Previously submitted to: Interactive Journal of Medical Research (no longer under consideration since Jan 17, 2024)
Date Submitted: May 29, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: May 29, 2023 - Jul 24, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint
Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).
Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.
Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).
Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.
Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.
Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Development of a cyberchondria severity scale for university students during the COVID-19 pandemic
ABSTRACT
Background:
Owing to the rapid development of the Internet, individuals can easily obtain health information online, which may positively or negatively affect their thoughts and behaviors. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic caused millions of deaths worldwide. People’s daily lives were disrupted when restrictions were imposed preventing them from going outside, resulting in reduced physical activity. This phenomenon was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Objective:
Cyberchondria is a hybrid word that signifies a state in which individuals compulsively search for health-related information online because of health distress or anxiety, resulting in symptoms of such conditions. The objective of this study was to develop a university student cyberchondrial severity scale and understand the current situation.
Methods:
Exploratory factor analysis was conducted using 145 valid questionnaires. Subsequently, a nationwide survey was conducted in various universities in Taiwan; 802 questionnaires were used for confirmatory factor analysis, and the current status of cyberchondria among university students was analyzed.
Results:
The factor analysis led to a cyberchondria severity scale for college students with four constructs: increased anxiety (α=.908), obsessive-compulsive hypochondria (α=.865), perceived controllability (α=.884), and online physician-patient interaction (α=.858), and a total scale Cronbach's alpha 0.924, variance of 66.81%. The confirmatory factor analysis showed that item reliability ranged from 0.50 to 0.86, factor loadings ranged from 0.71 to 0.93, and the composite reliability for latent variables ranged from 0.83 to 0.90 (p<.001). The extracted average variance lay from 0.46 and 0.60. There were significant differences in the various dimensions of the university student cyberchondria severity scale, of which perceived controllability had the highest score and obsessive-compulsive hypochondria had the lowest score (F3,2403=256.26, p<.001).
Conclusions:
This study is the first to develop a cyberchondria severity scale tailored to university students. The instrument was found to be reliable and valid. The various constructs were significantly correlated with each other, and increased anxiety and obsessive-compulsive hypochondria showed a significant moderate positive correlation with perceived controllability and online physician-patient interaction. These findings provide researchers, policymakers, and practitioners with evidence and opportunities to focus on preventive actions. The study can also be used as a reference for a broad-based qualitative and quantitative study design for future research to obtain a deeper understanding of online information searches and cyberchondria. Since studies on cyberchondrial severity scales are in their infancy, further research should examine the factors affecting cyberchondria, promoting online health information searches, and reading comprehension behavior as possible techniques for development.
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.