Health Promotion on Instagram: Descriptive–Correlational Study and Predictive Factors of Influencers’ Content

Laura Picazo-Sánchez (), Rosa Domínguez-Martín and David García-Marín ()
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Laura Picazo-Sánchez: Department of ICT Applied to Education and Media Literacy, Faculty of Education, Universidad Internacional de Valencia (VIU), 46002 Valencia, Spain
Rosa Domínguez-Martín: Department of Pedagogy, Faculty of Education, Universidad Internacional de Valencia (VIU), 46002 Valencia, Spain
David García-Marín: Department of Journalism and Corporate Communication, Faculty of Communication Sciences, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC), 28933 Móstoles, Spain

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 23, 1-15

Abstract: The pandemic has accentuated the power that influencers have to influence their followers. Various scientific approaches highlight the lack of moral and ethical responsibility of these creators when disseminating content under highly sensitive tags such as health. This article presents a correlational statistical study of 443 Instagram accounts with more than one million followers belonging to health-related categories. This study aims to describe the content of these profiles and their authors and to determine whether they promote health as accounts that disseminate health-related content, identifying predictive factors of their content topics. In addition, it aims to portray their followers and establish correlations between the gender of the self-described health influencers, the characteristics of their audience and the messages that these prescribers share. Health promotion is not the predominant narrative among these influencers, who tend to promote beauty and normative bodies over health matters. A correlation is observed between posting health content, the gender of the influencers and the average age of their audiences. The study concludes with a discussion on the role of public media education and the improvement of ethical protocols on social networks to limit the impact of misleading and false content on sensitive topics, increasing the influence of real health prescribers.

Keywords: influencer; Instagram; health promotion; followers; social media; misleading content; media education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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