Investigation of social media sharing of dietitians scientific and ethics rules (instagram example)

The increase in Internet and social network usage rates also affects the forms of interaction in the health field. Especially in recent years, with the increase in the interest of people to eat healthily, dieticians give information to people about healthy eating from social media accounts and they inform people about subjects they are curious about related to healthy eating. This research aims to evaluate dieticians' sharing on Instagram, one of the social media applications, in terms of scientific and ethical aspects. The qualitative research method was used in the research and data were gathered by interview and observation method. Within the scope of the research, the appropriate sampling method was used. In this study, 14 dietitians with open sharing accounts were reached, and the contents of these dietitians shared between 01-30 November 2017 were examined in depth. The study was carried out in two stages. In the first stage, the demographics of dietitians were reached; in the second phase, the shares. Instagram sharing of dietitians inspected in the study 43.4% of the information on nutrition and health; 34% of their own photos; 31.22% of the food images; 11.67% of images containing advertisements; personal information about the clients was 6.8%. Dietitians' social media shares they make 43.4% gives information on nutrition and health. 58.48% of these shares consist of shares quoted from scientific articles. Shares quoted from scientific articles only 9% of the respondents cited the source, whereas the remaining 91% did not. Dietitians sharing on social media they also share their personal photos from their occupational sharing accounts. On the other hand, dietitians do not share very often with their clients in their shares, this ratio was limited to 6.8%. Dieticians sharing on social media share their personal photos from professional accounts. This situation they are among the unethical behaviors according to Helm and Jones (2016). According to the American Dietetic Association (ADA) not showing resources in shared shares is considered among the unethical behaviors of the dietician profession (ADA, 2009). Dietitians do not prefer too much to share information about their clients. This can be interpreted in such a way that dieticians give greater importance to the privacy of their clients and to ethical rules concerning their clients.