IS THERE SUCH A THING AS AN ONLINE HEALTH LIFESTYLE?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of the Internet for health-related purposes and whether this usage is part of larger pattern of health-promoting behaviors, or health lifestyle. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus provides the key theoretical concept that links health lifestyle and the digital inequality framework to explain how social conditions (i.e. social status and quality of Internet access) influence attitudes and behaviors. Path analysis is used to examine the relationship between key endogenous variables on attitudes, health behavior, health status, and online health-related activities, while controlling for demographics and other factors. Data comes from the National Cancer Institute's 2007 Health Information National Trends Survey. The results demonstrate that online health behaviors can be usefully conceptualized as elements of health lifestyle. The combination of health lifestyle and digital inequality provides a broader theoretical framework that highlights the importance of social conditions to influence people's Internet habitus and routine health-promoting behaviors. The combination of health lifestyle and digital inequality provides a useful theoretical framework for future research investigating persistent social disparities in health and the potential for the growing reliance on information and communication technologies to contribute to socially patterned health outcomes.

Keywords:

• Internet
• health information seeking
• online health lifestyle
• digital inequality
• habitus

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the members of my doctoral committee, Drs. Shelia R. Cotten (chair), Patricia Drentea, Melinda Goldner, Belinda Needham, and Nir Menachemi for their helpful comments.

Notes

Details regarding the computation of the sample and replicate weights can be found in the 2007 HINTS Final Report by Cantor et al. (2009). Recommendations about the use of weights and the appropriate syntax for use with a variety of statistical packages is provided with the data-set available at http://hints.cancer.gov.