ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education set up a 24-h call center, i.e., Center 4030, to mitigate people's worries and anxieties, create composure, increase people's trust, and answer their questions. This qualitative study aimed to identify the challenges of COVID-19-related-information among people in point of experts' views. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This qualitative study was conducted to collect the opinions of experts on the identification of the Information challenges of COVID-19 during March-June 2020. The research population included all health professionals and experts. The sampling method was initially purposive and continued to saturate the data as snowball technique. In this study, 19 participants were interviewed. The data were collected using a semi-structured interview. After collecting the data, the audio files of the interviews were written down to extract their external and internal elements. MAXQDA version 12 software was used to organize qualitative analysis and coding data. RESULTS: The results of this study involved eight themes, i.e., lack of planning, lack of social trust in government, lack of COVID-19-integrated scientific authority in the country, conflicts of interest, lack of integrated information sources, distracting public attention, infodemic, and poor information quality, classified into 16 categories. CONCLUSIONS: The main information challenges that people in Iran faced included the lack of a scientific reference source to access accurate information, the existence of a large volume of information in virtual networks, and a huge volume of statistics from various information channels that caused confusion among people.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The widespread occurrence of COVID-19 has caused people to seek information from various sources such as virtual social networks, which can positively or negatively affect one's mental status. In this article, we present the role of virtual social networks in shaping people's attitudes toward COVID-19 in Iran. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is an applied descriptive study, in which 1010 users of virtual social networks were surveyed through an electronic questionnaire. Data were analyzed with SPSS, Excel, and Rapid Miner software. The FP-growth technique was used to investigate the concurrence of choices in multiple-choice questions, and the Mann-Whitney and the Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to determine the correlation of the mean of each dimension with demographic data. Moreover, the Wilcoxon signed-rank, the Shapiro-Wilk, and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests were used. RESULTS: Virtual social networks use increased significantly (40%) after the COVID-19 outbreak. According to users, the greatest psychological impact of virtual social networks was the induction of anxiety (46.43%) and the most common use was to learn about COVID-19 prevention and treatment (69.3%). Based on the findings, there were no significant differences between the "awareness," "behavior intention," and "attitude and trust" and the users' marital status, age group, educational degree, and gender. CONCLUSION: Although social networks have enriched the public knowledge, they increased the individuals' anxiety mostly because of controversial news and disperse of misinformation which in turn misled the users. The social networks play an important role in directing the behavioral inclinations. Accordingly, it is recommended that the authorities in healthcare system establish authentic and formal webpage in these social networks to manage controversial and voluminous information.