Social Media and Health Promotion among Indigenous People in Australia

This study aims to understand the potential of social media and health information sharing among Indigenous people in Australia. Qualitative research will be conducted to gather information on the type of health information being shared and how Indigenous people engage with social media for health-related purposes.

NURS6900 Written Assignment
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Purpose of the research topic:
Social media has massive impact on the health promotion. However, there is inadequacy of
the evidence to support the effectiveness of social media to influence behaviour of
Indigenous people in Australia. In Australia, it is evident that Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander people use more social media in comparison to the general population. Hence, it is
important for the health promotion investigators to understand who is using social media for
what purpose and content of heath related issues shared on the social media.
Perspective of research:
This study will be conducted to understand potential of social media and health information
sharing among Indigenous people in Australia.
Qualitative research question:
Qualitative research will be undertaken to gather information related to the type of health
information being shared by the Indigenous people and how indigenous people keep
themselves engaged with social media to share health related information.
Qualitative research design:
Grounded theory approach will be implemented for this qualitative study. Grounded theory
approach is a systematic approach useful in the social and health sciences to construct theory
based on the collection of information and analysis of the collected information (Anderson,
2010). In this study, data will be collected through social media networks and participants
interviews.
Measurement:
This study will be conducted to understand the type of health-related data being shared on
the social network, engagement of people on social media to access health related
information and influence of health-related information on public health.
Study population, eligibility criteria, study sample and sampling method:
Participants in this study will be selected among the community-based researchers. These
researchers will be recruited from the urban, rural and remote communities of the Northern
Territory (NT), Australia.
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Inclusion criteria for participants will be 1) Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, 2)
consistent operator of the social media, 3) people will be using social media like Facebook
and WhatsApp and 4) will have major amount of contacts in the social media network and
also regular face-to-face contact with the people in the social media. Participants will be
recruited with maximum diversity like age, geographic location, interests, education level,
employment type and gender. Hence, it would be helpful in gathering different perspectives
of use of social media for healthcare promotion (Berg and Lune, 2013; Dean, Sophie, and
Isabel, 2016).
30 participants will be recruited at the start of the study because there will be possibility of
withdrawal from the study. In grounded theory approach usually number of participants are
15 -20. Moreover, in qualitative research study, number of participants will be less as
compared to the quantitative research (Dean, Sophie, and Isabel, 2016). Out of 30
participants, 20 will be females and 10 will be males. Participants will be recruited with the
broad age range with youngest participant will be 18 years old and oldest participant will be
60 years old. Out of 30 participants, 8 will be using facebook only, 17 will be using whatsup
only and 6 will be using both facebook and whatup. Participants will be categorised into
different types based on their role and function while using social media. These different
types of participants will be observer, post sharer, positive supporter, educator, expert and
influencer. It would be helpful in gathering diverse perspective of the participants about
social media use related to healthcare information (Brusse, Gardner, McAullay, and Dowden,
2014). Participants will be recruited through purposive sampling method. Purposive sampling
method is appropriate sampling method in this type of qualitative research because
participants recruited through the purposive sampling method usually provide information
about the research question which researcher is being investigating (Wolgemuth, 2016).
Participants will be provided with the information related to the research methodology,
research ethics, research team and organisation and obligatory information from the
participants. Participants will be asked to give commitment for the period of 8 weeks with
duration of 3 hours per week. Moreover, participants will be asked to participate in the
meetings for data analysis after the data collection.
Data collection and analysis:
Data collection will be performed by two methods like 1) participants will monitor their
social media network for content related to health issues. Information in the social media
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network will be from the friends, news and sponsored posts. Participants will be asked to take
screenshots of the health-related information and will send for analysis to the research team.
