The Influencing Factors Of The Elderly’s Health Information Screening Ability

People’s health is the basis of social civilization and progress,and is an important symbol of national prosperity and national prosperity.Our country is not only the country with the largest population in the world,but also the country with the largest elderly population in the world,which has entered the aging society in 1999.The elderly as a vulnerable group,their health information needs are difficult to be met,the urgent need for the attention of scholars.In this study,the ability of discerning health information is defined as the ability of information users to understand the meaning of health information,to judge the authenticity of health information and to use it in real life.As one of the four dimensions of health information literacy,the ability to discriminate health information affects users’ health to a certain extent.The poor ability of health information screening will affect the elderly to make reasonable health decisions,so that they will be lost in the ocean of health information,and even believe rumors easily.In addition,most of the existing studies on the influencing factors of health information screening ability are college students and urban residents.Although there are many elderly people in the city,whether these influencing factors are suitable for the whole group of elderly people remains to be discussed.Therefore,the study on the influencing factors of health information screening ability of the elderly is the most important part of this study.Based on the qualitative research method of grounded theory,the researcher designed an interview outline for the research topic.Based on the interview outline,the researcher visited several squares and parks in XX city many times in May 2021,and randomly selected elderly people for face-to-face interviews.After asking for their consent,the interview process was recorded.After interviewing 22 elderly people,we found no new concept in the interview data.Then we added 3 more interview data to test and analyzed them according to the step of grounded theory coding.At the end of the interview,these original texts on the ability to identify health information of the elderly were summed up and sorted out,and the influencing factors of the ability to identify health information of the elderly were extracted through the open coding,spindle coding and selective coding process,including 3 dimensions and 13 main categories,and then a theoretical model of influencing factors of the ability to identify health information of the elderly was established based on the relationship between categories.The results showed that:(1)Older people’s cognition of the importance of health information was biased.(2)The factors that affect the ability of the elderly to identify health information involve three dimensions,namely,information level,individual level and social level.Specifically,the information level includes "information characteristics" and "information services";the social level includes "intangible resources","emotional support","infrastructure" and "soft environment";and the individual level includes "demographic characteristics","behavioral motivation","personality characteristics","physiological factors","health information needs","health literacy level" and "health information awareness".(3)Information factors at the information level and health information literacy at the individual level can directly affect the ability to identify health information of the elderly;resource factors and environmental factors at the social level can affect the ability to identify health information of the elderly by regulating health information literacy at the individual level;and individual factors at the individual level can respectively regulate health information literacy and information factors at the information level can affect the ability to identify health information of the elderly.According to the results of this study,we should improve the construction of health information resources,speed up the construction of health information release platform and strengthen the supervision of health information sources;at the social environment level,we should strengthen the health literacy education of the elderly,develop health information screening tools and guide the participation of social forces;at the group level,the elderly should establish correct health information concept and actively learn health knowledge and skills to improve the health information screening ability and health literacy level of the elderly.