Health literacy and information seeking and sharing during a public health crisis in China

Understanding individual differences in communication behaviors is crucial to achieve strategical communication during a public health crisis. To advance this knowledge, the current study explored how Chinese publics with different levels of functional, communicative, and critical health literacy sought and shared information in different forms (i.e. traditional media, social media, and offline word-of-mouth communication) and from different sources (i.e. government, news agencies, health professionals, the company, and other publics) during the Quanjian crisis, a public health crisis happened in China. Findings suggest that higher functional and critical health literacy were associated with higher frequency of seeking and sharing information of almost all forms and sources. However, communicative health literacy was not associated with seeking and sharing information of most forms and sources. The study contributes to crisis communication literature and practice by suggesting health literacy, as an individual factor, can be used to identify influential publics in crisis information transmission. The study also adds to health literacy literature by suggesting the need to develop context-specific operationalizations of communicative health literacy.