Internet Health Information Seeking Behavior Of Gay Men And Its Influencing Factors

With the popularization and development of the Internet,the Internet has become one of the important channels for people to obtain health information.By far,there is no research on Internet health information seeking behavior of gay.To make up for the lack of research in this field,this study took gay as the research object,aimed at understanding the basic situation of their health information seeking behavior on the Internet,also the factors that influence their internet health information seeking behavior.Based on the literature,this study used in-depth interviews to understand the motivation,content,channels,and obstacles of gay men's search for internet health information.The study found that gay men's internet health information seeking behavior is mainly affected by functional motivation and internet feature motivation.The search content includes four aspects: general disease information,specific disease information,mental health related information,and information related to improving lifestyle.For gay men,the search channels for health information are mainly divided into social networks and network resources.When using the Internet to search for health information,this group mainly faces four obstacles:lack of authenticity,professionalism,authority and lack of privacy protection.This study analyzed the interview materials to extract the influencing factors that may affect their internet health information seeking behavior,including perceived ease of use,perceived usefulness,credibility of online health information and internet health information literacy,and explored them later.At the same time,this study based on the Technology Acceptance Model,Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model,combined with the Perceived Risk Theory,conducted empirical research through questionnaires,discussed the influence of eight factors such as demographic variables,perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use,and health risk perception on the internet health information seeking behavior of gay men.The empirical results showed that the general health condition of gay in China is not good,and most people are very concerned about their health condition.In terms of the seeking channels and types,most of gay choose to use the search engine because it is easy and has very low barriers to use;In terms of seeking purposes,the main purpose is to understand the symptoms of the disease in order to self-diagnose.The study verified that internet health information literacy and perceived usefulness have significant positive effects on the internet health information seeking behavior of gay.