Accepted for/Published in: Interactive Journal of Medical Research
Date Submitted: Oct 2, 2024
Date Accepted: Jul 30, 2025
Factors predicting information overload during the COVID-19 pandemic in the digital age: a longitudinal study in Japan
ABSTRACT
Background:
Human capacity to process information is limited. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people were exposed to a large amount of uncertain and complex health information. This situation made some people perceive information overload, which made them unable to adopt appropriate preventive behaviors.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to examine the individual characteristics, abilities, and attention to informational media that predict the perception of information overload during a pandemic.
Methods:
We conducted a longitudinal study with two time points, August 2020 and August 2021, among residents of Japan under a COVID-19 emergency declaration. We used a web-based survey to measure sociodemographic characteristics, health literacy, attention to six different types of information channel, and participants’ perception of information overload.
Results:
A total of 784 participants responded to the survey at both time points. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that younger age, male sex, lower health literacy, paying less attention to television news, and paying greater attention to social media significantly predicted the perception of information overload.
Conclusions:
Public health communicators should aim to provide concise and understandable information in consideration of a target population that is vulnerable to information overload during a pandemic. Additionally, providing an environment during normal periods that allows people to develop the skills to critically interpret health information will help them to prepare for future infodemics.
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.