Health Promotion based on Media Literacy among the Educational Staff of Ardabil University of Medical Sciences: A Mixed Study

Health is a global issue and debate, and organizations are trying to improve the health of their employees. One of these solutions is to strengthen the method of obtaining reliable information related to health through social media. Considering that medical universities should be more diligent in improving the health of their employees, the present study was conducted with the aim of promotion health based on media literacy in the educational staff of Ardabil University of Medical Sciences in 2022.

This research is of mixed exploratory type with quantitative-qualitative method. In the qualitative part, the statistical population was the professors and managers of Ardabil University of Medical Sciences, who were selected by a purposeful snowball sampling method, and in the quantitative part, there were 234 educational staff of Ardabil University of Medical Sciences, who was selected by a simple random sampling method. The data collection tool in the qualitative part was a semi-structured interview, and in the quantitative part, a questionnaire was prepared using the results of the qualitative part. For qualitative data analysis, grounded theory method was used by Strauss and Corbin coding method, and descriptive and inferential statistics were used for quantitative data analysis.

In the qualitative stage, 8 main categories and 44 sub-categories were identified, which in the form of a paradigmatic model includes 6 dimensions; Causal conditions (individual characteristics and family background, environmental, social and economic conditions of society and critical evaluation of media content), background conditions (infrastructures for promoting media literacy), central phenomenon (promoting media literacy), strategies and measures (creation of learning environment and employee participation), intervening conditions (lack of acceptance of new media among employees) and finally consequences (improvement of public health). The results of the quantitative part also showed that the items that are considered to measure the main categories have sufficient validity and the relationships between the main meaningful categories and the model have good fit and predictive power.

Based on the findings of the research, it is concluded that the establishment of the health promotion model based on media literacy in Ardabil University of Medical Sciences can lead to the improvement of general health for the educational staff of the university, the results of which are the improvement of lifestyle and health behaviors, increase The capabilities of personal health are the creation and expansion of health services, the establishment of social justice and the empowerment of people, and the improvement of the quality and way of providing services.