If I testify about others, my testimony is valid: A study of other-justified discourses in Chinese online medical crowdfunding
XinZhao and YanshengMao
Nanjing University | Harbin Engineering University
Abstract
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.
This paper addresses a neglected aspect of trustworthiness constructed in online crowdfunding by portraying the linguistic strategies of other-initiated or other-justified discourses in Chinese online medical crowdfunding. Since its emergence in China in 2009, online medical crowdfunding has gained enduring popularity for Chinese people in dire need of covering health expenditures. Despite considerable momentum in the study of online medical crowdfunding (Ba et al. 2021; Jin 2019), there is a dearth of research on the role of trustworthiness in the outcome of online medical crowdfunding projects (Zhao and Mao 2023). As the potential donors decide whether give the online help-seekers financial support, they need to discriminate the help-seeking sources, which may affect the trustworthiness of the information, as to whether it is to be further disseminated or not (Ahn and Yap 2015). Although a tiny fraction of research has already investigated the online help-seekers’ trustworthiness constructed in medical crowdfunding via concentrating on their personal statements (Mao and Zhao 2022; Zhao and Mao 2023), insufficient attention has been paid to how other-justified comments on the crowdfunders’ personal statements are linguistically constructing online help-seekers’ trustworthiness. This is precisely crucial to facilitating potential donors’ trust and donation. Additionally, as multiple evidential markers are usually used as lexical or grammatical vehicles for testimony (Lim 2010), a pertinent question that has not yet been adequately answered would be what other discursive evidential might contribute to obtaining the hearers’ trust. Along this vein, one way forward to provide possible answers to this question would be to figure out how the various relational identities highlighted by the other-justified discourses contribute to eliciting trust from the potential donors for the online help-seekers’ request. In so doing, this paper provides a timely and necessary study of how other-justified discourses are exploited to build up a convincing comment on online help-seekers’ personal statements; meanwhile, this paper represents a further step towards understanding how other-justified discourses as evidential devices contribute to the construction of trustworthiness in online medical crowdfunding.
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