What we know about using social media as a health care improvement tool among youth
If COVID-19 taught communicators anything, it’s that health literacy is low among almost every age group. I’ve been communicating about COVID-19 and its new vaccines on social media for a year and it hasn’t gotten any easier, as misinformation continues to flow freely. Thankfully, communications professionals and researchers are constantly studying social media’s impact and its efficacy for disseminating important healthcare information.
As a 24-year-old, I have a somewhat decent understanding of ‘the youth’ and their social media usage, but one size does not fit them all. Therefore, it is critical to study their social media usage through both a quantitative and qualitative approach — pulling statistics and mined data, but also reviewing interviews and conversations with the users themselves.
In the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Dr. Nathan Cobb and Amanda Graham, Ph.D., took a quantitative approach when they analyzed whether STI prevention messages delivered via Facebook actually prevented increase in sexual risk behavior. With over 1,500 participants from different ethnicities, and with both intervention and control groups, the researchers were able to make strong conclusions that can impact social media content creation moving forward, including:
- “Social media can be used to facilitate prevention of declines in condom use among high-risk youth in the short term.”
- “Success in reaching large numbers of people with STI- and HIV-related content through Facebook.”
- “Data suggest that engagement with the Just/Us content occurred almost exclusively on individuals’ own pages, and they left their own page rarely to go directly to the Just/Us page.”
This takeaway was particularly insightful, which supports the importance of paid strategy and ongoing message distribution:
- “There is little evidence to suggest a majority of youth actively seek out and engage with organizations on Facebook. Thus, approaches like that of Just/Us to “push” messages out through RSS feed offer one way to get messages in front of a large number of youth.”
While this data is incredibly insightful, uncovering individual stories and chatting with users themselves with a qualitative approach can help us understand the uniqueness of teens and their healthcare knowledge.
Victoria Goodyear and Kathleen Armour wanted to analyze young people’s engagement with healthcare technologies such as health-related social media content and wearable health devices. In the Social Sciences journal, these researchers studied individual interviews and workshops to conclude, that within this group:
- “Young people are exposed to a range of health-related information on apps and health devices in the areas of physical activity, diet/nutrition and body image.”
- “There is evidence that young people access health-related information from regulated or “trusted sources” (e.g., governments or health trusts/organizations) and unregulated sources (e.g., peers or celebrities).”
- “There was an overwhelming sense that the health-related information that was shared by young people their age or of a similar age promoted negative feelings about their bodies.”
Although both journal studies make important observations when attempting to understand health-related social media usage among the youth, the quantitative data in the first example is more useful and actionable for communicators. For example, I know that I can use Facebook to communicate about sexual health with young people, and that my messaging is likely to resonate well. The conclusions from our qualitative data are more general, but can also be helpful when looking for a broader understanding of the youth and what goes through their minds.
Combined, quantitative and qualitative research can give communications professionals a stronger handle on how to effectively communicate with their audiences, as they can come to understand overarching themes and hidden intricacies lying within both types of research.
