Reading About the Flu Online: How Health-Protective Behavioral Intentions Are Influenced by Media Multitasking, Polychronicity, and Strength of Health-Related Arguments

ABSTRACT

As health organizations increasingly use the Internet to communicate medical information and advice (Shortliffe et al., 2000; World Health Organization, 2013), studying factors that affect health information processing and health-protective behaviors becomes extremely important. The present research applied the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion to explore the effects of media multitasking, polychronicity (preference for multitasking), and strength of health-related arguments on health-protective behavioral intentions. Participants read an online article about influenza that included strong and weak suggestions to engage in flu-preventive behaviors. In one condition, participants read the article and checked Facebook; in another condition, they were exposed only to the article. Participants expressed greater health-protective behavioral intentions in the media multitasking condition than in the control condition. Strong arguments were found to elicit more positive behavioral intentions than weak arguments. Moderate and high polychronics showed greater behavioral intentions than low polychronics when they read the article in the multitasking condition. The difference in intentions to follow strong and weak arguments decreased for moderate and high polychronics. The results of the present study suggest that health communication practitioners should account for not only media use situations in which individuals typically read about health online but also individual differences in information processing, which puts more emphasis on the strength of health-protective suggestions when targeting light multitaskers.

Notes

¹ “Influenza is a serious disease that can lead to hospitalization and sometimes even death. Every flu season is different, and influenza infection can affect people differently. Even healthy people can get very sick from the flu and spread it to others. Over a period of 31 seasons between 1976 and 2007, estimates of flu-associated deaths in the United States range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people. […] An annual seasonal flu vaccine (either the flu shot or the nasal spray flu vaccine) is the best way to reduce the chances that you will get seasonal flu and spread it to others. When more people get vaccinated against the flu, less flu can spread through that community” (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/keyfacts.htm#vaccination-benefits, CDC, n.d.).

² Examples of items to measure attitude toward flu vaccination: “Flu vaccination is a waste of time and money”; “Flu vaccination is important to remain in good health throughout the flu season.”

³ PROCESS allows testing for up to 76 conditional effects and mediation models. The model that we tested in the present study (model 1 in PROCESS, Hayes, 2013) is a simple moderation model. One of the advantages for testing moderating effects in PROCESS over a standard SPSS ANOVA is that PROCESS allows including continuous moderators in the analysis. Instead of dichotomizing the moderator, we explored the effects of the manipulation at multiple levels of polychronicity, which provided a more nuanced picture of the results.

⁴ CI = confidence interval; LL = lower level; UL = upper level