=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3191/paper12
|storemode=property
|title=Students’ Covid-19 Digital Health Literacy at Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (short paper)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3191/paper12.pdf
|volume=Vol-3191
|authors=Ioannis Patias
}}
==Students’ Covid-19 Digital Health Literacy at Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (short paper)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3191/paper12.pdf
Students’ Covid-19 Digital Health Literacy
at Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics,
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”
Ioannis Patias 1
1
University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski“, Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, 5
James Bourchier blvd., Sofia, 1164, Bulgaria
Abstract
The new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19, which
caused a pandemic. The highly contagious disease has led the whole world
to unprecedented business, humanitarian and human challenges. But, as
always, any risk can be recognized as a new opportunity. Thus, people
around the world have redefined their understanding for health and well-
being. However, it is important that in different geographies and industries
people will continue to take advantage of this large-scale experiment caused
by the pandemic and to rethink concepts, habits, and policies established
long ago, in some cases. The aim of the paper is to explore students’
Covid-19 digital health literacy at Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics,
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. A standardized questionnaire
and scale were used, which aims in providing the ability of comparing
the results with other students from other countries, and specialties. The
results so far show students reported high HL, and an ability to crosscheck
health information, which provides them with satisfaction, regarding to
this information. Our students trust modern digital platforms, but also the
official heath authorities in the country, including the developed Bulgarian
unified information portal, the Ministry of Health, and the Regional Health
Inspectorate web pages.
Keywords
Health literacy, digital, Covid-19
1. Introduction
The identified species of coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19
(where ‘CO’ for corona, ‘VI’ for virus and ‘D’ for disease), which caused a pan-
demic. We need to redefine our understanding for health and well-being, includ-
Information Systems & Grid Technologies: Fifteenth International Conference ISGT’2022, May 27–28, 2022, Sofia, Bulgaria
EMAIL: patias@fmi.uni-sofia.bg (I. Patias)
ORCID: 0000-0003-1355-7433 (I. Patias)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
ing our understanding for health literacy, the specifics of digital health literacy,
and the challenges related with Covid-19 digital health literacy.
According to the WHO “Health literacy implies the achievement of a level
of knowledge, personal skills and confidence to take action to improve personal
and community health by changing personal lifestyles and living conditions.” [1]
In other words the definition of health literacy requires access to health informa-
tion, ability to acquire correct information, and capacity to treat this information.
What we realized under the challenges imposed by the pandemic is that any
possible improvement of the population’s health literacy can provide the people
with the ability to first of all improve their own health, but also get engaged with
activities related with the improvement of the health for their community. The use
of the Inter-net as a resource for information of best quality has increased. But,
lack of time, lack of searching skills and sometimes lack of facilities and motiva-
tion don’t let end users to obtain the available information.
In this relation the applied digital communication technologies we experienced
that represent a very strong instrument, and play an important role in governments
health communication strategies. The efficiency of the communications of public
health authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic was related to the use of the dig-
ital plat-forms. The Internet became important source of COVID-19-related health
information. Information was spread faster than the virus itself. In many cases this
affected the governmental communication efforts. Even more people acquiring in-
formation and professionals developing such information platforms having all this
public health communications to deal with realized that COVID-19 digital health
literacy is a key competence to find reliable information on the Internet.
Under the SARS-CoV-2019 pandemic caused by the Coronavirus Disease
2019 (COVID-19) virus, we were all forced to access and use various sources
of health in-formation available on different digital platforms on the Internet.
This brought in front side issues related to health literacy (HL), but in a new for
the society point of view related with the involvement of the digital component.
Even people are using digital information platforms in their every day habits; it
is not always given their ability to adequate evaluating the quality of the acquired
information, and this becomes an issue when this information is related to health.
In the case of our students, from the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics,
at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” we have in many cases a dual role.
From the one side as people – users of the information, but from the other as IT
professionals are often engaged in systems development. In this second role they
have the duty, and the ability to improve the systems they develop, and provide
them with reliable, checked input. For systems based on the use of training data
and information it is of crucial importance the quality of those training examples.
It is this characteristic, of the participation of our students in the develop-
ment of the future health information systems and platforms, that makes this
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study more important. IT students, as future professionals involved in systems
development, need to have accurate health literacy, apart their digital abilities.
2. Methods
For the purpose of the study a Questionnaire developed by Dadaczynski, K.,
Okan, O. & Rathmann, K. in 2020 as COVID-19 Health Literacy Survey: Uni-
versity Students (COVID-HL Survey), and the respective Scale Documentation
under the Public Health Centre Fulda (PHZF) at the Fulda University of Applied
Sciences & Interdisciplinary Centre for Health Literacy Research at Bielefeld
University [2, 3, 4], was used.
The main goals of the study include to assess digital HL of university stu-
dents; explore the different digital sources of information students consult when
seeking for COVID-19 information; capture student’s future time perspective/
worries; and also assess students Sense of Coherence under this health situation.
An invitation for students’ participation was published on the Faculty of
Mathematics and Informatics web page on the 11th of December 2021. Addi-
tional reminding e-mails were sent to 1.690 students during the following month.
The students were informed that although personal data was collected, it couldn’t
be assigned to a specific person. And also the information was collected solely for
scientific purposes and with the aim of developing support services. Responses
were collected from 178 students, which make a response rate of 10.53% of the
students. The survey had the approval of the ethics committee of Sofia University
“St. Kliment Ohridski”.
