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Abstract

As aging populations expand across Asia, home-based palliative care remains underutilized despite its potential to preserve dignity and emotional well-being. This study examines adoption decisions under emotionally intense uncertainty by testing a moderated mediation model in which perceived risk reduces adoption intention through diminished perceived benefit, and trust conditions the risk–benefit appraisal link. A scenario-based experiment with 400 Chinese participants was analyzed using PROCESS Models 4 and 7 with bias-corrected bootstrapping. Results show that perceived benefit fully mediates the effect of perceived risk on adoption intention. Trust shows evidence of conditioning the association between perceived risk and perceived benefit; however, the index of moderated mediation and the conditional indirect effects are not statistically significant at the 95% level. Johnson–Neyman analysis indicates that the risk–benefit association becomes significant above a trust threshold. These findings suggest that, in end-of-life services, trust operates less as a risk-reducing mechanism and more as an evaluative organizing condition that structures value construction. Implications are discussed for institutional transparency, value framing, and trust-oriented service design in aging societies.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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