Influence Of Media Use Of Residents In Ethnic Regions On Health Behavior

The health of residents is an important indicator of the level of economic and social development in a country and is an important component of comprehensive national strength and the core competitiveness of a country. All countries in the world regard improving the health quality and health level of residents as a priority strategy for their social development and health problems have aroused wide attention from government departments, medical and health sector and academia. With the deepening of the research on the health problem, more and more people find that the health behavior of human beings has more and more influence and restrictive function on their own health level, even exceeding the impact of health care on the health quality and health level of human beings. For ethnic areas with underdeveloped economy, this area is more prominent and obvious. A lot of researches at home and abroad show that the use of media is a very important factor to affect the health behaviors of residents. However, it is clearly a particularly question worthy of deep thinking that how the use of media affects the health behavior, especially for such a special group of people of ethnic minority area residents and what the underlying impact mechanism behind it is.In addition, since 1950s, health behavior researchers of the European and American countries have paid more and more attention to the reference and guidance of the theoretical resources of various disciplines to the health behavior research, in order to construct theoretical hypothesis models of health behaviors. However, the use of the theory is single and the review and reflection of the health behavior research under the guidance of the corresponding theory are not enough. The applicability and limitations of the theory are not fully considered and attention is not paid to the dialogue and communication with other theories of health behaviors. At the same time, attempts for the integration of a variety of theories are not enough, resulting that the complex relationship between health information dissemination, media use and individual health behavior has not been fully revealed. A lot of problems have been obscured from the perspective of theory and not much attention and discussion are paid. In addition, there was obvious deficiency in the statistical methods used in the past domestic research of health behaviors:the factors used to analyze the health behavior are mostly multiple regression and factor analysis etc. In the discussion of the relationship between several factors influencing the behavior problem, it is often required to analyze multiple factors. However, the traditional multivariate statistical methods and path analysis could only deal with the observed variables and could not deal with the latent variables as factor analysis is not able to analyze the causal relationship between the latent variables. Therefore, it is very difficult to understand how the media influence the health behavior using the traditional statistical methods. In this regard, it is necessary and urgent for the methodology reform of health behavior research.Based on this, the combination of empirical research and theoretical research and the combination of quantitative research and qualitative research are used in this research.304 valid questionnaires and 40 qualitative interviews with local residents collected in Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Xiangxi are used as the sample. The influence factors of media use on health behaviors are extracted from behavior theories of planned behavior theory, knowledge-attitude-behavior theory and social cognitive theory etc. The theoretical model of the influence of media use related to ethnic areas residents and health on their health behaviors is established and the corresponding research hypotheses are proposed. In the study, the advanced statistical method-- the structural equation model is used for verification. The analysis data of in-depth qualitative interviews is used as the supplement of quantitative research results and verify the model.The final result of the study found that the gross effect of the influence of media use of ethnic area residents on health behavior is 0.5412, locating within the range of large effects, suggesting that the media use of ethnic area residents has a relatively large impact on their health behavior. It is found that there are two kinds of influence paths:one is direct influence, the other is indirect influence on health behavior through the two mediating variables of behavioral attitude and self-efficacy. The path to produce indirect influence on health behavior of media use through health knowledge, is suspended as health knowledge has no significant impact on health behavior. In-depth interview results explain and confirm the above conclusions.It can be seen that media use has great potentiality and promotion space for the health behavior of residents in ethnic regions. To fully play the media effect, health communication in ethnic regions should be constructed comprehensively in following aspects and should be a health communication system taking effect improvement as the target:1. Break the communication mode taking communicator as the center and construct accurate communication system taking audience as the center; based on the differences of residents in ethnic regions and their demand characteristics, make classification and hierarchical communication for it and perform key intervention for special groups; 2. It needs to change from single media communication to diversified and multi-channel communication and realize multi-media combination of healthy communication; 3. Make efforts to improve the media literacy of residents in ethnic regions; 4. Promote the knowledge internalization of health information for residents in ethnic regions vigorously; 5. Promote the change of behavioral attitude of residents in ethnic regions with great efforts.