage more prospective backers in a medical donative event. The results highlight that crowdfunders not only need to display a compelling narrative strength but also raise awareness to enhance the trustworthiness of their projects, especially focusing on shreds of evidence provided by a third-person comment.
Keywords: trustworthiness discourse, online medical crowdfunding discourse, other-justified discourse, Chinese
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Research background
- 2.1The scenarios of online medical crowdfunding
- 2.2Evidentiality, trust, and other-justified discourses
- 3.Research method
- 3.1Data collection
- 3.2Data analysis
- 4.Findings
- 4.1The orientations of other-justified discourses
- 4.1.1Experience-oriented discourse justified by others
- 4.1.2Emotion-oriented discourse justified by others
- 4.1.3Ethos-oriented discourse justified by others
- 4.2The claimed identities underlying the other-justified discourses
- 4.2.1A family member
- 4.2.2A person in the same business or occupation
- 4.2.3A classmate
- 4.2.4A friend
- 4.1The orientations of other-justified discourses
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References
Ahn, Mikyung, and Foong Ha Yap
2015 “Evidentiality in Interaction: A Pragmatic Analysis of Korean Hearsay Evidential Markers.” Studies in Language 391: 46–84. 
Ba, Zhichao, Yuxiang Zhao, Shijie Song, and Qinghua Zhu
2021 “Understanding the Determinants of Online Medical Crowdfunding Project Success in China.” Information Processing and Management 581: 1–19.
Bista, Sanat Kumar, Keshav Dahal, Peter Cowling, and Bhadra Man Tuladhar
2010 “Acquaintance-based Trust Model for the Evolution of Cooperation in Business Games.” Service Oriented Computing and Applications 4 (3): 181–189.
Brewer, Marilynn. B., and Wendi Gardner
1996 “Who is This “We”? Levels of Collective Identity and Self Representations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 711: 83–93.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chafe, Wallace L.
1986 “Evidentiality in English Conversation and Academic Writing.” In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, ed. by Wallace L. Chafe, and Johanna Nichols, 261–272. New York: Ablex.
Chi, Shu-Cheng Steve, Raymond A. Friedman, Shu-Chen Chen, Ming-Jie Tsai, and Mei-Ling Yuan
2020 “Sympathy Toward a Company Facing Disaster: Examining the Interaction Effect between Internal Attribution and Role Similarity.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 561: 73–106.
Cohen, Jacob
1960 “A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales.” Educational and Psychological Measurement 201: 37–46.
Cook, Karen S.
2001 Trust in Society. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Corbin, Juliet, and Anselm Strauss
2015 Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (4th ed.). New York: Sage.
Eisenberg, Nancy, Richard A. Fabes, and Tracy L. Spinrad
2006 “Prosocial Development.” In Handbook of Child Psychology, ed. by Nancy Eisenberg, 646–718. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Elm, Malin Sveningsson
2009 “How Do Various Notions of Privacy Influence Decisions in Qualitative Interest Research?” In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, ed. by Annette N. Markham, and Nancy K. Baym, 49–76. New York: Sage.
Fei, Xiaotong
1992 From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Oakland: University of California Press.
Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames
1987 Thinking Through Confucius. New York: Suny Publishing.
Hoffman, Martin L.
2000 Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
House, Juliane, Dániel Z. Kádár, Fengguang Liu, Shiyu Liu, Wenrui Shi, Zongfeng Xia, Lin Jiao
2021 “Interaction, Speech Acts and Ritual: An Integrative Model.” Lingua 2571: 1–24.
Hsieh, Ivy Haoyin
2018 “Confucian Principles: A Study of Chinese Americans’ Interpersonal Relationships in Selected Children’s Picture Books.” Children’s Literature in Education 491: 216–231.
Jin, Pingyue
2019 “Medical Crowdfunding in China: Empirics and Ethics.” Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (8): 538–544.
