A Qualitative Investigation on Miscommunication of Everyday Health Information Between Older Parents and Adult Children

摘要

With the advancement of ICTs, older adults are more actively participating in their healthcare decisions and accessing online health information. However, older adults demonstrated low levels of health literacy which calls for various interventions to improve. Given the limited accessibility and mixed results of public intervention programs, intergenerational communication/ learning has been proposed as a cost-effective solution. While intergenerational communication/learning often became problematic even within family. Therefore, it is far from conclusive to employ intergenerational communication/ learning to improve older adults' health literacy. To address these concerns, this study adopted semi-structured interviews to explore older adults' perceptions on their online health information seeking and sharing behaviors and on their adult children's responses. We found that older adults preferred the WeChat to seek and share everyday health information. Compared to older adults' actively involvement, adult children provided inactive or even negative responses to the sharing behaviors. Our results revealed that two miscommunications occurred in the intergenerational communication contributed to forming the problematic communication and incomplete comprehension. Implications for both theory and practice were discussed as well.