Managing social media health information seeking on COVID-19: The perspective of staff and students from a Malaysian public university

Health information seeking may depend on a variety of factors. From the theory of motivated information management (TMIM), emotions such as anxiety may play a central role in influencing decisions to seek and manage information related to the issue (i.e. direct/indirect information seeking, avoidance). Specifically, TMIM predicts that uncertainty discrepancy about health-related issues may influence anxiety related to uncertainty discrepancy and consequently influence how people cope and deal with uncertainty and information seeking regarding health-related issues. In this study, we attempt to examine how staff and students from a Malaysian public university managed social media information related to the novel COVID-19 pandemic, from the TMIM perspective (N = 630). This study also attempted to examine the mediating role of anxiety regarding information discrepancy when managing information related to COVID-19 from social media. Using a cross-sectional survey, data was collected online beginning from March to June 2020, when Malaysia was undergoing the Movement Controlled Order (MCO) due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, the results provided some support for TMIM in the Malaysian context, where analysis revealed significant relationships between information discrepancy and anxiety, as well as between anxiety, coping efficacy and outcome expectancy. The ramification of these findings on the TMIM theory and the effect of anxiety on social media information seeking behavior are discussed