Social capital and health information seeking in China

Lu et al. BMC Public Health (2022) 22:1525

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13895-2

RESEARCH

Social capital and health information

seeking in China

Qianfeng Lu1

, Angela Chang2

, Guoming Yu3

, Ya Yang3 and Peter J. Schulz1,4*

Abstract

Background: People’s potentials to seek health information can be afected by their social context, such as their

social networks and the resources provided through those social networks. In the past decades, the concept of social

capital has been widely used in the health realm to indicate people’s social context. However, not many such studies

were conducted in China. Chinese society has its special quality that many Western societies lack: people traditionally

render strong value to family relations and rely heavily on strong social ties in their social life. Therefore, the purpose

of this study was to examine the association between diferent types of social capital and health information-seeking

behavior (HISB) in the Chinese context. The diferent types of social capital were primarily bonding and bridging, as

well as cognitive and structural ones.

Methods: Our analysis is based on a total of 3090 cases taken from the Health Information National Trends Survey

(HINTS) – China, 2017. Dataset was weighted due to the overrepresentation of female respondents and hierarchi￾cal multiple regression analyses as well as binary logistic regression tests were operated to examine the associations

between people’s social capital and their HISB.

Results: Some aspects of social capital emerged as positive predictors of HISB: information support (standing in for

the cognitive component of social capital) promoted health information seeking, organization memberships (stand￾ing in for the structural component) encouraged cancer information seeking, and both the use of the internet and

of traditional media for gaining health information were positively linked with bridging networks and organization

memberships. Bonding networks (structural component) were not correlated with any other of the key variables and

emotional support (cognitive social capital) was consistently associated with all health information-seeking indicators

negatively.

Conclusions: Social capital demonstrated signifcant and complex relationships with HISB in China. Structural social

capital generally encouraged HISB in China, especially the bridging aspects including bridging networks and organi￾zation memberships. On the other hand, emotional support as cognitive social capital damaged people’s initiatives in

seeking health-related information.

Keywords: Social capital, Social support, Social networks, Health information-seeking behavior

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Background

The potential of health information seeking

Health information is among the most-sought subject

matters on the internet. Situations in which people seek

such information can be easily imagined, e.g. we can￾not decide whether we need to see a doctor or can help

ourselves with new symptoms; or we need arguments

because we intend to challenge our doctor’s diagnosis

Open Access

*Correspondence: [email protected]

1

Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, Università Della Svizzera

Italiana, Via Buf 13, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland

Full list of author information is available at the end of the article