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

August 25, 2020 - Anastasia Kononova, Shupei Yuan and Eunsin Joo

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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.