Research On Vaccine Information Seeking Of Older Adults

This study focuses on the health information seeking and processing of the elderly as a vulnerable group,represented by influenza vaccine information,in the context of an aging society and risk society.A questionnaire survey was conducted among Chinese older adults aged 60 and above.The purpose of the survey was to investigate the influence of various levels of factors on older adults seeking information about the influenza vaccine.Firstly,after distinguishing between individual and social levels of perceived salience of influenza and vaccine issues,we found that the perceived salience at the social level was higher than the perceived salience at the self-level and that the phenomenon of impersonalization of individual risk emerged.Self-relevance is a crucial influence for the risk itself and the means of coping with it,with older adults seeking and systematically processing information only on issues they perceive as more relevant to them,while avoiding and heuristically processing information on issues that are more important to society.Secondly,we examined the impact of the complexity of the current media system on older adults’ health information seeking.Older adults trusted more authoritative and traditional information channels such as traditional media and official information channels,and trusted less health-related information disseminated by emerging or interpersonal network-based information channels such as social media and interpersonal channels.Older adults have the strongest ability to gather information from formal channels represented by official information releases and communities and have the strongest willingness to obtain influenza vaccine-related information based on such channels.Despite their low trust in interpersonal channels,interpersonal channels are still the most important channels for information seeking by older adults when they feel they are insufficient to relevant information.Thirdly,we find that in contemporary Chinese families,in addition to the intergenerational support from adult children to older parents that have been the focus of previous scholarship,older adults are also providing support to family members in their own way,which we conceptualize as intergenerational altruism.Intergenerational support provided by adult children to older parents and intergenerational altruistic tendencies of older parents partially mediated the effect of communication orientation on older adults’ information-seeking attitudes,but in opposite directions,which we conceptualize as intergenerational relationships mediating the effect of family communication patterns on information-seeking attitudes in both directions.Finally,we found that the self is as much an object of interpretation as the external environment.In the risk context,external environmental risks disrupt the sense of self of older adults,especially those with underlying illnesses,and cause interference with their self-identity.In order to rebalance self-awareness and alleviate the identity disturbance,the older person re-evaluates his or her cognition through norm trumping,discarding the old social norms and replacing them with another set of social norms that fit his or her condition that are socially acceptable,thus regaining an adequate state of self-awareness.These mechanisms are more pronounced in the elderly with underlying diseases,as they experience more severe disturbances in self-awareness and self-identity in influenza risk situations than healthy elderly people.