The Correlation of Online Health Information Seeking Experience with the Health Related Quality of Life: A Cross-sectional Study among Iranian Female Students

Abstract

Background: Given the increasing availability of internet, it has become a common source of health information for all population including students. However, the actual effect of this increased access to information on the health status and its different aspects needs to be studied more. This study aimed to investigate the correlations between online health information seeking behavior and health related quality of life in a sample of high school students of Iran. Methods: A survey was conducted among secondary school girl students of Yazd province, Iran in 2019. A total of 295 students participated in the study. The required data were gathered using two valid questionnaires including eHIQ (Kelly et al., 2015) to measure the online health information seeking experience and validated Persian version of SF-36 to measure the health related quality of life. The collected data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation coefficient using SPSS version 23. Results: The mean score of eHIQ was 2.71±0.71. Mean scores for physical component summary and mental component summary of SF-36 were 72.90±16.20 and 63.19±22.26, respectively. eHIQ score showed no statistical correlations with physical component summary (P=.46) and mental component summary (P=.53). Conclusion: The findings suggest that seeking online health information does not improve the health related quality of life. The possible causes are discussed but this finding should be studied more.

Measuring Online Health Information Seeking Skills and its Related Factors in a Middle-Aged Population

“…This paper describes online health informationseeking skills (OHISS) and its related factors in middle-aged people. Our study revealed that participants had a level of average the online health information-seeking skills which is similar to the studies conducted in other countries such as China and the United States [22][23][24]. In the country of Ghana, few patients use online health information [25].…”