Social media as a source of knowledge ab out health nursing students

Abstract

Introduction: Nowadays, the Internet allows unlimited access to information from various areas, including health. Health-related content posted on the Internet and social media can shape users’ health behaviour and knowledge, but unfortunately not always in a professional manner. Given the unreliability of health information present on the Internet, there is a need to sensitize students planning to pursue medical professions in the future to this phenomenon. The results presented here constitute a continuation and expansion of the study on selected health behaviours of nursing students from the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Jagiellonian University and the sources of health knowledge they use in social media. The aim of this paper was to explore the sources of health knowledge among nursing students from available social media on the Web. Material and methods: The study covered 110 first-and second-year students at the undergraduate and graduate levels of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Jagiellonian University. The 2021 study was conducted using a diagnostic survey method, and data were collected based on the author’s survey questionnaire with 6 question categories. The results were developed using IBM SPSS 26.0 package, and the significance level was adopted as p ≤ 0.05. Results: Among the issues related to health, the most searched content was related to physical activity. The most popular social network was Instagram, and the most reliable source of information were profiles of specialists. Conclusions: Internet social media are a frequent source of information in the surveyed group of nursing students. There is a need to sensitize the recipients to seek and use professional sources in social media.