Teenagers and the Use of New Technologies (Ict) for Health Information

Abstract

The spread of health messages through ICTs has raised the issues of source reliability more than ever before.

Online Health Information Seeking During Adolescence: A Quantitative Study Regarding Romanian Teenagers

“…Secondly, the perception on the credibility and usefulness of online health related information is often debatable. The teenagers surveyed both in the first stage (N=22) (Duduciuc, 2014), and in the questionnaire-based stage (N=161), challenge the credibility of the online information on health. More than half of the surveyed subjects consider that the health information they accessed and read online helped them to a small extent with a health problem they had at a certain point in time.…”

“…The social-demographic group researched in this questionnaire-based study, whose results I will present hereinafter, is represented by Romanian adolescents, aged between 14 and 19, most of them high school students who live and study in urban areas, who have a smartphone and a Facebook account. This survey is the second stage of this research, after the qualitative one (Duduciuc, 2014), and has as purpose to describe the way in which teenagers use new technology to access information related to health. The main focus of the research is to explore the impact online information on this topic (health and a healthy lifestyle) has on teenagers' health and on the decisions they make, such as, for example, treating minor symptoms they could have at a certain point (headaches, for example).…”

“…The data from 2000-2014(Flash Eurobarometer 404, 2014Ólafsson, Livingstone & Haddon, 2013;Mascheroni & Ólafsson, 2013;, 2013;Kummervold & Wynn, 2012;Pletneva, Vargas & Boyer, 2011;Livingstone & Das, 2010;Edelman Trust Barometer, 2009Eurobarometer 2008Eurobarometer 58.0, 2003;Kummervold et al, 2008;Fox, 2006) converge towards an Internet accessing pattern as source of information regarding health. The percentage of the population using the Internet for health related topics grew from 42.3% in 2005 to 52.2% in 2007 (Kummervold et al, 2008), whereas in 2014 it reached 90% of the EU population (Flash Eurobarometer, 404, 2014).…”