Antecedents predicting health information seeking: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract Numerous reasons regarding why people should seek health information exist, but empirical evidence has indicated that factors that influence health information seeking (HIS) differ according to the context. To make suggestions based on explicit and judicious use of the best available evidence, a meta-analytic review was undertaken. In the present review, 16 electronic databases were searched up to July 2019, empirical results of 71 primary studies that met inclusion criteria were coded, and seven antecedents that commonly affect HIS behavior were examined. We obtained 204 correlation coefficients from 90 independent subsets with a total of 74,171 respondents. The results indicated that self-efficacy (ESr = 0.254), health literacy (ESr = 0.222), availability (ESr = 0.412), credibility (ESr = 0.308), emotional response (ESr = 0.090), and subjective norms (ESr = 0.443) substantially influenced individuals’ HIS, and subjective norms was the most influential factor. Individuals’ behavior usually aligns with the opinions of other critical individuals in their lives, and this phenomenon was observed in the present study of the HIS context. In addition, eight variables were examined as potential moderators (i.e., roles of samples, gender, average age, topic, information channel, type of publication, data collecting method, and sampling method); statistically significant effects on some of the aggregated correlations were noted for all of these variables.