Health Bloggers in the Assessments of City Residents: Practices, Communication, Trust
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2024.2.2446Keywords:
health bloggers, digital influencers, health care, trust, online communication, healthy lifestyleAbstract
The article presents the results of a mixed empirical study carried out in 2020–2021, which included semi-structured interviews with residents of large Russian cities (n = 90) and a telephone survey of residents of St. Petersburg (n = 861). The study aims at describing the experience of accessing materials from Internet influencers specializing in the topic of health and the specifics of communication in their blogs, as well as at highlighting the mechanisms for building trust in new experts. The author shows that accessing materials from bloggers working in the field of health is both a routine and situational practice for city residents. The topics of queries and the “specialization” of the most popular bloggers demonstrate that information of greater interest relates not to treatment methods, but to ways to maintain good health. The network nature of communication in blogs, which distinguishes it from institutional forms, requires trust, the formation criteria of which are content, personification, network capital, publicity, and compliance of recommendations with the user’s personal experience. The practice of reading posts and watching videos is more typical for young respondents, who are more integrated into Internet communications and trust online sources of health information. Urban residents who have adopted new ways to take care of their health, such as being attentive to their emotional state, nutrition control, or digital self-tracking, are more likely to listen to bloggers. Trust in online influencers is low and is not associated with (dis)trust in doctors. The demand for health blogs is explained by the attention to healthy lifestyle issues and the peculiarities of interaction between new experts and users. Bloggers occupy thematic niches where official healthcare is absent, while acting not as alternative, but as structures parallel to institutional medicine, communications in which correspond to trends in social change and are attractive to citizens.
Acknowledgements. The study was carried out with support from the Russian Scientific Foundation (RSF) within the research grant No. 21-18-00125. The author expresses her gratitude to M.E. Glukhova (graduate student of the EUSPB), A.A. Dupak (Master of Sociology), and A.S. Zakharova (Master of Sociology) for their help in collecting empirical material.
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