OBJECTIVE: This study aims to examine the phenomenon of health information avoidance among Generation Z, a representative cohort of active web users in this era.
METHODS: Drawing on the planned risk information avoidance model, we adopted a qualitative approach to explore the factors related to information avoidance within the context of health and risk communication. The researchers recruited 38 participants aged 16 to 25 years for the focus group discussion sessions.
RESULTS: In this study, we sought to perform a deductive qualitative analysis of the focus group interview content with open, focused, and theoretical coding. Our findings support several key components of the planned risk information avoidance model while highlighting the underlying influence of cognition on emotions. Specifically, socioculturally, group identity and social norms among peers lead some to avoid health information. Cognitively, mixed levels of risk perception, conflicting values, information overload, and low credibility of information sources elicited their information avoidance behaviors. Affectively, negative emotions such as anxiety, frustration, and the desire to stay positive contributed to avoidance.
CONCLUSIONS: This study has implications for understanding young users' information avoidance behaviors in both academia and practice.
MATERIALS: MEDLINE, EMBASE and the Cochrane Library were systematically searched for studies published before May 2023 on the benefits and harm of chatbots used in the perioperative period. The major outcomes assessed were patient satisfaction and knowledge acquisition. Untransformed proportion (PR) with a 95% CI was used for the analysis of continuous data. Risk of bias was assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias assessment tool version 2 and the Methodological Index for Non-Randomised Studies.
RESULTS: Eight trials comprising 1073 adults from four countries were included. Most interventions (n = 5, 62.5%) targeted perioperative care in orthopaedics. Most interventions use rule-based chatbots (n = 7, 87.5%). This meta-analysis found that the majority of the participants were satisfied with the use of chatbots (mean proportion=0.73; 95% CI: 0.62 to 0.85), and agreed that they gained knowledge in their perioperative period (mean proportion=0.80; 95% CI: 0.74 to 0.87).
CONCLUSION: This review demonstrates that perioperative chatbots are well received by the majority of patients with no reports of harm to-date. Chatbots may be considered as an aid in perioperative communication between patients and clinicians and shared decision-making. These findings may be used to guide the healthcare providers, policymakers and researchers for enhancing perioperative care.
METHODS: A randomised controlled experiment was conducted from 29 April to 7 June 2021, which coincided with the early phases of the national vaccination programme when vaccine uptake data were largely unavailable. 5784 Malaysians were randomly allocated into 14 experimental arms and exposed to one or two messages that promoted COVID-19 vaccination. Interventional messages were applied alone or in combination and compared against a control message. Outcome measures were assessed as intent to both take the vaccine and recommend it to healthy adults, the elderly, and people with pre-existing health conditions, before and after message exposure. Changes in intent were modelled and we estimated the average marginal effects based on changes in the predicted probability of responding with a positive intent for each of the four outcomes.
RESULTS: We found that persuasive communication via several of the experimented messages improved recommendation intentions to people with pre-existing health conditions, with improvements ranging from 4 to 8 percentage points. In contrast, none of the messages neither significantly improved vaccination intentions, nor recommendations to healthy adults and the elderly. Instead, we found evidence suggestive of backfiring among certain outcomes with messages using negative attribute frames, risky choice frames, and priming descriptive norms.
CONCLUSION: Message frames that briefly communicate verbatim facts and stimulate rational thinking regarding vaccine safety may be ineffective at positively influencing vaccine-hesitant individuals. Messages intended to promote recommendations of novel health interventions to people with pre-existing health conditions should incorporate safety dimensions.
TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT05244356.