Since March 11, 2020, when WHO declared Covid19 as a worldwide pandemic, a drastic change in the lives of individuals and nations can be witnessed. The constrained mobility and restricted capacity of local governments in providing health care services resulted as an increased dependence of people on alternate sources of information and guidance regarding their health. This has transformed the ways people take care of their health and make health related decisions for themselves or their dear ones. This article contributes to the growing body of research on new media by exploring the role of internet as a source of health information, specifically through the lens of Uses and gratification and Dependency theory. A questionnaire-based online survey collected data from users belonging to different age and income groups regarding needs, perceived usefulness and cyberchondric effects of OHI among them. Findings revealed websites and discussion forums as to be most extensively used sources of OHI followed by Facebook and YouTube. To get information and updates of Covid19, to take precautionary measures for Covid19 and to check for the symptoms of Covid19 were reported as major needs by the users. The ratio of the usage of internet for health-related information about health issues other than Covid19 was also significantly higher. To avoid in person, visit to physician, ubiquity, and quick and easy retrieval of information from divers’ sources were the reported reasons for this increased usage. Results demonstrate that during Covid19, both the usage of internet as an alternative source of HI needs and its perceived usefulness was significantly higher. Statistical analysis revealed difference in perceived usefulness of OHI during Covid19 due to gender, income, education and health status of the respondents. Similarly, the study revealed a strong positive relationship between Usage and Perceived usefulness of OHI. The strong relationship between Usage and psychological effect show ever was found to marginalize the significance of OHI.
Web series are a prominent part of digital media with huge viewership among the youth. They are presented on web television and streamed only on an online network. The research study explored the consumption of web series and its effects on the perception of youth regarding intimate relationship patterns in Pakistan through the insight of ‘uses and gratification theory’ and ‘cultivation theory’. The researcher used, a quantitative method and conducted a survey of 300 youngsters, both male and female of Lahore between the age of 17-24 years. The results show that youth watch web series to gratify their affective, cognitive and tension-free needs and study fully satisfied the objectives. The statistical test of a generalized linear model of ordinal logistic regression revealed that web series' consumption has significant effects on the perception of youth regarding intimate relationship patterns and the youth have similar views about intimate relationships as shown in the series.
The rapid advancement in new Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) has transformed the ways people take care of their health. The significant role of new media in health-related behaviors at both macro and micro levels is a recognized fact. mHealth apps are amongst the advancements which are benefiting human health at an individual level. This increased usage of mHA led the researchers to explore the ways youth consumes these Apps and the benefits they perceive to attain for their physical and psychological health. The data on consumption patterns and perceived usefulness were measured on a five-point Likert scale. The finding of the study suggested that most of the users reported having one to three health apps on their mobile phones on average and found them useful to get both PHI (Prevent Health Information) and CHI (Curative Health Information). The study concluded that these apps were creating awareness among youth and benefiting them by gratifying both their physical as well as their psychological health related needs. Keywords: mHealth apps, Youth, Perceived Usefulness.
World Wide Web provides massive amount of health oriented information. The inclination of using internet to get information on health is also all-embracing. Particularly women are found to be the heavy users of online health information (OHI) both for ‘Curative health information’ (CHI) and ‘Preventive health information’ (PHI). This trend is reported to escalate in pandemic like situations due to many factors including increased dependency on online sources. Online health information helps people to have an idea of the health issues and diseases which they probably can be diagnosed with on the basis of their symptoms. Additionally, it can also assist people to have a better understanding of health and illness and provide them with possible explanations for symptoms. Contrariwise, using symptoms as indicators leading to online search can also have undesirable consequences, for example; increase in the anxiety in people. This phenomenon is called cyberchondria, which has recently gained substantial attention from scholars in health communication field. From among the other featured variables in studies on OHI, eHealth literacy is a significant one. There is a huge amount of literature available on established relationship between eHealth literacy and certain aspects of OHI including trust. However, the aspect that how and to what extent factors (eHealth literacy, age and health status of the user) can marginalize the Cyberchondria effects has had little scholarly attention. This study attempts to fill this gap. A survey from 1000 female users of OHI measured eHealth literacy using eHEALS scale and the relationship between the selected variables. Results showed insignificant positive association between ehealth literacy and Cyberchondria (Kendall’s Tau-b= 0.044, p-value=0.294) at 5% level of significance. Negative insignificant association was observed between age of respondents and cyberchondria (Kendall’s Tau-c= -0.057, p-value=0.123). Similarly, the association between health status of respondents and cyberchondria was also found insignificantly negative (Kendall’s Tau-c= -0.065, p-value=0.081). The study showed that eHealth literacy was not found to have association with cyberchondria among users whereas; it established the association of age and health status with cyberchondria. Although the difference was found in direction and signigicance of this relationship. Keywords: Online health information (OHI), eHealth Literacy, Cyberchondria. Online health research (OHR).
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