MD2Assgn_Cruz Ballester_A

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Florida State University *

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Health Science

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Apr 3, 2024

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docx

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1 Disinformation and its Impact on the Public Health of University Students Alexis M. Cruz Ballester PUBH 6038 Walden University Dr. Bruce Ragon March 24, 2024 Module 2: Assignment

2 Disinformation and its Impact on the Public Health of University Students The Health Belief Model (HBM) is an essential theoretical model that healthcare providers can utilize to significantly guide health promotion and disease prevention programs. The health care providers primarily use this model to explain and anticipate the shifts in individual health behaviors (Journal of Risk Research). In fact, it is one of the most popular health models used widely by care providers across the globe to understand the health behaviors of individuals and promote health and disease prevention initiatives (Rural Health Information Hub, n.d.). HBM has six key constructs that target individual beliefs about various health conditions. Such beliefs enable the care providers to guide health promotion and disease prevention programs because they predict individual behavior changes relating to health. Specifically, HBM’s constructs define the key elements that influence health behaviors with respect to a person’s perceived threat to a disease or infection (Griffith Law Review). The constructs include perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers to action, cues to action, and self-efficacy (Rural Health Information Hub, n.d.). These elements can be applied to guide and promote the health behavior changes of various vulnerable populations about public health issues. In this case, the HBM can be applied to guide and promote health behavior changes in university students about disinformation in healthcare. University students spend most of their time browsing online and social media platforms, largely associated with healthcare disinformation (Bernard et al., 2021, p. 3-12). This implies that they are highly vulnerable to disinformation, justifying their selection in this assignment. This paper explores and describes how care providers can use HBM constructs to establish the impacts of disinformation on the public health of university students.

3 Perceived Benefits and Perceived Barriers The HBM is driven by a desire to prevent sickness, the belief that changing the behavior can prevent the disease, and the potential positive benefits of the health action. In this case, it is very difficult to convince university students to change their online behavior and use digital space to share or acquire health-related information if there is no potential benefit attached to the action (APSIPA Transactions on Signal & Information Processing). This implies that individuals are likely to give up their behaviors to adopt new ones if there are perceived benefits like reduced risk of disease infection (Rural Health Information Hub, n.d.). For example, disinformation about the Coronavirus vaccine discouraged many individuals, including university students, from getting vaccinated (Jabbour et al., 2023, p. 291-301). Applying the perceived benefit construct to educate and inform the university students and the public about how the vaccine reduces infection risk encouraged them to seek COVID-19 vaccination. This affirms that the perceived benefit changed the health behavior of university students, promoting the public health outcome globally. Perceived barrier outlines that individuals do not change their health behaviors if they believe numerous obstacles hinder them from doing so. Changing health behaviors demands effort, time, and resources like money, which university students consider major obstacles (DiClemente et al., 2019, p. 59-72). The amount of effort needed to convince university students to reduce the time they spend online and avoid some websites that contain their preferred digital content creates a barrier to healthcare behavior change. For example, convincing university students to spend less than two hours online per day and avoid disinformation-prone sites that contain their preferred videos or music is very difficult. The social consequences associated with

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