Relationships among Information Consumption, E-Health Literacy, and Information Avoidance in the Era of Covid-19 Pandemic

This study examined the relationships among eHealth literacy, information consumption ‎from different sources, information overload, information anxiety, and information avoidance. ‎Drawing on the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking framework (Johnson et al., ‎‎1995), a model was proposed to investigate factors influencing information avoidance during ‎the COVID-19 pandemic. ‎Data were collected from adults in the United States using an online survey and the ‎proposed model was initially tested using SEM (n=1,875). The research questions were ‎answered using Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Structural ‎Modeling correlational analyses, reliability analyses, and Generalized Linear Modeling. The ‎results showed the data do not fit the initial model properly. However, by implementing EFA, ‎an alternative best-fit model was identified. In addition, the study shows that information ‎consumption from both credible and noncredible sources had a significant relationship with ‎information overload and eHealth literacy. Also, eHealth literacy, information overload, and ‎information anxiety can be predictors of information avoidance.‎