A research on the reception of health information circulated on social media

The aim of this thesis is to measure how individuals receive health-related information transmitted through social media. In this context, using the symbolic interactionism perspective and Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding approach, attempts were made to determine the connection of the way health information is received through social media with e-health literacy. The first part of the thesis focuses on the concepts of health, disease and literacy. In the second part, the theoretical framework is tried to be created for the research part that constitutes the third part by referring to the approaches that form the basis of the reception studies. In the third part, the quantitative research method was adopted and a questionnaire technique was applied to measure how individuals received the health information associated with social media. In the third part, T-test, Anova, correlation analysis and regression analysis were used to test the hypotheses formed within the scope of the thesis. According to the T-test and Anova results, demographic variables are important variables in terms of reading format and e-health literacy. The correlation analysis results showed that there was a positive relationship between e-health literacy and critical reading, and a negative relationship between e-health literacy and hegemonic reading. In addition, regression analysis results showed that the critical reception variable can be explained by 34.2% and the hegemonic reception variable can be explained by the e-health literacy variable by 29%. The results of the research revealed that the way of reception is linked to e-health literacy, and the importance attributed to issues such as media literacy, health literacy and e-health literacy has been emphasized. As the study participants noted, individuals receive significant health information from social media. At this point, it is possible to interpret the results of the research in the context of the reception of health-related information on social media, which is seen as an unsupervised area, to suggest that activities aimed at ensuring the self-awareness of the individual should take precedence.