Does Variation in the Extent of Individual Education and Extensiveness of Social Security Policies Affect Health Information-Seeking?

This chapter focuses on health information-seeking (HIS) which reflects people’s search of information about health issues via the use of mass media resources. Several empirical studies report that consumption of such resources is not randomly distributed across demographic groups and countries. We aim to explain differences in HIS using the perspectives of sociological theories which state that individuals are rational beings who strive to reach their goals by means of available resources. Based on these theories, we hypothesize that variation in the extensiveness of social security policies explains cross-national differences in HIS and in relationship between education and HIS.

Our results are obtained using hierarchical multilevel analysis of the data from the Eurobarometer 58.2, in a sample of 14,835 respondents from 15 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

We found that social security policies matter for the relationship between education and health information-seeking. The results indicate that in Southern European countries, the better educated use more mass media for getting health information than the less educated. However, in Central, Northern and Western European countries, the negative impact of low education is absent. This might suggest that social security policies in these countries have a favorable impact on health information-seeking behavior of the low educated.

Further research is needed to find which specific social security policies are more effective in reduction of the negative impact of low education on HIS. The findings of this chapter offer suggestions for social policy initiatives to reduce educational differences in HIS or to keep the reduction reached stable over time.

In this chapter, we have used a more sophisticated method of multilevel analysis to examine the combined impact of social security policies and individual education on the use of mass media resources for search of health information. This has not yet been studied in the previous research.