Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Abstract
Public health restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an increase in the reliance on social media for peer interactions. This resulted in the proliferation of medical misinformation and conspiracy theories that undermined public support for disease control measures, and influenced negative health attitudes such as vaccine denial. The aim of this study was to determine how social inequalities influence the adoption of health related misinformation, and the extent to which the adoption of health misinformation results in poor health behaviours. The study employed an exploratory survey design, and relied on both quantitative and qualitative methods to collect and analyse data. A stratified sample of 480 participants was employed to select respondents to questionnaires in two urban and rural areas of Cameroon. The results suggested that, the adoption of health related misinformation was significantly higher among females than in males, with wide contrasts in the rate of adoption between urban and rural populations. Social factors such as education level, income status and language were also shown to influence the adoption of health misinformation with rates of adoption significantly higher among low income, rural dwellers and less educated members of the population. Social factors were shown to determine the extent to which health misinformation influenced the formation of opinions and habits, and there was a significant contrast across sample sets employed in the study. Negative attitudes influenced by misinformation were determined to include mistrust for health authorities, disease denial, vaccine hesitancy, vaccine refusal, hospitalisation refusal and mistrust for public health authorities.
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