Social Media Use in the United States: Implications for Health Communication

By Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, Y. Hunt, E. Beckjord, Richard P. Moser, B. Hesse. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2009

1,113 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a08fa76bba9772382a6e170cb76121c63d2e3e94

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Citations in the corpus

Patients' and health professionals' use of social media in health care: motives, barriers and expectations. (2013, background): “A third motive, is improving the efficiency [1,8,10].”
eHealth Literacy and Web 2.0 Health Information Seeking Behaviors Among Baby Boomers and Older Adults (2015, positive): “Preliminary research suggests that eHealth literacy is negatively associated with age among low income homebound adults above 60 years of age [31], but the literature is not definitive regarding relationships between social determinants, sociodemographic variables, eHealth literacy, and use of socia”
Social Media in Employee-Selection-Related Decisions (2016, background): “However, controlling for differences in access to the Internet, there were few ethnic group differences in use of SM as reported in a nationally representative survey from 2007 (Chou et al., 2009).”
Predictors of eHealth Usage: Insights on The Digital Divide From the Health Information National Trends Survey 2012 (2014, background): “Gaps in access to the Internet have been persistent in that lower socioeconomic status, minority racial/ethnic groups, older age, and poorer health, among others, are associated with decreased access to the Internet [19,21,25-29].”
Harnessing Social Media for Health Promotion and Behavior Change (2013, background): “Chou et al. (2009) found that people of any ethnicity, regardless of education level, used social networking sites at a higher rate than all non-Hispanic Whites, noting that these differences are likely explained by age.”
Social Networks, Interpersonal Social Support, and Health Outcomes: A Health Communication Perspective (2016, background): “org October 2016 | Volume 1 | Article 10 aware of the need to integrate social networks and interpersonal relationships into population-based health-care interventions (Valente and Saba, 1998; Beaudoin et al., 2006; Abroms and Maibach, 2008; Chou et al., 2009; Chee et al., 2016).”
Using social media for work: Losing your time or improving your work? (2014, positive): “DiMicco et al., 2009; Efimova & Grudin, 2007), our data are collected from a large pool of companies in the insurance sector (the active members of the IIS are thirty-three companies) rather than a single company. In this work, we found that two out of three employees make occasional use of social m”
Extracting and understanding urban areas of interest using geotagged photos (2015, background): “While social media data have often been criticized for the representative issue, i.e., the users may not constitute a representative sample of the entire population (Chou et al. 2009), they are nevertheless generated by millions of people from different countries throughout the world.”