Building And Breaking Walls: A Study Of Health Information Avoidance Behavior In The Elderly From The Perspective Of Health Communication

In recent years,the Party and the state pay more and more attention to the national health problem,and have introduced many policies to protect the national health,health is put in the first place.China’s population census is conducted every ten years.According to the seventh national census,the elderly population aged 60 and above is 264.02 million,accounting for18.70% of the country’s total population.In March 2022,the National Health Commission,the Ministry of Education,the Ministry of Science and Technology,the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other departments jointly issued the Notice on the issuance of the 14 th Five-Year Plan for Healthy Aging [2022],which provides a positive signal for actively coping with aging and helping the elderly adapt to information dissemination,and also lays a solid foundation for the development of health communication.In the contemporary society where health has been attached great importance,the aging of the population is deepening day by day,and the "silver age" has quietly come,and the health of the elderly has also been attached great importance.With the continuous development of health communication,information avoidance has also become a hot topic in academic research.Although some scholars have analyzed the factors of health information avoidance in the elderly,their perspectives are mainly focused on the intergenerational family and the influence of new media.Based on the above background,this paper takes the elderly over 60 years old as the research object.In the early stage,the network ethnography method is adopted to enter the wechat "health school students group of 63" for online participatory observation,so as to explore the health information avoidance phenomenon of the elderly.The in-depth interview method was then adopted to interview 20 elderly people,and it was found that there was avoidance phenomenon in elderly people’s cognition and acceptance of health information,which was not an individual phenomenon.Meanwhile,according to the difference in the degree and duration of avoidance,The avoidance types of health information in the elderly were divided into eight categories: complete avoidance and selective avoidance,active avoidance and passive avoidance,psychological avoidance and physical avoidance,persistent avoidance and temporary avoidance.With the advent of the digital age,the source of health information for the elderly is not limited to relatives and friends.Social media has also become another major source.The study found that the elderly mainly avoided two types of health information: specific disease information and daily health information.Through the collation and induction of the interview content,it is concluded that the factors that affect and trigger the avoidance of health information of the elderly are information factor,psychological factor,behavioral inertia,intergenerational relationship and demographic factor.According to the analysis results,three measures to alleviate the health information behavior of the elderly are obtained in this paper,namely,promoting two-way socialization through benign communication,optimizing the access channels of online health information in various aspects,and promoting the healthy development of health communication with state support.It is hoped that the research on health information avoidance behavior of the elderly can enhance their ability to resist diseases,further improve their health literacy,realize effective and high-quality communication of health information,help build a warm "age-appropriate" communication environment,and contribute to the better realization of "healthy China".