Social media use in health communication and its impact on health literacy

The main purpose of this thesis is to examine the effect of social media use in health communication on health literacy behavioral intentions. For this purpose, a quantitative research method was used. The universe of the study consists of individuals over the age of 18 who use social media. During the data collection process, volunteer individuals who agreed to participate in the study were informed about the purpose and scope of the study. A total of 400 people were surveyed using the simple random sampling method; 392 surveys suitable for analysis due to missing and incorrect markings were included in the analysis process. Data analysis was carried out using the IBM SPSS Statistics package program. Before the analyses, whether the data met the normal distribution assumption was evaluated by examining the kurtosis and skewness values ​​and Q-Q plot graphics were examined. In addition, extreme values ​​in the data set were detected using the Mahalanobis distance and removed from the analyses. Independent sample (t-test) was used in paired group comparisons, and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used in three or more group comparisons. When a significant difference was detected between the groups as a result of ANOVA, post-hoc Tukey HSD test was applied to determine which groups the difference was between. Linear regression analysis was applied to examine the relationships between continuous variables. As a result of the results obtained, it was concluded that social media use did not have a significant effect on health literacy behavioral intention, the perception of the reliability of the source in social media varied according to socio-demographic characteristics, and health literacy differed according to socio-demographic characteristics.