Relationship between eHealth literacy and health promoting behaviors among nursing students

Abstract

Background: Utilizing health literacy is important in establishing knowledgeable health advancements and practices, which can become deterrents to promoting a healthy lifestyle. Technological advancements improve health information availability and accessibility, potentially affecting the users’ proficiency and their capability in applying the accessed health information. However, obtaining health information through information technology for health promotion requires e-health literacy. Purpose: This study aimed to determine the relationship between eHealth literacy and health-promoting lifestyle behaviors among nursing students. Methods: A descriptive-correlational study was applied to 131 nursing students recruited through a purposive sampling method from a nursing school in the Philippine. The researchers adopted the original English version of the e-Health Literacy Scale and Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II (HPLP) to collect the data. The gathered data were analyzed using descriptive analysis, frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation, and the correlation using Pearson’s r correlation. Results: A total of 131 nursing students were employed in the study, with a mean age of 20.14 (±1.22). Participants were female (71.8%) and were Level 1 students (44.3%). The mean of the total sum score for eHealth literacy was 31.24 (±4.30), while the overall item mean was 3.92 (±0.54). On the other hand, the health-promoting behavior has a mean score of 2.43 (±0.43), while its subscales have a mean score of 2.46 (±0.45) for nutrition, 2.45 (±0.62) for physical activity, and 2.39 (±0.47) for health responsibility. EHealth literacy was found to have a significant relationship with the students’ healthpromoting behavior (r=0.245, p=0.005). Hence, students with a high level of eHealth literacy are more inclined to perform healthy behaviors. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that developing strategies to improve the e-health literacy of nursing students may contribute to maintaining their health-promoting behaviors. Identified intervention strategies based on eHealth literacy are needed to encourage healthy practices, which may reduce the risks of illnesses due to unhealthy lifestyle behaviors among nursing students.