Health information seeking behavior of Birjand University students in social media during the pandemic Covid-19

Considering the influence of social media in the lives of today's people, the investigation of students' information-seeking behavior in these media regarding Covid-19 was the focus of this study.

This descriptive survey used a Researcher-made questionnaire on a sample of students of University of Birjand (386 participants). For questionnaire’s validity, the experts’ (specialists in medicine and knowledge and information) opinions was used, and Cronbach's alpha was used for questionnaire’s reliability (0.897).

The main purpose of this research is to study University of Birjand students' health information seeking behavior in social media during the pandemic of Covid 19.

The studied community mostly used public search engines, social networks (especially Telegram and Instagram) and news media to get information about Covid-19. In the meantime, more women than men used reliable specialized medical sources to obtain information on this matter.

According to the researcher's review, any research at the national level has not studied this research subject.