Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Aug 26, 2020
Date Accepted: Nov 15, 2020
The Correlation of Online Health Information Seeking Experience with the Health-related Quality of Life: A Cross-sectional Questionnaire Study among Non-English Speaking Female Students in a Religious Community
ABSTRACT
Background:
Given the increasing availability of internet, it has become a common source of health information. However, the effect of this increased access on the health needs to be studied more.
Objective:
This study aimed to investigate the correlations between online health information seeking behavior and general health dimensions in a sample of high school students of Iran.
Methods:
A cross-sectional study was conducted. A total of 295 students participated in the study. The required data were gathered using two valid questionnaires including eHIQ (Kelly et al., 2015) and SF-36. The collected data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation coefficient using SPSS version 23.
Results:
The participants moderately use online information in their health-related decisions and they think that internet helps people in health-related decision makings. They, also think that internet can be used to share the health experiences with others. Participants had a moderate confidence to online health information and stated that the information provided by health websites are moderately understandable and reliable and moderately encouraged and motivated them to play an active role in their health promotion. Despite this, the results showed that online health information seeking experience has not a significant correlation with health-related quality of life.
Conclusions:
This study suggests insights into the effect of using internet information on the health of adolescent. It has important implications for researchers and policy makers to build appropriate policies to maximize the benefit of internet access for the health. Clinical Trial: not applicable
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.