NU-Evanston SubProject

Are youth concerned about their health? And if so, do they pay attention to public health campaigns? And even if that is the case, are current public health campaigns targeted at youth successfully? Our study wants to answer these questions. For Qatar these answers seem even more important than for most other countries—because, for instance, obesity among children and adolescents is particularly widespread in Qatar. This study plans to find out how Qatari youth acquire and evaluate information about health issues of all kinds. In particular, with the incomparable access youth now have to the Internet, what do we know about young people’s concerns for and use of technology to address their own health interests, but also how future public health campaigns might reach these youth beyond traditional media and school settings? So, in this study, we will use the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS) (Johnson & Meischke, 1993) as our theoretical framework to explore the following questions: 1) How do Qatari adolescents use and evaluate health information? How important are Internet, social media, mobile apps and health trackers? 2) How do Qatari adolescents perceive the impact of health information on their health-related behavior decisions? 3) How might media technologies be best used to reach Qatari adolescents with health-related information? To answer these research questions, we plan to conduct a large and representative survey of Qatari adolescents to comprehensively inventory their use and evaluation of health communication and health-supporting technologies. The outcomes of this study will be unique and valuable for all stakeholders in Qatar–to get to young Qataris the information they need for health purposes. The project will help design health communication measures of all sorts for young people, both more effectively and efficiently. Our study ties in with the new focus of Qatar’s Supreme Council of Health (2015) on applying e-health techniques to improve health communication of all kinds.