2) Participants will be interviewed on weekly basis. Participants will be interviewed to
understand their viewpoint why they will consider this information is health-related, how
they will respond to it and context of posting the information. Interview will also be
conducted to understand the relationship of the participants with the person who shared
health related information and whether this information is their self-experience or gathered
from the other sources. With the permission of the participants interviews will be recorded
for the future references. Interviews will be conducted by the single experienced researcher
who underwent appropriate training for conducting interview-based research. Interview will
be conducted by the single interviewer because it will be helpful in reducing variability in the
data collection. Collected data will be considered as health related information about the
Indigenous people if this belongs to following categories like health related content, mental
health and well-being, food and diet, aboriginal identity, celebrations for positive
accomplishment and confronts racism and negative stereotypes, Indigenous and non-
indigenous public views and perceptions about health and medicine and community and
family support (Rice, Haynes, Royce, and Thompson, 2016; Palinkas et al., 2015).
Data analysis will be iterative and participatory. Data analysis will be performed
independently by two researchers who will not be the part of the study. Moreover, data
analysis researchers will not be known to the participants. Data analysis researchers will give
codes to the collected data on the weekly basis. Codes given to the screenshots will be
clarified and confirmed during the interview process. At the end of the 8 weeks of data
collection, codes will be compared across all the screenshots and interviews. It will be helpful
in developing the initial category of the participants. It will be followed by the individual
reflection discussion with every single participant on the initial analysis. It will be helpful in
establishing emerging categories of the participants. Data collected in the initial phase and
after the reflection discussion will be organized and compared to refine the categories of the
participants. This preliminary analysis will be reported during the face-to-face meeting for
the added validation and final refinement of the categories (Punch, 2013).
Rigour, trustworthiness and study limitations:
Trustworthiness of this study will be improved by coding the collected data. Coding of the
collected data will be helpful in the reducing biasness in the study (Saldana, 2012).
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Trustworthiness of the study will also be improved by incorporating the interviewer who will
not be known to the participants (Fisher, 2011). It will also be helpful in reducing biasness in
the data collection. Integrity of the collected data will be helpful in the improving
trustworthiness and rigour of the study. Integrity of the collected data will be helpful in
demonstrating positive impact on practice and policy. Outcome of this qualitative study will
be considered with rigour and trustworthiness because this study will be conducted following
validated research methodology. Moreover, trained researchers in qualitative research will be
incorporated for conducting interviews and for data analysis. Hence, these results will be
considered with rigour and trustworthiness. Reliance on the collected data will be considered
as the limitation of this study because there will be possibility that participants will filter the
data based on their perceptions, ideas and view. Outcome of the qualitative research will
mostly be dependent on the skills of the researchers. In this study, researchers will be
incorporated with experience in the qualitative research; however, these researchers will not
be experienced in the studies related to role of social media in health promotion. Data
analysis in this qualitative study will be complex process because collected data will be
complex in nature. Some of the data will be in the form of texts, pictures and videos.
Moreover, volume of collected data will be more in this study because there will not be no
limitation of shared data on facebook and whatup (Hefler, Kerrigan, Henryks, Freeman, and
Thomas, 2018). Hence, uniform analysis of the collected data will be difficult. In qualitative
research like this study, it will be difficult to maintain, assess and demonstrate rigour because
most of the collected data will be subjective data (Wolgemuth, 2016).
Ethics:
Ethical approval will be taken from the Human Research Ethics committee of the Central
Australia Human Research Ethics Committee. Written informed consent will be taken from
the participants after clearing the inclusion criteria. Written consent will be taken from the
participants because Indigenous people are more vulnerable. Participants will be allowed to
withdraw from the study at any time point without any penalty. Passive consent will be taken
from the participants because active consent will not possible; since, most of the content on
the social media will be either public or semi-public. All the participants will be asked to
announce study on their social network. People in the network of the participants will be
allowed to opt out of the sharing information during the study duration. Information related to
the names and profile pictures of the both participants and people in the network will be
eliminated during the data analysis (Wolgemuth, 2016).
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Additional data:
In mixed method of study design both qualitative and quantitative study will be incorporated
(Creswell, 2013; Green et al., 2016). In quantitative study, data will be collected for a greater
number of participants. Data will be collected for % of internet access, importance of internet
use, % of social networking service use in participants of different age groups, % gender
differences in sharing health related information, categorisation of health information based
on the health promotion and disease prevention.
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References:
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