Author guidelines for journals could help to promote transparency, openness, and reproducibility

Background Given the rapid changes in the communication landscape brought about by participative Internet use and social media, it is important to develop a better understanding of these technologies and their impact on health communication. The first step in this effort is to identify the characteristics of current social media users. Up-to-date reporting of current social media use will help monitor the growth of social media and inform health promotion/communication efforts aiming to effectively utilize social media.Objective The purpose of the study is to identify the sociodemographic and health-related factors associated with current adult social media users in the United States.Methods Data came from the 2007 iteration of the Health Information National Trends Study (HINTS, N = 7674). HINTS is a nationally representative cross-sectional survey on health-related communication trends and practices. Survey respondents who reported having accessed the Internet (N = 5078) were asked whether, over the past year, they had (1) participated in an online support group, (2) written in a blog, (3) visited a social networking site. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify predictors of each type of social media use.Results Approximately 69% of US adults reported having access to the Internet in 2007. Among Internet users, 5% participated in an online support group, 7% reported blogging, and 23% used a social networking site. Multivariate analysis found that younger age was the only significant predictor of blogging and social networking site participation; a statistically significant linear relationship was observed, with younger categories reporting more frequent use. Younger age, poorer subjective health, and a personal cancer experience predicted support group participation. In general, social media are penetrating the US population independent of education, race/ethnicity, or health care access.Conclusions Recent growth of social media is not uniformly distributed across age groups; therefore, health communication programs utilizing social media must first consider the age of the targeted population to help ensure that messages reach the intended audience. While racial/ethnic and health status–related disparities exist in Internet access, among those with Internet access, these characteristics do not affect social media use. This finding suggests that the new technologies, represented by social media, may be changing the communication pattern throughout the United States.

The Health Information National Trends Survey data portray a tectonic shift in the ways in which patients consume health and medical information, with more patients looking for information online before talking with their physicians.

Little is known about access, sources, and trust of cancer-related information, or factors that facilitate or hinder communication on a population-wide basis. Through a careful developmental process involving extensive input from many individuals and organizations, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) developed the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) to help fill this gap. This nationally representative telephone survey of 6,369 persons aged > or = 18 years among the general population was first conducted in 2002-2003, and will be repeated biennially depending on availability of funding. The purpose of creating a population survey to be repeated on a cyclical basis is to track trends in the public's rapidly changing use of new communication technologies while charting progress in meeting health communication goals in terms of the public's knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. The HINTS survey instrument was built upon extant models of health communication and behavior change, taking into account the rapidly changing communication environment. Questions in the survey were drawn from an overall theoretical framework that juxtaposed the"push" aspects of traditional broadcast media against the"pull" aspects of new media. HINTS data will be made widely available for researchers and practitioners; it will help further research in health communication and health promotion and provide useful information for programs, policies, and practices in a variety of settings.

Few nationally representative surveys have assessed the cancer-related information seeking behavior of the American public. Data for our analysis were from the 2003 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS). The goals of our analysis were to characterize cancer information seekers (3,011) and nonseekers (3,348) in terms of sociodemographic, health care access, and health status variables, and to describe the nature of the cancer-related information being sought by information seekers. Significant and independent associations with seeking status were identified for gender, age, race, income, education, personal and family history of cancer, and having a usual source of health care. Information seekers were less likely to be male (OR = .51); aged 65 or older (OR = .40); Hispanic (OR = .60); to have a usual source of health care (OR = .70); and more likely to have incomes greater than $50,000 (OR = 1.50), some college (OR = 1.87) or a college degree (OR = 2.95), a prior cancer diagnosis (OR = 3.57), or a family history of cancer (OR = 2.17). Among cancer information seekers, the most frequently searched topic was cancer site-specific information (50.2%). Individuals who reported searching for cancer site-specific information were most frequently looking for information about breast cancer (23.8%), prostate cancer (11.5%), and skin cancer (11.3%). The HINTS survey provides a unique opportunity to explore the characteristics of information seekers and nonseekers and the content of information being sought by the public in a nationally representative sample; understanding gained from this effort provides generalizable and policy-relevant information about the American public's information needs.