Jordan, Brigitte, and Austin Henderson
1995 “Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice.” Journal of the Learning Sciences 41: 39–103.
Lim, Dong Sik
2010 “Evidentials and Interrogatives: A Case Study from Korean.” PhD diss. University of Southern California.
Liu, Zejun
2019 “Waterdrop Crowdfunding Has Topped Among Chinese Internet Health Care Providers with Over 20-billion-yuan Fundraising in Three Years.” [URL]
Lyons, John
1977 Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mao, Yansheng, and Xin Zhao
2022 “Trust Me, Trust My Words: Trustworthiness Construction in Chinese Online Medical Crowdfunding Discourses.” Pragmatics & Society 13 (4): 703–724.
Mayer, Roger C., James H. Davis, and F. David Schoorman
1995 “An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust.” Academy of Management Review 20 (3): 709–734.
McKeown, Jamie, and Hans J. Ladegaard
2020 “Evidentiality and Identity Positioning in Online Disputes about Language Use in Hong Kong.” Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice 141: 53–74.
Merriam-Webster
Morse, Anice M.
1991 “Approaches to Qualitative-Quantitative Methodological Triangulation.” Nursing Research 401: 120–123.
Mushin, Ilana
2011 Evidentality and Epistemological Stance: Narrative Retelling. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nazione, Samantha, Evan K. Perrault, and David M. Keating
2019 “Finding Common Ground: Can Provider-patient Race Concordance and Self-disclosure Bolster Patient Trust, Perceptions, and Intentions?” Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities 6 (5): 962–972.
Palmer, Frank Robert
1986 Mood and Modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ramsey, Lydia
2017, June 14. “Almost Half of All Money Raised Through Crowdfunding is Going Toward Medical Expenses.” Business Insider. [URL]
Shen, Fuyuan, Vivian C. Sheer, and Ruobing Li
2015 “Impact of Narratives on Persuasion in Health Communication: A Meta-analysis.” Journal of Advertising 441: 105–113.
Snyder, Jeremy
2016 “Crowdfunding for Medical Care: Ethical Issues in an Emerging Health Care Funding Practice.” Hastings Center Report 461: 36–42.
Vaish, Amrisha, Malinda Carpenter, and Michael Tomasello
2009 “Sympathy Through Affective Perspective Taking and its Relation to Prosocial Behavior in Toddlers.” Developmental Psychology 45 (2): 534–543.
Wang, Xueyu
2020 “Book Review of Trust and Discourse: Organizational Perspective
”. East Asian Pragmatics 5 (2): 285–288.
Wheeless, Lawrence R., and Janis Grotz
1977 “The Measurement of Trust and its Relationship to Self-disclosure.” Human Communication Research 3 (3): 250–257.
Wilkes, Julie, and Susan A. Speer
2022 “Kinship Carers’ Complaints about Birth Parents’ Facebook Posts: Mediated Evidentiality and Identity Construction.” Language & Communication 831: 97–108.
Wodak, Ruth
2015 “Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse-historical Approach.” In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, ed. by Karen Tracy, 275–288. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Xu, Kaibin, and Xiaoyu Wang
2020 “Kindhearted People, Please Save My Family: Narrative Strategies for New Media Medical Crowdfunding.” Health Communication 35 (13): 1605–1613.
Yu, Yating
2020 “Perpetuating and/or Resisting the “Leftover” Myth? The Use of (De)legitimation Strategies in the Chinese English-language News Media.” Feminist Media Studies 961: 1–18.
Zhao, Xin, and Yansheng Mao
2021 “Trust Me, I Am a Doctor: Discourse of Trustworthiness by Chinese Doctors in Online Medical Consultation.” Health Communication 36 (3): 372–380.
2023 “The Identity Lies in the Words of Crowd-funders: Help-seekers’ Identity Construction in Chinese Online Medical Crowdfunding Discourses.” Health Communication 38 (2): 363–370.