Abstract

Although health information encountering is a significant aspect of information behavior on social media, it has been understudied in the literature. The study aims to investigate the factors that influence health information encountering on social media in three contexts: environmental characteristics, personal characteristics, and network characteristics. Online surveys were conducted with social media users at a university in Seoul, South Korea. A total of 316 responses were collected, and hierarchical regression analysis was performed to test the hypotheses. Significant predictors affecting health information encountering included environmental characteristics, such as unexpected leads and trigger connections in social media; personal characteristics, such as frequency of health information seeking and perceived health status of users; and network characteristics, such as users’ self-disclosure on social media. It contributes to the literature on health information-seeking behavior by shedding light on unintentional health information behavior, which is a more common behavior among users. The study highlights social media as a potential health information-seeking channel to effectively cope with emergent health issues and identifies the major factors affecting health information encountering on social media. This study draws on survey data collected in September 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the findings should be interpreted within this temporal context.