The Influence Of Internet Health Information Seeking Behavior On Health Anxiety

Since 1980 s,the Internet has greatly attracted public’s eyes,steadily changing the world and human’s daily life,and becomes one of the most powerful tools for satisfying public’s information needs,regardless of the time and zone limitation.As long as input some keywords in search engine,people can quickly get the information they need with little cost.Moreover,with more attention throwing on self-health,and the rising concept of “Internet + Medical Treatment”,the Internet has been one of the main ways for acquiring health information.Low cost as it is,the Internet has its own disadvantage,especially for the information quality,which could misguide those people with limited knowledge about medical.The more misleading health information they get online,the more distracted they are.More severely,effected by the non-scientific online health information,public may become more anxious about their health,adopting wrong medical treatment,suffering from huge physical impairment and economic loss.The needs of health information push individual to search online.Those needs may originate from three aspects.The first one is self-health concern which comes from self-rated health status.Moreover,the influence of physical health couldn’t be ignored,since it directly connects with survival.Once clearly felt something strange on physical,one may quickly go online for related information.Last one is the intolerance of uncertainly.The more intolerant of uncertainty,more probable for people seek for health information online,for solving health threat.Base on the situations mentioned above,through questionnaire researching with523 effective participants included,this study firstly forms a rough picture of the characteristic on Internet health information seeking behavior of civil people.Besides that,this study explores the influence of the frequency of Internet health information seeking behavior(IHISB-F)on health anxiety(HA),and studies what exact effect of three influential factors,which are self-rated health(SRH),physical health status(PHS)and intolerance of uncertainty(IU),cast on them.The result shows that: 1)IHISB-F can positively predict HA;2)PHS fully meditates the relationship between IHISB-F and HA;3)SRH plays a role of moderator between IHISB-F and PHS as well as PHS and HA;4)IU positively predicts HA,but the moderator effect between IHISB-F and HA seems non-significant.