3. Findings
First of all the related with Digital Health Literacy (DHLI) question was
formulated with a subscale related to information searching. The main question
was “When you search the Internet for information on the coronavirus or related
topics, how easy or difficult is it for you to…” with three sub components (see
Figure 1):
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Figure 1: Digital Health Literacy (DHLI) question – incl. the three sub-components
1. make a choice from all the information you find?
2. use the proper words or search query to find the information you are
looking for?
3. find the exact information you are looking for?
The majority of the respondents more than 70%, find it “easy” or “very easy”
to make a choice (70%), find the information (90%), or find the exact information
they are looking for (71%), according to the question adopted from Van der Vaart,
R. & Drossaert, C. (2017) [5].
Immersive is the amount of students (89%) crosschecking the acquired health
information in both English and Bulgarian languages (see Figure 2). The students
were instructed for the possibility to select multiple responses if necessary.
Figure 2: Languages of the sources, used for searching information on corona-
virus and related health topics
138
The sources used for online information seeking were explored by providing
various possibilities, on how to get information about coronavirus and related
topics on the Internet (see Figure 3). The students were asked to indicate how
often they used the following sources:
• Source 1: Search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
• Source 2: Websites of public bodies (here were added three sources from
our country, namely, Bulgarian unified information portal, the Ministry of
Health, and the Regional Health Inspectorate web pages)
• Source 3: Wikipedia and other online-encyclopedias
• Source 4: Social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)
• Source 5: YouTube
• Source 6: Blogs on health topics
• Source 7: Guidebook-communities (here was added one example from
our country, namely, zdrave.net)
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Figure 3: Sources used for online information seeking
• Source 8: Health portals (here was added one example from our country,
namely, credoweb.bg)
• Source 9: Websites of doctors or health insurance companies
• Source 10: News portals (e.g. of newspapers, TV stations)
The available options provided to the students were qualified, as never, rare-
ly, sometimes, often, and don´t know.
As for the various possibilities of how to get information about the coronavi-
rus and related topics on the Internet (see Figure 3), the respondents indicate most
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often they use search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo!), followed by official
Health portals (for example, the Bulgarian unified information portal, the current
news – Ministry of Health, and the Regional Health Inspectorate).
The question related to the online sources of information seeking, was adapt-
ed from Marstedt, G. (2018) [6].
The students’ satisfaction with the information acquired on the Internet about
corona-virus was explored also. The question was stated as “How satisfied are
you with the information you find on the Internet about corona-virus?” and were
given the following options to the students (see Figure 4): very dissatisfied, dis-
satisfied, partly satisfied, satisfied, and very satisfied.
Figure 4: Students’ satisfaction with the information found on the Internet
about corona-virus
The majority of the students, 62%, were either satisfied, or very satisfied
with the information they found on the Internet about corona-virus.
4. Conclusions
The results presented show that most of the students reported high HL. May
be their ability to crosscheck health information explains their satisfaction re-
garding to this information. Young people as the students in the Faculty of Math-
ematics and Informatics, at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” trust modern
digital platforms, but also have a high rated opinion for the official heath authori-
ties in the country. The trusted sources for our students of Covid-19 health-related
information include the developed for the purpose Bulgarian unified information
portal, the Ministry of Health web page, and the web page of the Regional Health
Inspectorate, confirming the published preliminary results [7].
We can see that our students have well-developed COVID-19 digital health
literacy. But still, more efforts could help in two directions, first to further
strengthen our students’ digital health literacy capacities, and second to help im-
prove the health-related information quality on the Internet.
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The study is still ongoing. More results are currently collected from sciences
students in the Faculty of Public Health, at the Medical University – Sofia.
5. References
[1] WHO (World Health Organization) 1998, Division of Health Promotion,
Education and Communications (HPR), Health Education and Health Pro-
motion Unit (HEP), WHO/HPR/HEP/98.1, accessed Jan. 2022, https://
www.who.int/activities/improving-health-literacy.
[2] Dadaczynski, K., Okan, O. & Rathmann, K. (2020). COVID-19 Health
Literacy Survey: University Stu-dents (COVID-HL Survey). Questionnaire
and Scale Documentation. Public Health Centre Fulda (PHZF) at the Fulda
University of Applied Sciences & Interdisciplinary Centre for Health Lit-
eracy Research at Bielefeld University. doi: 10.4119/unibi/2942920.
[3] Dadaczynski, K. Okan, O., Messer, M., Leung, A., Rosário, R., Darlington,
E. & Rathmann, K. (2021). Digital health literacy and online information
seeking in times of COVID-19. A cross-sectional survey among university
students in Germany. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(1):e24097.
DOI: 10.2196/24097.
[4] Dadaczynski, K. Okan, O., Messer, M. & Rathmann, K. (2021, online first).
University students´sense of coherence, future worries and mental health.
Findings from the German COVID-HL-Survey. Health Promotion Interna-
tional. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daab070.
[5] Van der Vaart, R. & Drossaert, C. (2017). Development of the digital health
literacy instrument: measuring a broad spectrum of health 1.0 and health
2.0 skills. J Med Internet Res, 19(1), e27.
[6] Marstedt, G. (2018). Das Internet: Auch Ihr Ratgeber für Gesundheits-
fragen? Bevöl-kerungsumfrage zur Suche von Gesundheitsinformationen
im Internet und zur Reak-tion der Ärzte (The Internet: Also your guide to
health issues? Population survey on the search for health information on the
Internet and the reaction of doctors).
[7] Patias, I. (2022) “Covid-19 Digital health literacy of Sofia University IT
students – preliminary results”, International Journal of Population Data
Science, 7(2). doi: 10.23889/ijpds.v7i2.1744.
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