Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 5, 2022
Date Accepted: Dec 23, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
The Relation between e-Health Literacy and Health-related Behaviors: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the widespread use of the Internet and mobile devices, many people gained improved access to obtain health-related information online for health promotion and disease management. As the acquired health information online can affect health-related behaviors, healthcare providers need to take into account each individual’s online health literacy (e-Health literacy, hereinafter “eHL”).
Objective:
To determine whether an individuals’ level of eHL affect actual health-related behaviors, the correlation between eHL and health-related behaviors was identified in an integrated manner through systematic literature review and meta-analysis.
Methods:
The MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane, KoreaMed, and RISS databases were systematically searched for relevant studies published up to 19 March 2021 using combined keywords related to “e-Health” and “literacy.” A pooled correlation coefficient was generated by integrating the correlation coefficients obtained from the selected studies, and subgroup analysis with participants’ characteristics and types of behaviors was performed. The risk of bias was assessed using the modified Newcastle-Ottawa Scale.
Results:
Among 1,922 eHL-related papers, 14 studies that presented the correlation coefficient between eHL and health-related behaviors were included in the meta-analysis. The pooled correlation coefficient was 0.31 (95% confidence interval [CI]=0.25-0.34), which indicated a moderate correlation between eHL and health-related behaviors. In the subgroup analysis, the pooled correlation coefficient was 0.37 (95% CI=0.29-0.44) among older adults (aged≥65), 0.28 (95% CI=0.17-0.39) in the population with disease, and 0.36 (95% CI=0.27-0.41) for studies on the relevance to health-promoting behavior.
Conclusions:
Our results of positive correlation between eHL and health-related behaviors indicate that eHL can be a mediator in the process by which health-related information leads to changes in health-related behavior. Larger-scale studies with stronger validity are needed to evaluate the detailed relationship between the proficiency level of eHL and health-related behaviors for health promotion in the future.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.