https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9149-4891
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ABSTRACT
This study quantitatively examines whether health literacy can reduce belief in COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories. Conducting path and cluster analyses on survey data collected from 1,488 adults in Japan in 2021, we found that while health literacy reduces people’s belief about COVID-19 and vaccination misinformation, it has no direct effect on their belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. That said, the results also highlighted the importance of health literacy. It is found that even though high health literacy does not guarantee a low degree of conspiracy beliefs, low health literacy is associated with high susceptibility to both misinformation and conspiracy theories. Moreover, people who relied more on social media than mass media for COVID-19 news and reported on having been more severely affected by the pandemic were found to be more likely to have lower health literacy and higher belief in misinformation and conspiracy theories. Based on the findings, we discussed ways to enhance health literacy research and promotion in Japan.
© 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented under the title “Health Literacy: A Vaccine for the COVID-19 Infodemic?” at the 44th Conference of JSICR held online in Tokyo, Japan on 26 June 2021. The authors would like to thank Professor Shinichi Yamaguchi for commenting on the paper and for the feedback that they received at the conference. The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the journal editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments, which helped the authors greatly in improving the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Ethics statement
The survey in this paper was a part of a larger survey on Japanese public attitudes during COVID-19 approved by the University of Toronto’s Research Ethics Board (RIS Human Protocol Number 40537).