Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: May 5, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: May 5, 2022 - May 19, 2022
Date Accepted: Sep 10, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 13, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
How do people interpret health information in the context of an emerging infectious disease? Digital focus group exploring perceptions of novel health information during the first wave of COVID-19 restrictions in Singapore
ABSTRACT
Background:
Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated global public concern and panic. The glut of information, or ‘infodemic’, has caused concern for the authorities due to its negative impacts on COVID-19 prevention and control, spurring calls for a greater scholarly focus on health literacy during the pandemic. Nevertheless, few studies have sought to qualitatively examine how individuals interpreted and assimilated health information at the initial wave of COVID-19 restrictions.
Objective:
We developed this qualitative study adopting chat-based focus group discussions to investigate how individuals interpreted COVID-19 health information during the first wave of COVID-19 restrictions.
Methods:
We conducted a qualitative study in Singapore to investigate how individuals perceive and interpret information that they receive on COVID-19. Data were generated through online focus group discussions conducted on the mobile messaging smartphone app, WhatsApp. From 28 March to 13 April 2020, we held eight WhatsApp-based focus groups (n=60) with participants stratified by age groups, namely 21 to 30 years, 31 to 40 years, 41 to 50 years, and 51 years and above. Data were thematically analysed.
Results:
A total of four types of COVID-19 health information were generated from analysis; labelled as formal health information, informal health information, suspicious health information, and fake health information. How participants interpreted these categories of information depended largely on the perceived trustworthiness of the information source, as well as perceived veracity of information. Both factors were instrumental to determining individuals’ perceptions and their subsequent treatment and assimilation of COVID-19-related information.
Conclusions:
Both perceived trustworthiness of the information source and perceived veracity of information were instrumental concepts in determining one’s perception, and thus subsequent treatment and assimilation of such information for one’s knowledge of COVID-19, or the onward propagation to their social networks. These findings have implications for how policymakers and health authorities communicate with the public and deal with fake health information in the context of COVID-19.
Citation
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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.