Psychosocial determinants of health information seeking behavior

Health information seeking behavior (HISB) concerns all the actions that individuals undertake to obtain information about their or others' health, with the goal to fulfill an information need. Several models exist that describe factors affecting HISB, for example the comprehensive model of information seeking, the planned risk information seeking model, and the integrative model of eHealth use. Based on these models it can be stated that whether a person pursues HISB to fulfill an information need is partly determined by a range of psychosocial factors. Various psychosocial determinants are described, focusing on cognitive factors, personality characteristics, demographics, and situational factors. Even though meta-analytic studies have shown small to moderate effect sizes, psychosocial factors are found to be robust determinants of HISB. Understanding relations between psychosocial factors and HISB is important because HISB is positively related to health outcomes such as more engagement in preventive health behaviors and greater treatment compliance.