
This summer I had the opportunity to continue my work in Dr. Alexa Lamm’s lab as a summer research fellow for UGA’s Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities (CURO). As a CURO fellow, I completed over 300 hours of research, attended several workshops, and presented my work at CURO’s Summer Research Final Forum.
The research I presented focused on determining if social media health information seeking behaviors predict self-efficacy regarding healthy eating behaviors. Information was gathered via an online survey from 780 rural Georgia residents in 2022. Examples of statements regarding social media health information included, “I rely on social media to get the majority of my health information” and “Social media makes it easy for accessing health information”. Examples of statements regarding self-efficacy of eating behaviors included, “Using nutrition labels to choose healthy foods” and “Choosing foods that lower my chances of getting heart disease, diabetes, and/or cancer”.
The study findings were that the mean level of confidence for self-efficacy was 3.54, while the mean level of agreement for social media health information was 3.06, indicating that respondents averaged in the neutral range. In addition, the study found that 67.7% of respondents received their health information from health professionals, 53.1% received their health information from websites, but only 32.2% received their information from word of mouth. Considering rural areas are more community based, the word-of-mouth percentage was expected to be higher. In addition, website usage was lower than expected, as many respondents may have opted to not select websites since the example of websites was the CDC website.
I would like to thank Dr. Lamm and Kristin Gibson for all their guidance and support this summer, as well as CURO for providing me with this opportunity. I am excited to continue my work in the Lamm Lab this upcoming fall.