Social Media Usage for Changes in Health Practices and Health Promotion

David Thomas^1, , Margaret Alston¹, Malliga Jambulingam¹, Ariel Hunt¹ and Yvonne Bronner¹

¹School of Community Health and Policy, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Cite this paper

David Thomas, Margaret Alston, Malliga Jambulingam, Ariel Hunt and Yvonne Bronner. Social Media Usage for Changes in Health Practices and Health Promotion. American Journal of Public Health Research. 2022; 10(2):53-62. doi: 10.12691/AJPHR-10-2-3

Abstract

Background: Behavior change is essential in adopting healthy behaviors. Although several social media (SM) platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc., are available to share information and to promote health behaviors, how are they used in and health promotion? What specific online platform is used in supporting the health promotion of adopting health behaviors in general? By this, it can be understood what SM platform can be used to change the behavior of some African American mothers’ infant safe sleep practices to prevent the risk of Sleep Related Infant Death. Objective: To explore the literature for the identification of specific social media platform(s) that is/are helpful in changing the behavior of the general population. Methods: PubMed, EBSCOhost, and Google Scholar search engines were utilized to find articles that supported changes in health behavior following social media use, were published between 2010 to 2021, had free access, outlined interventions, and reported media marketing impacts, health promotion, as well as documented improvements in health behaviors. Findings: The findings of this literature review revealed that among all social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Myspace were utilized to obtain health information on various health topics including breastfeeding vaccinations, drug/alcohol use, physical activity, and more, Facebook was found to be the most utilized social media platform. Overall, women were the primary participants. However, no study has been done on changing the behavior of the African American mothers via social media platforms for adopting infant safe sleep practices. Conclusion and Recommendations: Although the literature has shown that Facebook was most utilized to improved behavioral health outcomes of various health topics, it did not describe how interventions led to improved behavioral health outcomes. Further research can be performed to identify how social media platforms influence health behaviors by measuring behavioral outcomes qualitatively and quantitatively. This result can be utilized to change the behavior of the African American mothers’ for adopting infant safe sleep practices.

Keywords

African American, sleep-related infant deaths, social media, online, safe sleep

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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