Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 30, 2024
Date Accepted: May 7, 2025
The Reciprocal Relationship Between Parental E-health Literacy Mediation and Adolescents' E-health Literacy: A Three-wave Longitudinal Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The online environment provides adolescents with vast amounts of health-related information, but navigating this information effectively requires high levels of e-health literacy to avoid misinformation and harmful content. Parental guidance is often seen as a crucial factor in shaping adolescents' online health behaviors, yet there is limited longitudinal research investigating how parental e-health literacy mediation impacts adolescents' development of e-health literacy over time.
Objective:
This study aims to examine the reciprocal relationship between parental e-health literacy mediation and adolescents’ e-health literacy. Furthermore, it investigates whether parental education moderates this relationship, with a focus on whether higher parental education levels enhance the effectiveness of e-health mediation in improving adolescents’ e-health literacy.
Methods:
A three-wave longitudinal study was conducted, collecting data from 2,500 adolescent-parent pairs. A random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) was applied to assess the reciprocal effects of parental e-health literacy mediation and adolescents' e-health literacy across the three waves. Parental education was included as a potential moderating variable in the model to examine whether it influences the strength of the relationship between parental e-health mediation and adolescents’ e-health literacy development.
Results:
The results revealed a lack of significant within-person effects, indicating that changes in parental e-health literacy mediation did not lead to corresponding changes in adolescents' e-health literacy over time. Moreover, the moderating effect of parental education was not supported by the data, suggesting that higher levels of parental education do not significantly enhance the influence of parental e-health mediation on adolescents' e-health literacy.
Conclusions:
This study contributes to the understanding of parental involvement in shaping adolescents' e-health literacy. Contrary to expectations, parental e-health literacy mediation does not appear to significantly impact adolescents' e-health literacy development longitudinally, and higher parental education does not strengthen this relationship. These findings suggest that additional factors beyond parental mediation and education may be crucial in supporting adolescents’ ability to navigate online health information effectively.
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.