Health Information Avoidance Behavior and Influencing Factors of Cancer Patients in the Smart Media Era: A Preliminary Exploratory Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Objectives: To explore the influencing factors and path of health information avoidance behavior of cancer patients in the age of smart media, and to construct a theoretical model of influencing factors. Methods: Face-to-face interviews were used to collect primary data, following the steps of the rooted theory research method. NVivo 12 software was applied to code and analyze the data, and a theoretical model of the factors influencing the health information avoidance behaviors of cancer patients was constructed by combining with the Stimulus-Human Body-Response (SOR) theory. Results: This study proposed six research hypotheses by analyzing the content of the interviews, which showed a causal relationship between psychological factors and health information avoidance behavior; personal, informational, and environmental factors, while indirectly influencing the health information avoidance behavior of cancer patients through the mediating role of psychological factors; capacity factors moderated the chain of factors from information factors and environmental factors to psychological factors to health information avoidance behaviors, respectively. Conclusions: In this study, we proposed a theoretical model of the factors influencing cancer patients' health information avoidance behavior in the smart media era. This model can summarize the influencing factors of cancer patients' occurrence of health information avoidance behaviors in the environment of the Smart Media Era, and provides research hypotheses and theoretical frameworks for further explaining the role path relationships between the influencing factors.