Does social media provide adequate health education for prevention of COVID-19? A case study of YouTube videos on social distancing and hand-washing

Evaluation of the understandability, actionability and reliability of YouTube videos for brain, head, and neck cancer information

PURPOSE

Online videos accessed via YouTube are a popular method to provide health education. Videos need to be critically evaluated for educational qualities as the information could influence health outcomes. The present study aimed to evaluate the understandability, actionability and reliability of videos available on YouTube regarding brain, head, and neck cancer information.

METHODS

A scoping review was conducted with a specific search strategy and inclusion/exclusion criteria based on previous studies. For each video, video characteristics and user engagement activities were recorded. Videos were evaluated using the PEMAT-A/V and modified DISCERN criteria. Spearman's rank correlation, Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann-Whitney U test were used for analysis.

RESULTS

Out of 200 retrieved videos, 37 were included and analysed. The median length of the video was 3 min and 33 s. The majority of videos were published by health institutional and private channels (43.2%, n = 16). Health institutional channels received the highest actionability (Md = 37.5, p = 0.049), while private channels resulted in lower views/day (Md = 0.46, p = 0.001) and likes/day (Md = 0.01, p = 0.002). Animated and narrated videos acquired the highest understandability score (Md = 92.31, p < 0.001). Videos with professional transcripts reported higher actionability (Md = 62.5, p = 0.004), reliability (Md = 3.33, p = 0.028), views/day (Md = 29.31, p = 0.026), and likes/day (Md = 0.272, p = 0.023).

CONCLUSION

YouTube videos pertaining to brain and head and neck cancer have low understandability, low actionability and moderate reliability. It is beneficial to have a stronger representation of trustworthy and credible organisations for sharing essential health information via YouTube. Including animations and professional video transcripts may improve their overall quality and consumer engagement.

The role of social media in public health crises caused by infectious disease: a scoping review

IMPORTANCE

The onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic highlighted the increasing role played by social media in the generation, dissemination and consumption of outbreak-related information.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of the current review is to identify and summarise the role of social media in public health crises caused by infectious disease, using a five-step scoping review protocol.

EVIDENCE REVIEW

Keyword lists for two categories were generated: social media and public health crisis. By combining these keywords, an advanced search of various relevant databases was performed to identify all articles of interest from 2000 to 2021, with an initial retrieval date of 13 December 2021. A total of six medical and health science, psychology, social science and communication databases were searched: PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Embase, PsycINFO and CNKI. A three-stage screening process against inclusion and exclusion criteria was conducted.

FINDINGS

A total of 338 studies were identified for data extraction, with the earliest study published in 2010. Thematic analysis of the role of social media revealed three broad themes: surveillance monitoring, risk communication and disease control. Within these themes, 12 subthemes were also identified. Within surveillance monitoring, the subthemes were disease detection and prediction, public attitude and attention, public sentiment and mental health. Within risk communication, the subthemes were health advice, information-seeking behaviour, infodemics/misinformation circulation, seeking help online, online distance education and telehealth. Finally, within disease control, the subthemes were government response, public behaviour change and health education information quality. It was clear that the pace of research in this area has gradually increased over time as social media has evolved, with an explosion in attention following the outbreak of COVID-19.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE

Social media has become a hugely powerful force in public health and cannot be ignored or viewed as a minor consideration when developing public health policy. Limitations of the study are discussed, along with implications for government, health authorities and individual users. The pressing need for government and health authorities to formalise evidence-based strategies for communicating via social media is highlighted, as well as issues for individual users in assessing the quality and reliability of information consumed on social media platforms.

Use of YouTube by academic medical centres during the COVID-19 pandemic: an observational study in Taiwan

OBJECTIVES

YouTube has been of immense importance in conveying essential information on COVID-19 and promoting the latest healthcare policies during the outbreak. However, there have been few studies that have focused on how healthcare organisations have used YouTube to communicate with the public and increase their awareness during the pandemic, as well as its effectiveness.

DESIGN

A nationwide observational study.

SETTINGS

We analysed all YouTube video posts culled from the official accounts of all medical centres in Taiwan from December 2019 to August 2021.

PARTICIPANTS

All YouTube videos were categorised as either COVID-19 or non-COVID-19 related. The COVID-19-related videos were divided into five categories, and detailed metrics for each video were recorded. For comparison, we also surveyed all YouTube video posts placed by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (TCDC).

RESULTS

We analysed official YouTube channels from 17 academic medical centres, involving a total of 943 videos. We found a relationship between the quantity of YouTube videos uploaded by the TCDC and the trend of confirmed cases (Pearson's correlation coefficient was 0.25, p=0.02). Data from private hospitals revealed that they posted more COVID-19 videos (103 vs 56) when compared with public hospitals. In addition, multivariate linear regression showed that more 'likes' (estimate 41.1, 95% CI 38.8 to 43.5) and longer lengths (estimate 10 800, 95% CI 6968.0 to 14 632.0) of COVID-19-related videos correlated significantly with an increased number of 'views'.

CONCLUSIONS

This nationwide observational study, performed in Taiwan, demonstrates well the trend and effectiveness of academic medical centres in promoting sound healthcare advice regarding COVID-19 through YouTube due to the channel's easy accessibility and usability.

Bibliometric analyses of social media for educational purposes over four decades

The unexpected outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has led students to frequently use social media to receive education, which brought about both positive and negative learning outcomes (Oliveira et al., 2022). To address the issue of integrating social media into education, this study conducted both quantitative and qualitative studies using VOSviewer and CitNetExplorer. The qualitative study through CitNetExplorer, involving 1780 publications, concluded that while social media might have gained popularity in education based on the classic theoretical framework of the zone of proximal development, there might be many challenges such as teacher resistance, data privacy, costs, and ethical and social issues. Besides, this study conducted bibliometric analyses using VOSviewer (N = 1841) to identify the top cited authors, organizations, documents, references, sources, countries, and keywords with high occurrences based on the citation networks. In the future, researchers could enhance the studies on how to guide students and teachers to properly integrate social media into education.

Assessing COVID-19 Health Literacy (CoHL) and its relationships with sociodemographic features, locus of control and compliance with social distancing rules during the first lockdown in France

Health literacy (HL) is critical to find, understand and use health information for adopting appropriate health behavior, especially during a pandemic crisis in which people can be exposed to an overwhelming amount of information from different media. To this end, we conducted an online study to first validate the measure of COronaVIrus Disease appeared in 2019 (COVID-19) health literacy (CoHL) and then investigated its relationships with locus of control (LoC), news information search and the adoption of protective behaviors (PBs) during the first lockdown in France. We first showed the good structural and psychometric qualities of the CoHL scale on a 3-dimensional structure: the Critical dimension, the Extraction/Communicative and the Application/Communicative dimension. We then found that CoHL was associated with the adoption of PBs suggesting that people with higher CoHL tended to adopt more PBs during the first lockdown, regardless of their LoC. However, people with low CoHL would be more likely to adopt PBs if they believe that they may get COVID-19 due to the behavior and health conditions of others (high external LoC). The study has implications for the design of public health campaigns for people with inadequate HL and with a different LoC.