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Abstract
Despite their understanding of the links between (a) information seeking and scanning and (b) health outcomes, researchers still know relatively little about the impact of information behaviors on people's disease-related beliefs and attitudes. The goal of this study was to validate findings linking information and health behaviors and to assess whether information seeking and scanning are associated with beliefs about the effectiveness of heart disease and colon cancer risk prevention behaviors (in regard to exercise, controlling one's diet to prevent overweight/obesity, and daily fruit and vegetable intake), as well as determine whether the effects of seeking versus scanning on these beliefs differ. Data from the Annenberg National Health Communication Survey were analyzed (N = 3,212). For colon cancer, significant main effects were detected for information scanning for each of the 3 beliefs assessed (p < .05). For heart disease, both information scanning and heart disease media exposure (p < .05) were associated with stronger beliefs. Information seeking was not associated with beliefs for either disease (p > .05). Our results suggest that disease-related cognitions and beliefs, which ultimately impact decisions to engage in prevention behaviors, may be influenced most by less purposeful forms of information acquisition.
Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge our use of the Annenberg National Health Communication Survey (ANHCS) 2005–2012 in this secondary analysis. The ANHCS was cosponsored by the Annenberg Schools for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California and received support from the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.
Notes
1Surveys were not conducted in February 2005, September 2006, or September 2008.
2Interactions between (a) information seeking and scanning, (b) information seeking and media exposure, and (c) information scanning and media exposure were examined in additional analyses. Information seeking and scanning can interact negatively (see Shim et al., Citation2006). However, those models resulted in interaction results that were not significant or created multicollinearity issues by changing the directional signs of main effects variables. Thus, the simplified model is presented. Additional models were also run with exposure to information about cancer through the media and exposure to information about heart disease through the media as categorical variables; the pattern of the results did not differ from the results presented here (i.e., low media exposure was not significant, higher media exposure was significant).