eHealth literacy was associated with anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria: a cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Electronic health (eHealth) literacy may play an important role in individuals' engagement with online mental health-related information. Aim: To examine associations between eHealth literacy and psychological outcomes among Nigerians during the Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study among Nigerians conducted using the 'COVID-19's impAct on feaR and hEalth (CARE) questionnaire. The exposure: eHealth literacy, was assessed using the eHealth literacy scale, and psychological outcomes were assessed using the PHQ-4 scale, which measured anxiety and depression; and the fear scale to measure fear of COVID-19. We fitted logistic regression models to assess the association of eHealth literacy with anxiety, depression, and fear, adjusting for covariates. We included interaction terms to assess for age, gender, and regional differences. We also assessed participants' endorsement of strategies for future pandemic preparedness. Results: This study involved 590 participants, of which 56% were female, and 38% were 30 years or older. About 83% reported high eHealth literacy, and 55% reported anxiety or depression. High eHealth literacy was associated with a 66% lower likelihood of anxiety (adjusted odds ratio aOR, 0·34; 95% confidence interval, 0·20-0·54) and depression (aOR: 0·34; 95% CI, 0·21-0·56). There were age, gender, and regional differences in the associations between eHealth literacy and psychological outcomes. eHealth-related strategies such as medicine delivery, receiving health information through text messaging, and online courses were highlighted as important for future pandemic preparedness. Conclusion: Considering that mental health and psychological care services are severely lacking in Nigeria, digital health information sources present an opportunity to improve access and delivery of mental health services. The different associations of e-health literacy with psychological well-being between age, gender, and geographic region highlight the urgent need for targeted interventions for vulnerable populations. Policymakers must prioritize digitally backed interventions, such as medicine delivery and health information dissemination through text messaging, to address these disparities and promote equitable mental well-being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".