Nur Athirah Sumardi, Maulana Amirul Adha, Noor’ain Mohamad Yunus
With the recent phenomenon of Covid-19 and the emergence of Monkeypox, health literacy has garnered the spotlight of being significant in nurturing self-efficacy ability among individuals to take charge of their own health-related decisions. The swarming of health information online has made the situation worsen when the nation’s level of health literacy was in a worrying state. By using a correlational approach, this descriptive study aimed to investigate the relationship and effects of health literacy and its domains towards the electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) in disseminating the health information among the internet users in four regions of Peninsular Malaysia. Proportionate quota sampling was applied in this study to approach the targeted respondents from Central, Northern, Southern and East Coast regions in Malaysia whereby 100 respondents have been conveniently selected as the study’s samples. A set of self-administered questionnaires with 38 items was used as the instrument which has been virtually distributed via the google form. Findings from descriptive analysis have shown that East Coast and Northern regions have lower percentage in limited health literacy as compared to Central and Southern regions. Other than that, correlational analysis results have indicated the significant, large and positive relationships between the overall and domains of health literacy towards the electronic word of mouth (e-WOM). Similarly, the results from multiple regression analysis have also demonstrated that all the three domains have significant influences on the dependent variable, where disease prevention domain was the strongest predictor. Accordingly, this study recommends the health authorities to organize various health education programs for society to enhance their basic understanding on disease prevention and its relative measures. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.
Faculty of Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Selangor Branch, Selangor, Puncak Alam, 42300, Malaysia; Faculty of Economics, Universitas Negeri Jakarta, Jakarta, Indonesia
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